This presentation by Dr. Jordan Brasher was delivered as a part of the Fall 2020 Virtual Speaker ... more This presentation by Dr. Jordan Brasher was delivered as a part of the Fall 2020 Virtual Speaker Series on Southern Confederacy & Memorialization in the History & Geography Department at Columbus State University. Dr. Brasher discusses the transnational uses of the embattled Confederate flag, especially where and why it flies abroad, in the context of the ongoing global struggle to come to terms with the histories and memories of slavery, indigenous dispossession, settler colonialism, and other forms of white supremacy. The presentation especially explores how the Confederate flag becomes embedded into local cultural fabrics around the world in places like Ireland, Germany, and Brazil, igniting social tensions and inflaming historic traumas.https://csuepress.columbusstate.edu/confederacy/1001/thumbnail.jp
The rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, of right-wing populism, and incidences of white supr... more The rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, of right-wing populism, and incidences of white supremacist domestic terrorism associated with the presence of Confederate iconography since 2015 in the United States has brought much attention to the issue of Confederate memory. According to a study by the Southern Poverty Law Center, as of 2018, only eight percent of graduating high school seniors could correctly identify slavery as the primary cause of the U.S. Civil War (1861-1865). This speaks to a crisis of memory and identity around what the Confederate States of America (CSA) were and how we should remember the Confederacy today. Yet, for all the scholarly work that has been done to understand the politics of Confederate memory in the United States, especially in the South, little known is the fact that thousands of Confederate soldiers and their families migrated to Brazil in light of the devastation of the war and the potential incorporation of formerly enslaved people into Southern society and politics associated with Reconstruction. Today, Confederate descendants in the interior of São Paulo, Brazil still celebrate their heritage with an annual festival called the Festa Confederada. A museum on the town square, too, narrates the Confederate migration from the perspective of descendants. The purpose of this dissertation is to broaden academic and public perspective on the Confederacy by exploring the racialized transnational contours of commemoration at these sites of Confederate memory. This research is situated at the intersection of scholarly work in cultural-historical geography on the relationship between public memory, race and racism, heritage tourism, settler colonialism, Black Geographies, and regional identity. This dissertation advances understandings of public memory as socially constructed and negotiated by social groups competing over rights and recognition on the memorial landscape. Further, it examines how Confederate memory moves and takes shape across international boundaries and cross-culturally, and comes to resonate and make sense outside its traditional place of public memory in the American South. Finally, this dissertation offers sustained reflection on the challenges of working on issues of race in the Global South as a white male "gringo" American. vi
<jats:p> The crisis over Confederate memory in the United States has dominated internationa... more <jats:p> The crisis over Confederate memory in the United States has dominated international headlines since the tragic events of racist violence associated with the 2017 Charlottesville tragedy. Yet the scale of debate and attention paid to this crisis has been mostly limited to the United States, despite the globalized nature of Confederate memory politics. Little known is the fact that after the US Civil War, several thousand ex-Confederates migrated to Brazil where descendants still celebrate their heritage with a festival that draws thousands to a rural area of São Paulo state. A descendant-curated museum also narrates the Confederate migration. Drawing on work in critical settler colonial and comparative racial and ethnic studies, the "transcultural turn" in memory studies, and a year of fieldwork, this article traces the crisis of Confederate memory to the interior of São Paulo, Brazil, and explores the global impact the 2017 Charlottesville tragedy has had on Confederate commemoration. </jats:p>
The ratification of the 13th amendment and the emancipation of African-Americans from slavery rad... more The ratification of the 13th amendment and the emancipation of African-Americans from slavery radically transformed the Reconstruction-era American landscape. Black southerners seeking to flee the institutional oppression of the south and its Jim Crow laws fled to places like Kansas and Oklahoma to form their own communities and give life a fresh start. These communities were called “all-black towns” and were established from the 1880s through the early 1900s across the American West in an effort to create socially, politically, and economically autonomous black communities. No other state or territory had as many of these all-black towns as Oklahoma Territory, with more than 50 dotting the landscape. Of these, Langston City rose to prominence due to the publication of a newspaper called The Langston City Herald, which was circulated throughout the Deep South. My research analyzes these newspapers to understand how Langston was represented as a black utopia and a racial haven from southern oppression. Importantly, I place this representation within the context of Booker T. Washington’s racial ethos and explore the role of Christianity in constructing a compelling racialized narrative about Langston. Ultimately, my results demonstrate the heavy influence of Washington’s identity politics and the Christian influence is so strong that I suggest Langston be thought of as an historical “black promised land.”
