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Sto caricando le informazioni... American Dreams in Mississippi: Consumers, Poverty, and Culture, 1830-1998di Ted Ownby
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The dreams of abundance, choice, and novelty that have fueled the growth of consumer culture in the United States would seem to have little place in the history of Mississippi--a state long associated with poverty, inequality, and rural life. But as Ted Ownby demonstrates in this innovative study, consumer goods and shopping have played important roles in the development of class, race, and gender relations in Mississippi from the antebellum era to the present. After examining the general and plantation stores of the nineteenth century, a period when shopping habits were stratified according to racial and class hierarchies, Ownby traces the development of new types of stores and buying patterns in the twentieth century, when women and African Americans began to wield new forms of economic power. Using sources as diverse as store ledgers, blues lyrics, and the writings of William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Richard Wright, and Will Percy, he illuminates the changing relationships among race, rural life, and consumer goods and, in the process, offers a new way to understand the connection between power and culture in the American South. Non sono state trovate descrizioni di biblioteche |
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While the meaning of consumer goods in Mississippi has changed through time, consumerism was essential in establishing racial, class, and regional identity. Wealthy white antebellum men sought to show their abundance by paternalistically providing for women and slaves, itinerant black musicians in the 1920s used goods to impress and attract the opposite sex, and civil rights era whites saw shopping as a way to assert segregationist ideals in the face of black boycotts—all of which are examples of the use of consumerism as a means to express social habits.
One common thread from the antebellum period to the present time is the belief that African-American consumers are frivolous and tasteless in their consumption of goods, thereby making them untrustworthy with abundance and requiring paternalistic white assistance in financial management. Citing city and store ledgers, census bureau statistics, tax records, diaries, letters, farm records, novels, blues songs, WPA oral histories, newspapers, state and county agricultural bulletins, legal records, and state laws, Ownby disproves this stereotype in each historical period, explaining that fiscal conservatism, fear of debt, financial caution, and smart consumerism have all along been a part of black consumption in the South.
Ownby illustrates that understanding consumerism in the South is essential to understanding culture in the South. All southerners were consumers in some capacity, shattering the idea that the South became less southern as consumerism took a more prominent role in social interactions. In fact, “questions about the meanings of consumer goods continue” as southerners use goods to redefine, and occasionally purchase, their identity. ( )