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Newsletter--Fall 2002
Conference Report: The Material World of Tidewater, The Lowcountry, and the Caribbean On June 7-9, 2002, twenty-seven scholars and approximately eighty members of the public met at the Tate Center on the College of Charleston campus to explore material culture as a register of regional identity. Supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities Research Grant, the conference brought together anthropologists, architectural historians, historical archaeologists, social historians, historic site professionals, art historians, and literature scholars to discuss whether buildings, furniture, and manufactured goods produced in Tidewater, the Lowcountry, and the Caribbean shared a distinctive signature that mark them as participating in a regional sensibility. In seven panels and three plenary sessions, scholars discussed the history of material culture from the earliest phase of settlement—the walled cities era—to the post Civil War nationalization of commerce and manufactures. The program, organized by Max Edelson and David Shields, brought a multi-disciplinary perspective to several questions: To what extent did the built environment of these locales refract the forms and functions of the material culture of the larger transatlantic world? Is regional identity in material culture expressed more articulately as a pattern of creolization, adapting the material practices of a broader world to local circumstances with indigenous materials, or in patterns of consumption—in local preferences for types of goods? How did the cultural geography mapped by material practices coincide with and differ from that drawn by political and social history. At the end of two days of conversation, participants agreed that this sort of concentrated interrogation of a region’s cultural historiography was a peculiarly informative, intellectually satisfying exercise. Eighteen of the presentations will be collected and issued in an extensively illustrated volume edited by David Shields for the CLAW book series published by the University of South Carolina Press. Carolina Lowcountry and Caribbean Cuisine Conference On March 20-22 a conference treating the rich parallel traditions of cookery in the Lowcountry and the West Indies will be held at the Lightsey Center at the College of Charleston and at the demonstration kitchens at Johnson & Wales University, Charleston. Treating both the history and the current practice of food preparation and consumption, the meeting will include cooking demonstrations, discussions of food history, and public lectures. It will feature keynote addresses by four of the top authorities on the foods of the Lowcountry and the Atlantic World. Jessica B. Harris, the author of more than ten books, including Iron Pots and Wooden Spoons: Africa’s Gift to New World Cooking (1999), will begin by locating the foods of the Carolinas within the African diaspora. John Martin Taylor, author of Hoppin’ John’s Lowcountry Cooking (2000), will then focus in on the rich traditions of Charleston cooking. A view from Savannah will be provided by Damon Lee Fowler, author of Damon Lee Fowler’s New Southern Kitchen (2000). Finally, the world renowned historian of sugar and the West Indies’ role in the world of food, Sidney Mintz, will give a historic overview of Caribbean cuisine on Friday evening. Scholarly panels will consider such topics as the technology of milling, the Madeira trade, and nutrition, as well as the place of food in ethnicity, literature, and religion. Multimedia presentations will include segments from the Southern Stews documentary produced by Stan Woodward. Top regional chefs will give cooking demonstrations at the professional kitchens of conference co-host Johnson & Wales University in Charleston. Banquets, field trips, and tastings will round out a truly memorable program on Carolina and Caribbean cooking. Because of space and seating restrictions, attendance will be limited to 200 persons. Because of the demand, we suggest that you reserve a place by registering to attend as soon as possible. There will be a $125 registration fee for attendees covering entertainment costs. Send registration checks made payable to “Claw-College of Charleston” to Prof. Simon Lewis, Dept. of English, College of Charleston, Charleston, SC 29423. Rooms have been reserved at the The Westin Francis Marion - $149.00 per night (Single/Double Occupancy), The Holiday Inn Historic District - $129.00 per night (Single/Double Occupancy), The Hampton Inn Historic District - $125.00 per night (Single/Double Occupancy); there is also a block of rooms available at Charleston Place. Anyone interested in receiving further notices about the conference, please send name and address to atlanticwd@cofc.edu to the attention of Jane Aldrich. Memory and Identity: The Huguenots in France and the Atlantic Diaspora Bertrand Van Ruymbeke and Randy J. Sparks, Editors cloth, ISBN 1-57003-484-2, $39.95 February The Huguenot diaspora is one of the most important and most spectacular dispersions of a religious minority in early modern Europe. Traditionally known as le Refuge, this migration led to the exodus of nearly 200,000 Protestants out of France in 1685 at the time of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Memory and