Complicated Conversation

Place is central to the study of the American South. The question of the meaning and power of place underpinned the earliest efforts to define and understand the region, and place remains a crucial concept in an ongoing process of regional identification and inquiry. This book examines Southern place autobiographically, historically, and theoretically in order to illuminate the subjective and social dimensions of place and to promote progressive conversation in the region. Using the interpretive tools of psychoanalysis to take account of the autobiographical roots of knowledge and society, Brian Casemore conceptualizes curriculum inquiry in the American South as a response to the complex role of place in self-formation. If we accept that place is ideological as well as physically dimensional – that it is created in the mind as well as the landscape – we have an opportunity to explore it as it emerges, laden with personal and public meaning.

This book introduces literary métissage as a way to research, teach, and live ethically «with all our relations» in our precarious times. The authors theorize and perform literary métissage through the praxis of life writing, braiding their autobiographical texts, in various (mixed) genres, into seven themes. Life Writing and Literary Métissage as an Ethos for Our Times explores this writing praxis, with its more inclusive and generative notions of knowledge and knowledge practices, as a tool for creating more just societies and schools.

Drawing on data gathered through a three-year autoethnography, A Delicate Dance couples the author’s experiences teaching multicultural education and learning to zydeco dance in order to explore semblances of intimacy across self and other. More specifically, the book looks at semblances of intimacy embodied on the dance floor and the implications such intimacy might have for thinking about curriculum and qualitative research. This lively narrative encourages readers to consider what it might mean to envision curriculum as an embodied locale – much like zydeco dancing – where the play of epistemological forces replaces technocratic force; and where students experience the relative weight of desire, fear, and knowledge, the reciprocal touch of self and other, and the mysterious momentum of the semblance of intimacy.