Some of us have connected the dots from the church of football to the homes of abused women...Going to book event by young academic friend Reiko Hillyer, "Designing Dixie: Tourism, Memory, and Urban Space in the New South" (University of Virginia Press).
"Although many white southerners chose to memorialize the Lost Cause in the aftermath of the Civil War, boosters, entrepreneurs, and architects in southern cities believed that economic development, rather than nostalgia, would foster reconciliation between North and South. Hillyer shows how these boosters crafted distinctive local pasts designed to promote their economic futures and to attract northern tourists and investors.
"Neither romanticizing the Old South nor appealing to Lost Cause ideology, promoters of New South industrialization used urban design to construct particular relationships to each city’s southern, slaveholding, and Confederate pasts. Drawing on the approaches of cultural history, landscape studies, and the history of memory, she shows how the southern tourist destinations of St. Augustine, Richmond, and Atlanta deployed historical imagery to attract northern investment. St. Augustine’s Spanish Renaissance Revival resorts muted the town’s Confederate past and linked northern investment in the city to the tradition of imperial expansion."
Ironically, since you mentioned "Designing Dixie" I think the dots connect in the old South -- the Lost Cause is nothing but a lie to package a false ideal of "manhood," when the reality is misogyny, racism, and militarism. And it's all celebrated in football.
Some of us have connected the dots from the church of football to the homes of abused women...Going to book event by young academic friend Reiko Hillyer, "Designing Dixie: Tourism, Memory, and Urban Space in the New South" (University of Virginia Press).
ReplyDelete"Although many white southerners chose to memorialize the Lost Cause in the aftermath of the Civil War, boosters, entrepreneurs, and architects in southern cities believed that economic development, rather than nostalgia, would foster reconciliation between North and South. Hillyer shows how these boosters crafted distinctive local pasts designed to promote their economic futures and to attract northern tourists and investors.
"Neither romanticizing the Old South nor appealing to Lost Cause ideology, promoters of New South industrialization used urban design to construct particular relationships to each city’s southern, slaveholding, and Confederate pasts. Drawing on the approaches of cultural history, landscape studies, and the history of memory, she shows how the southern tourist destinations of St. Augustine, Richmond, and Atlanta deployed historical imagery to attract northern investment. St. Augustine’s Spanish Renaissance Revival resorts muted the town’s Confederate past and linked northern investment in the city to the tradition of imperial expansion."
exactly: "The church of football to the homes of abused women." Fed up with all of it.
DeleteIronically, since you mentioned "Designing Dixie" I think the dots connect in the old South -- the Lost Cause is nothing but a lie to package a false ideal of "manhood," when the reality is misogyny, racism, and militarism. And it's all celebrated in football.
ReplyDelete"Fed up with all of it."
Exactly.
Russell Brand (the British comedian) has been critiquing many of our cultural myths. Here he takes on Super Bowl commercials.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oi69BBT42NY