Identity offers a comparative perspective on this event and its repercussions by an international group of seventeen specialists of early modern France, Britain, Germany, and the Netherlands and historians of British and French Colonial America and Dutch South Africa. This collection is the first look at the Huguenot diaspora in a broad Atlantic context rather than as a narrowly European or Colonial American phenomenon. It sheds new light on the Protestant experience both in and outside of France. The Huguenot experience of seventeenth-century France and in the diaspora is examined through the lens of minority status and assimilation. This volume explains why some Huguenots chose to emigrate instead of being assimilated by the dominant Catholic group, while others recanted their faith and remained in France. Revealing how minority status at home affected the creation of refugee communities outside France, scholars trace the Huguenots' eventual integration into the different host societies that the exiles encountered. Comparing Huguenot diasporic experiences on both sides of the Atlantic, essays focus on Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, British North America (particularly South Carolina and New York), the French Caribbean, New France, and Dutch South Africa. Finally, beyond the issues of persecution, dispersion, and assimilation, several essays study the long-term impact of the Revocation and of le Refuge in examining nineteenth-century Huguenot memory in France and in the diaspora and the maintenance of a Huguenot identity. ABOUT THE EDITORS Bertrand Van Ruymbeke is associate professor of American civilization at the Université de Toulouse, France. He is currently completing a monograph on the Huguenot migration to proprietary South Carolina. Van Ruymbeke lives in Toulouse. Randy J. Sparks is an associate professor of history at Tulane University. He is the author of Religion in Mississippi and On Jordan's Stormy Banks: Evangelicalism in Mississippi, 1773–1876. Sparks lives in New Orleans. CONTRIBUTORS Jon Butler • Bernard Cottret • Joyce D. Goodfriend • John Miller Carolyn Chapell Lougee • Keith P. Luria • Leslie Choquette • Willem Frijhoff Gérard Lafleur • Lucien Abénon • Philippe Denis • Raymond A. Mentzer R. C. Nash • Diane C. Margolf • Timothy Fehler • Charles Littleton Bertrand Van Ruymbeke A CALL FOR MANUSCRIPTS “The Carolina Lowcountry and the Atlantic World” Book Series University of South Carolina Press Series Editors: David Shields (Citadel), Rosemary Brana-Shute (College of Charleston), and Randy Sparks (Tulane) In 1997 the directors of the Program in the Carolina Lowcountry and the Atlantic World at the College of Charleston, at that time Jack P. Greene, Randy Sparks, and Rosemary Brana-Shute, agreed, in collaboration with the University of South Carolina Press, to serve as editors of a series of monographs, collections of scholarly papers, and critical editions of significant primary sources for the study of the Carolina Lowcountry and/or the Atlantic context in which it developed. David Shields has now replaced Jack Greene. Academic year 2001-2002 saw the publication of the first three titles from the Program's book series with the University of South Carolina Press: Money, Trade and Power: The Evolution of Colonial South Carolina’s Plantation Society (edited by Greene, Brana-Shute and Sparks); The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World (edited by David Geggus), and London Booksellers and American Customers: Transatlantic Literary Community and the Charleston Library Society (by James Raven). In press is Memory and Identity: The Huguenot in the Atlantic World (edited by B. van Ruymbeke and Randy Sparks). Brad Wood, Colonial Cape Fear Region of North Carolina is in press. A number of others are under contract or review, dealing with the Atlantic slave trade after the American Revolution, the Atlantic economy in the 17th and 18th centuries, and manumission in the Atlantic world. Do you have a manuscript in hand or in preparation that would fit scope of this series? Do you know others who do? Please contact David Shields (shieldsd@citadel.edu) or Rosemary Brana-Shute (branashuter@cofc.edu) to explore this possibility. As an added incentive, we are biennially awarding The Hines Prize
for the best first book relating to any aspect of the history and life of the Carolina Lowcountry and/or the Atlantic World. The prize will carry a cash award of $1,000 and publication in the Program’s book series. The Program (CLAW) was established at the College of Charleston in 1994 with the purpose of exploring and illuminating those links and reciprocal influences between the Lowcountry and other cultures in the broader Atlantic world as they have changed over time, stressing the comparative analysis of institutions, cultures, and developments within it. The Program focuses on the broader Atlantic world of which the Lowcountry was and is a part, and facilitates the development of an understanding of the interactivity among subregions, regions, nations, and areas. Manuscripts that fit this perspective will be considered. Please contact the editors for further information. Deadline: March 15, 2003. CLAW AND THE UNESCO TRANSATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE (TST) The College of Charleston has joined with Tulane