ABSTRACT This essay is a critical reflection on positionality, participatory ethics and fieldwork... more ABSTRACT This essay is a critical reflection on positionality, participatory ethics and fieldwork failure in the Global South. It argues that the collision of our academic theories with socio-political realities in the field cannot be separated from and often includes who we are and what we think we can do as researchers. It explores how my understandings of my positionality as a white, male doctoral student from the United States were challenged during my fieldwork in the interior of São Paulo, Brazil. I explore the difficulties of negotiating my positionality amongst different groups of people with competing political interests and ideologies at the annual Festa Confederada – a festival that celebrates US southern heritage and culture. I critically reflect on how my failure to negotiate the various axes of my identity with the local chapter of the Movimento Negro (Black Movement) and with the Confederate Festival’s organizers revealed political-ideological differences within the Movimento Negro and resulted in my being barred from conducting research at the annual festival. In an effort to be as transparent and self-critical as possible, this essay also explores valuable and sometimes embarrassing lessons learned that other researchers from the Global North should heed before entering the field.
ABSTRACT Local history museums are important to heritage tourism, often presenting interconnected... more ABSTRACT Local history museums are important to heritage tourism, often presenting interconnected local, regional, national, and transnational histories. This article explores the settler colonial narrative presented at the Museu da Imigração (Museum of the Immigration), in Santa Bárbara d’Oeste, São Paulo, Brazil. Though much scholarship explores the relationship between the Confederacy and slavery in public memory and heritage tourism studies, the scale of discussion is typically limited to the US South. Less well known is the fact that several thousand Confederate soldiers and their families, rather than face Reconstruction, preferred to restart their lives in Brazil. Applying innovations in discourse analysis and studies of commemorative atmosphere, I analyze a local museum’s spatial narrative. I show how it weaves together a settler interpretation of the past through texts, photographs, and historical objects and artifacts – bringing together discourses like the Lost Cause and Brazil’s ‘racial democracy.’ Ultimately the museum constructs a settler colonial narrative that frames the Confederate migrants as brave ‘pioneers’ striking out to re-create their lives after the US Civil War. I conclude by placing the significance of the museum’s narrative into broader context, highlighting how some scholars have perpetuated this narrative in academic and public discourse.
Tornadoes rank among the most destructive hazards to human life and property. In the United State... more Tornadoes rank among the most destructive hazards to human life and property. In the United States, two regions known as Tornado Alley and Dixie Alley are particularly prone to tornadoes, but determining exactly where tornadoes will occur remains difficult. Examining the relationship between land surface heterogeneity (i.e. variations in topography, vegetation, and land cover) and tornado occurrence can provide insight into the spatial distribution of these storms. The objective of this study is to uncover the relationships between severe storm occurrence and land surface heterogeneity variables to determine (1) whether certain land heterogeneity variables exhibit a significant relationship with tornado occurrence, and (2) whether those relationships vary by region and storm strength. We delineate the spatial extent of Tornado Alley and Dixie Alley based on clusters of tornadic activity. We then use logistic regression to investigate how land heterogeneity factors are related to tornado formation of weakly and significantly tornadic storms. Using these relationships uncovered, we map tornado probability across the two regions. Regression results show that several land surface heterogeneity variables have a statistically significant relationship with tornado occurrence, but these relationships vary with region and storm severity, supporting the need for more local studies.
