This panel convenes around the geographic and religious specificities of the U.S. South. Engaging different regions and methodologies, the panelists theorize the contours, limits, and qualities of religion in the U.S. South. This panel implicitly repudiates academic and popular characterizations of the U.S. South as a religiously conservative “Bible Belt.” The southern religious movement(s) here considered are that of Latinx migration, the transpositions of mountain-based religion as a vehicle of Dolly-Parton-capitalism, the ebbs and flows of Texas groundwater and the laws and technologies of its extraction, and the grooves and grinds of majorette dancers at Southern HBCUs. Rather than rehashing the tired and largely specious distinctions between liberal versus conservative, North versus South, secular versus religious, these papers work to rewrite the narratives that maintain these distinctions while simultaneously attending to and reveling in the material, cultural, and geographical nuances of each panelist’s Southern place.
This paper presents an ethnographic collaboration with my dad’s congregation, which is largely made up of undocumented and recently-arrived Latin Americans. Here, I consider the assemblages that form when the Global South encounters the U.S. South. This paper takes inspiration from Joaquín Torres’ 1943 pen and ink drawing, “América Invertida” or “Inverted Map of South America,” where the artist shows the constructedness of place and the malleability of borders. While scholars like Thomas Tweed argue that migrants transpose their homelands onto, or reproduce their homelands in, their host societies, I insist that what happens is an inversion or worlds turned upside down. This inversion or Relation, to draw on Édouard Glissant, rejects ideas of a fixed root or single origin. Here, I theorize how my dad’s congregation is a case study in multiple Souths coexisting, colliding, and inverting our ideas of place and devotion.
This paper examines “My Hawaii,” a 1988 episode of country musician Dolly Parton’s eponymous 1980s variety show, to consider Parton’s extension of Appalachian-Southern religion beyond Tennessee’s Smoky Mountains. As a celebrity, artist, and cultural icon, Parton is an expert in the marketing and selling of Southern religion in a secular key. If Dollywood, her theme park set in the Smoky Mountains, exemplifies the success of this project, My Hawaii’s attempt to graft Southern religion onto Hawaii’s mountainous landscape—merging religion, indigeneity, and capitalism— revealed its limits. With particular attention to capitalism and the historical context of the 1980s, this paper unpacks Parton’s use of analogy, translation, and ownership as techniques for transporting Southern religion. Assuming Parton a key figure in Appalachian-Southern religion, this paper explores the role of mountains in constructing and exporting of this religion and as a site where religion coarticulates with capitalism, tourism, and imperialism.
This paper considers the materiality of underground water in west Texas through the lens of queer and religious studies. By bringing these two academic disciplines into conversation with groundwater in this arid region, I examine how ideas about queerness and religion structure the legal and technological apparatuses that characterize, capture, and commodify what the Texas Supreme Court has deemed, the “oozing” and “occult” movement of underground water. Water is a substance that places boundaries on knowledge (as the deep and mysterious), sustenance (as the pure or toxic), and sovereignty (as the Texas-Mexico border or “international waters”). Just as frequently, however, water dissolves those boundaries in a torrent of liquid destruction or a drought of crippling proportions—both of which are labeled “Acts of God.” In this paper, I ask how fluidity subverts and solidifies conceptions of bodies, knowledge, and territory.
From a recent profile on Good Morning America to its featuring at Vice President Kamala Harris’s inauguration, majorette dance--a Southern-born black femme dance idiom--has quickly attracted the attention of middle America. However, majorette dancers of historically black college and university (HBCU) marching bands have long grooved through the architecture(s) of black southern religious life. This paper, “What’s a Girl to a Doll?: The Politics and Poetics of Black Femme Respectability in the Gulf South'' accounts for how this dance aesthetic shifts and dances with its geographic location. Historically, black women and femmes have been caricatured and publicly recognized through misrecognition, and majorette dance provides neglected insight on overlapping and distinctive black gender formations and agency in the Gulf South. My paper argues that majorette dance teaches us about the social and religious contracts of gender, embodied civility, respectability, and morality in the Gulf South.