University, Penn State University, Yale University, and The National Underground Railroad Freedom Center (Cincinnati) to form the US Partnership with the UNESCO TST Education Project. Each of the partners has significant resources to research and teach some aspect of the TST, perhaps the most important social and economic influence in the development of the modern world and globalization. The College was chosen because of CLAW’s achievements and interest in using the rich history and resources of the Carolina Lowcountry to explore how this region was integrated into this global exchange of peoples and resources. All three directors of CLAW serve on the College’s Steering Committee. Rosemary Brana-Shute, Associate Director of CLAW, also served on the Partnership’s Steering Committee at a meeting at Yale University in July 2002 which discussed funding and local project initiatives. Each of the five partners has joined with a local middle school to help teachers master the topic, and develop materials for teaching the TST and its consequences across the curriculum. This UNESCO project is now operating in 23 countries with a network of over 500 schools that combine scholarly research with innovative educational approaches. CLAW is proud to be one of the first five partners in the US. Vincent Carretta Lecture: “Sons of Carolina?” CLAW is pleased to announce that Professor Vincent Carretta of the Department of the English Language and Literature at the University of Maryland, College Park, will deliver a Wachovia Foundation public lecture entitled “Sons of Carolina?” on February 20, 2003. The talk will treat several Anglo-African and African-American writers who resided for periods of time in South Carolina during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. He will also present a faculty seminar on February 21 at 3:00 p.m. at Blacklock House on “Francis Williams—the most famous African American of the 18th century.” Carretta is editor of several volumes of writings that explore the black literary traditions of the eighteenth century, including Genius in Bondage: Literature of the Early Black Atlantic (with Philip Gould, Univ. of KY, 2001), Unchained Voices: An Anthology of Black Authors in the English-Speaking World of the Eighteenth Century (Univ. of KY, 1996), and The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings by Olaudah Equiano (Viking, 1995). Sparking discussion and some controversy, Carretta’s research has uncovered archival evidence that indicates Equiano, whose writings of his life experiences in bondage and in freedom have become standard reading in schools and colleges in Africa, Great Britain, and the United States, was actually born in South Carolina and not West Africa. CLAW Faculty Seminar Series Fall Semester All seminars will be held at the Blacklock House on Bull Street. October 25, 2002 Dr. David Gleeson, Dept. of History, College of Charleston: “Irish Nationalism and the American South.” An analysis of the work of Irish immigrants and native southerners on behalf on Irish nationalism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I may shorten time frame if paper gets too long. David Gleeson, author of The Irish in the South, 1815-1877 (University of South Carolina Press, 2001), is a native of Ireland. Receiving his Ph.D. in American History from Mississippi State University, he taught at Armstrong Atlantic State University in Savannah for five years before joining the History Department of the College of Charleston this year. November 15, 2002 Dr. Sarah Owens, Department of Spanish Language and Literature, College of Charleston "Journeys to Dark Lands: Francisca de los Angeles' Spiritual Bilocations to New Mexico (1700)." Tucked away on the shelves of a Franciscan archive in Celaya, Mexico lie hundreds of spiritual letters written by a lay pious woman called Francisca de los Angeles. These forgotten documents tell the story of a remarkable woman who supposedly bilocated (she could physically be in two places at one time) to the Spanish territories of New Mexico. This essay will focus on two particular letters writen by the lay woman in 1700. Both of these texts concentrate on what she refers to as her experiences with the infidels. Francisca claims to have enjoyed liberties during her celestial journeys, such as the right to preach and baptize, unattainable to any woman at the beginning of the eighteenth century, let alone even to catholic women of this generation. Sarah E. Owens is an Assistant Professor of Spanish at the College of Charleston and completed her Ph.D. in Colonial Latin American Literature at the University of Arizona (2000). Her specialty is religious women of colonial Mexico and she recently published a book chapter in Models in Medieval Iberian Literature and Their Modern Reflections. Spring Semester January 31, 2003 Nichole Green, Department of Anthropology, Duke University “Free People of Color in Charleston” February 21, 2003 Dr. Vincent Carretta, Dept of English, University of Maryland " Francis Williams—the most famous African American of the 18th century?" See feature article in this issue of Connections March 14, 2003 Dr. Scott Peeples, Department of English, College of Charleston "Postcolonial Lowcountry: Edgar Allan Poe, Osceola, and Lydia Maria Child" |
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