ABSTRACT In 2013, the city of Tulsa, Oklahoma ‘renamed’ Brady Street in its downtown arts distric... more ABSTRACT In 2013, the city of Tulsa, Oklahoma ‘renamed’ Brady Street in its downtown arts district to M.B. Brady Street and designated the road as Reconciliation Way to rid itself of ties to Wyatt ‘Tate’ Brady, the original namesake. Tate Brady, a Ku Klux Klan leader, participated in a 1921 massacre that killed, injured, and displaced many black Tulsans. Honoring M.B. Brady, a Civil War photographer with the same last name but no ties to Tulsa, was part of a neoliberal compromise to ensure the name change would have the least disruptive impact on the financial interests of white business owners on the road. The Tulsa case demonstrates how convenience and practicality—although represented as a matter of neoliberal ‘nonpolitics’—is nonetheless a political technology used to justify sanitizing controversial histories and prioritizing capital accumulation over social justice. The faux renaming of Brady prompts a critical consideration of how neoliberalism weakens cities’ ability to engage in the restorative ‘memory-work’ of recovering (from) past racial violence. Our study contributes to the study of neoliberal place naming, struggles over urban space and memory, and the possibilities and limits of street naming as a vehicle for (re)claiming a black sense of place.
ABSTRACT A number of U.S. universities are embroiled in debates over the longtime commemoration a... more ABSTRACT A number of U.S. universities are embroiled in debates over the longtime commemoration and valorization of white supremacy through the campus landscape. Recognizing place naming as a legitimate political arena, activists have called for—and in some instances succeeded—in removing from university buildings the names of historical figures shrouded in racial controversy. For the broader public and even sympathetic higher education officials, there is a lack of understanding about why these demands are important and even less recognition about the violence that racially insensitive place naming inflicts on the belonging of marginalized groups. Instead, the renaming of campus landscapes is understood as merely an act of political correctness and thus campus authorities have offered uneven and incomplete solutions in the name of progressive reform. Applying recent innovations in race and memory studies, specifically the ideas of wounded places and memory work, we situate ongoing university place naming controversies in a critical context. Specifically, we build on the recent work of law scholar Stephen Clowney and discuss the opportunities and challenges of developing a policy of landscape fairness that recognizes the power of place to transmit ideas about racial power across generations and the right of critics to challenge dominant historical narratives.
This presentation by Dr. Jordan Brasher was delivered as a part of the Fall 2020 Virtual Speaker ... more This presentation by Dr. Jordan Brasher was delivered as a part of the Fall 2020 Virtual Speaker Series on Southern Confederacy & Memorialization in the History & Geography Department at Columbus State University. Dr. Brasher discusses the transnational uses of the embattled Confederate flag, especially where and why it flies abroad, in the context of the ongoing global struggle to come to terms with the histories and memories of slavery, indigenous dispossession, settler colonialism, and other forms of white supremacy. The presentation especially explores how the Confederate flag becomes embedded into local cultural fabrics around the world in places like Ireland, Germany, and Brazil, igniting social tensions and inflaming historic traumas.https://csuepress.columbusstate.edu/confederacy/1001/thumbnail.jp
The rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, of right-wing populism, and incidences of white supr... more The rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, of right-wing populism, and incidences of white supremacist domestic terrorism associated with the presence of Confederate iconography since 2015 in the United States has brought much attention to the issue of Confederate memory. According to a study by the Southern Poverty Law Center, as of 2018, only eight percent of graduating high school seniors could correctly identify slavery as the primary cause of the U.S. Civil War (1861-1865). This speaks to a crisis of memory and identity around what the Confederate States of America (CSA) were and how we should remember the Confederacy today. Yet, for all the scholarly work that has been done to understand the politics of Confederate memory in the United States, especially in the South, little known is the fact that thousands of Confederate soldiers and their families migrated to Brazil in light of the devastation of the war and the potential incorporation of formerly enslaved people into Southern society and politics associated with Reconstruction. Today, Confederate descendants in the interior of São Paulo, Brazil still celebrate their heritage with an annual festival called the Festa Confederada. A museum on the town