On Tuesday, 4/17, at 3:30pm, in Humanities and Social Sciences, room 123, Professor Coleman Hutchison will speak on “Dixie Mythologies: Religion, Race, Refrain.” Within weeks of its first performance on Broadway in 1859, “Dixie’s” problematic image of African American longing for the plantation South became a metonym for the region as a whole. One hundred and fifty years later, the song and its sobriquet continue to shape how people think about the US South. In his talk, Hutchison uses a diverse set of Dixies to make an argument about the cultural power of this five-letter word and its crucial connections to both the Civil War era and a post-Charlottesville America.
Dr. Hutchison is an associate professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin, where he teaches courses in 19th-century US literature and culture, bibliography and textual studies, and poetry and poetics. He is also the current president of the Society for the Study of Southern Literature.