Minrose Gwin, Mourning Medgar: Justice, Aesthetics, and the Local; Southern Spaces

Speaking at Emory University on February 19, 2008, Dr. Gwin considers how attention to historical location and to locally-embodied experiences raises questions about justice, aesthetics, and memory. She examines the 1963 assassination of Medgar Evers in Jackson, Mississippi, through writings by James Baldwin, Anne Moody, Eudora Welty, and Margaret Walker.

Dr. Gwin situates her larger project in a moment of alternative political imagination, the U.S. civil rights movement in the 1960s, and locates her particular attention upon the seething city of Jackson, Mississippi, during the early summer of 1963. She foregrounds the aesthetic challenges and ethical complexities of the fiction, poetry, memoirs, drama, and film that came in response to Evers's life and death. Her emphasis upon the local engages cultural mourning, memory, memorialization. Does mourning and testimony require the embodiment found in aesthetic forms? Can imaginary embodiment lead readers toward larger questions of justice through the remembering of regional and national history?

Dimensions of aesthetic mourning. Connections between Nazism and the Jim Crow South. Cultural memory and mourning kept alive through writings and stories are as much spatial as temporal. How to mourn and to celebrate Medgar Evers?

The city of Jackson in the spring and summer of 1963. Situating four writers (Baldwin, Moody, Welty, Walker) who responded to Evers's death aesthetically and ethically. Where are these writers' voices coming from? "Location," in Welty's words, is "the proving ground of what happened, who's here, who's coming." Location as "the heart's field." Conceptualizing the local in this time and place of terror: the neighborhood and house of Medgar and Myrlie Evers.

Evers's death spurs James Baldwin, as emissary to Mississippi and as reporter, to write a play.
Excerpt from James Baldwin's Blues for Mister Charlie (1964)

Jackson residents Margaret Walker and Eudora Welty's vexed relationship with their home city in the early 1960s. Contrasting the black neigborhood of Walker and Evers with the white neighborhood of Welty, 3.6 miles away. From what locations did these two writers meet the aesthetic challenges and ethical imperatives of this moment?
Margaret Walker's "Micah" (1970)
Excerpt from Eudora Welty's "Where is the Voice Coming From?" (1963)

Locating Anne Moody in the summer of 1963, and in her memoir. Moody brings to an aesthetics of historical transformation and political alterity the methodology of framing in the local.
Excerpt from Anne Moody's Coming of Age in Mississippi (1968)

Dr. Minrose Gwin is Kenan Eminent Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and co-editor of the Southern Literary Journal. She received both her MA and PhD in English from the University of Tennessee and is the author of Wishing for Snow: A Memoir (2004), The Woman in the Red Dress: Gender, Space, and Reading (2002), and The Feminine and Faulkner: Reading (Beyond) Sexual Difference (1990), and Black and White Women of the Old South: The Peculiar Sisterhood in American Literature (1985), and numerous essays, and coeditor of The Literature of the American South: A Norton Anthology (1997). Currently, she is working on multiple projects about racial violence, trauma, and cultural memory situated in the period of the civil rights movement. Dr. Gwin also writes creative nonfiction, poetry, and fiction, and has taught many courses related to her interests in race and gender, history and memory, location and cultural space, women's writing, American literature, and the U.S. South.

Part 1 (7:53 min.) RealMedia Windows Media QuickTime	Dr. Gwin situates her larger project in a moment of alternative political imagination, the U.S. civil rights movement in the 1960s, and locates her particular attention upon the seething city of Jackson, Mississippi, during the early summer of 1963. She foregrounds the aesthetic challenges and ethical complexities of the fiction, poetry, memoirs, drama, and film that came in response to Evers's life and death. Her emphasis upon the local engages cultural mourning, memory, memorialization. Does mourning and testimony require the embodiment found in aesthetic forms? Can imaginary embodiment lead readers toward larger questions of justice through the remembering of regional and national history?
Part 2 (5:29 min.) RealMedia Windows Media QuickTime	Dimensions of aesthetic mourning. Connections between Nazism and the Jim Crow South. Cultural memory and mourning kept alive through writings and stories are as much spatial as temporal. How to mourn and to celebrate Medgar Evers?
Part 3 (9:40 min.) RealMedia Windows Media QuickTime	The city of Jackson in the spring and summer of 1963. Situating four writers (Baldwin, Moody, Welty, Walker) who responded to Evers's death aesthetically and ethically. Where are these writers' voices coming from? "Location," in Welty's words, is "the proving ground of what happened, who's here, who's coming." Location as "the heart's field." Conceptualizing the local in this time and place of terror: the neighborhood and house of Medgar and Myrlie Evers.
Part 4 (4:48 min.) RealMedia Windows Media QuickTime	Evers's death spurs James Baldwin, as emissary to Mississippi and as reporter, to write a play. Excerpt from James Baldwin's Blues for Mister Charlie (1964)
Part 5 (12:02 min.) RealMedia Windows Media QuickTime	Jackson residents Margaret Walker and Eudora Welty's vexed relationship with their home city in the early 1960s. Contrasting the black neigborhood of Walker and Evers with the white neighborhood of Welty, 3.6 miles away. From what locations did these two writers meet the aesthetic challenges and ethical imperatives of this moment? Margaret Walker's "Micah" (1970) Excerpt from Eudora Welty's "Where is the Voice Coming From?" (1963)
Part 6 (8:24 min.) RealMedia Windows Media QuickTime	Locating Anne Moody in the summer of 1963, and in her memoir. Moody brings to an aesthetics of historical transformation and political alterity the methodology of framing in the local. Excerpt from Anne Moody's Coming of Age in Mississippi (1968)