square, too, narrates the Confederate migration from the perspective of descendants. The purpose of this dissertation is to broaden academic and public perspective on the Confederacy by exploring the racialized transnational contours of commemoration at these sites of Confederate memory. This research is situated at the intersection of scholarly work in cultural-historical geography on the relationship between public memory, race and racism, heritage tourism, settler colonialism, Black Geographies, and regional identity. This dissertation advances understandings of public memory as socially constructed and negotiated by social groups competing over rights and recognition on the memorial landscape. Further, it examines how Confederate memory moves and takes shape across international boundaries and cross-culturally, and comes to resonate and make sense outside its traditional place of public memory in the American South. Finally, this dissertation offers sustained reflection on the challenges of working on issues of race in the Global South as a white male "gringo" American. vi
<jats:p> The crisis over Confederate memory in the United States has dominated internationa... more <jats:p> The crisis over Confederate memory in the United States has dominated international headlines since the tragic events of racist violence associated with the 2017 Charlottesville tragedy. Yet the scale of debate and attention paid to this crisis has been mostly limited to the United States, despite the globalized nature of Confederate memory politics. Little known is the fact that after the US Civil War, several thousand ex-Confederates migrated to Brazil where descendants still celebrate their heritage with a festival that draws thousands to a rural area of São Paulo state. A descendant-curated museum also narrates the Confederate migration. Drawing on work in critical settler colonial and comparative racial and ethnic studies, the "transcultural turn" in memory studies, and a year of fieldwork, this article traces the crisis of Confederate memory to the interior of São Paulo, Brazil, and explores the global impact the 2017 Charlottesville tragedy has had on Confederate commemoration. </jats:p>
The ratification of the 13th amendment and the emancipation of African-Americans from slavery rad... more The ratification of the 13th amendment and the emancipation of African-Americans from slavery radically transformed the Reconstruction-era American landscape. Black southerners seeking to flee the institutional oppression of the south and its Jim Crow laws fled to places like Kansas and Oklahoma to form their own communities and give life a fresh start. These communities were called “all-black towns” and were established from the 1880s through the early 1900s across the American West in an effort to create socially, politically, and economically autonomous black communities. No other state or territory had as many of these all-black towns as Oklahoma Territory, with more than 50 dotting the landscape. Of these, Langston City rose to prominence due to the publication of a newspaper called The Langston City Herald, which was circulated throughout the Deep South. My research analyzes these newspapers to understand how Langston was represented as a black utopia and a racial haven from southern oppression. Importantly, I place this representation within the context of Booker T. Washington’s racial ethos and explore the role of Christianity in constructing a compelling racialized narrative about Langston. Ultimately, my results demonstrate the heavy influence of Washington’s identity politics and the Christian influence is so strong that I suggest Langston be thought of as an historical “black promised land.”
ABSTRACT This essay is a critical reflection on positionality, participatory ethics and fieldwork... more ABSTRACT This essay is a critical reflection on positionality, participatory ethics and fieldwork failure in the Global South. It argues that the collision of our academic theories with socio-political realities in the field cannot be separated from and often includes who we are and what we think we can do as researchers. It explores how my understandings of my positionality as a white, male doctoral student from the United States were challenged during my fieldwork in the interior of São Paulo, Brazil. I explore the difficulties of negotiating my positionality amongst different groups of people with competing political interests and ideologies at the annual Festa Confederada – a festival that celebrates US southern heritage and culture. I critically reflect on how my failure to negotiate the various axes of my identity with the local chapter of the Movimento Negro (Black Movement) and with the Confederate Festival’s organizers revealed political-ideological differences within the Movimento Negro and resulted in my being barred from conducting research at the annual festival. In an effort to be as transparent and self-critical as possible, this essay also explores valuable and sometimes embarrassing lessons learned that other researchers from the Global North should heed before entering the field.
ABSTRACT Local history museums are important to heritage tourism, often presenting interconnected... more ABSTRACT Local history museums are important to heritage tourism, often presenting interconnected local, regional, national, and transnational histories. This article explores the settler colonial narrative presented at the Museu da Imigração (Museum of the Immigration), in Santa Bárbara d’Oeste, São Paulo, Brazil. Though much scholarship explores the relationship between the Confederacy and slavery in public memory and heritage tourism studies, the scale of discussion is typically limited to the US South. Less well known is the fact that several thousand Confederate soldiers and their families, rather than face Reconstruction, preferred to restart their lives in Brazil. Applying innovations in discourse analysis and studies of commemorative atmosphere, I analyze a local museum’s spatial narrative. I show how it weaves together a settler interpretation of the past through texts, photographs, and historical objects and artifacts – bringing together discourses like the Lost Cause and Brazil’s ‘racial democracy.’ Ultimately the museum constructs a settler colonial narrative that frames the Confederate migrants as brave ‘pioneers’ striking out to re-create their lives after the US Civil War. I conclude by placing the significance of the museum’s narrative into broader context, highlighting how some scholars have perpetuated this narrative in academic and public discourse.
Tornadoes rank among the most destructive hazards to human life and property. In the United State... more Tornadoes rank among the most destructive hazards to human life and property. In the United States, two regions known as Tornado Alley and Dixie Alley are particularly prone to tornadoes, but determining exactly where tornadoes will occur remains difficult. Examining the relationship between land surface heterogeneity (i.e. variations in topography, vegetation, and land cover) and tornado occurrence can provide insight into the spatial distribution of these storms. The objective of this study is to uncover the relationships between severe storm occurrence and land surface heterogeneity variables to determine (1) whether certain land heterogeneity variables exhibit a significant relationship with tornado occurrence, and (2) whether those relationships vary by region and storm strength. We delineate the spatial extent of Tornado Alley and Dixie Alley based on clusters of tornadic activity. We then use logistic regression to investigate how land heterogeneity factors are related to tornado formation of weakly and significantly tornadic storms. Using these relationships uncovered, we map tornado probability across the two regions. Regression results show that several land surface heterogeneity variables have a statistically significant relationship with tornado occurrence, but these relationships vary with region and storm severity, supporting the need for more local studies.
ABSTRACT In 2013, the city of Tulsa, Oklahoma ‘renamed’ Brady Street in its downtown arts distric... more ABSTRACT In 2013, the city of Tulsa, Oklahoma ‘renamed’ Brady Street in its downtown arts district to M.B. Brady Street and designated the road as Reconciliation Way to rid itself of ties to Wyatt ‘Tate’ Brady, the original namesake. Tate Brady, a Ku Klux Klan leader, participated in a 1921 massacre that killed, injured, and displaced many black Tulsans. Honoring M.B. Brady, a Civil War photographer with the same last name but no ties to Tulsa, was part of a neoliberal compromise to ensure the name change would have the least disruptive impact on the financial interests of white business owners on the road. The Tulsa case demonstrates how convenience and practicality—although represented as a matter of neoliberal ‘nonpolitics’—is nonetheless a political technology used to justify sanitizing controversial histories and prioritizing capital accumulation over social justice. The faux renaming of Brady prompts a critical consideration of how neoliberalism weakens cities’ ability to engage in the restorative ‘memory-work’ of recovering (from) past racial violence. Our study contributes to the study of neoliberal place naming, struggles over urban space and memory, and the possibilities and limits of street naming as a vehicle for (re)claiming a black sense of place.
ABSTRACT A number of U.S. universities are embroiled in debates over the longtime commemoration a... more ABSTRACT A number of U.S. universities are embroiled in debates over the longtime commemoration and valorization of white supremacy through the campus landscape. Recognizing place naming as a legitimate political arena, activists have called for—and in some instances succeeded—in removing from university buildings the names of historical figures shrouded in racial controversy. For the broader public and even sympathetic higher education officials, there is a lack of understanding about why these demands are important and even less recognition about the violence that racially insensitive place naming inflicts on the belonging of marginalized groups. Instead, the renaming of campus landscapes is understood as merely an act of political correctness and thus campus authorities have offered uneven and incomplete solutions in the name of progressive reform. Applying recent innovations in race and memory studies, specifically the ideas of wounded places and memory work, we situate ongoing university place naming controversies in a critical context. Specifically, we build on the recent work of law scholar Stephen Clowney and discuss the opportunities and challenges of developing a policy of landscape fairness that recognizes the power of place to transmit ideas about racial power across generations and the right of critics to challenge dominant historical narratives.
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