(An)other Southern Rhetoric: Charlotte Hawkins Brown’s Mammy: An Appeal to the Heart of the South

ABSTRACT

In 1919 Charlotte Hawkins Brown, founder of the Palmer Memorial Institute, wrote the novella, Mammy: An Appeal to the Heart of the South as a persuasive appeal to white Southern women in Greensboro, North Carolina. This essay takes an intersectional approach to argue Brown rhetorically appropriates the mammy trope within a combination of slave narrative and Southern romantic novella addressing white female Southerner’s responsibility to their Black counterparts. The result is a novella providing evidence of Brown’s conscious use of African American Southern identity disrupting white Southern moral superiority.

Notes

1. The author wishes to thank Laura Sells, Kenneth Zagacki, Brandon Inabinet, Dan Grano, and Kathleen Turner for their helpful comments on various versions and encouragements of this essay as it went from dissertation chapter to publication. A special thanks to Andre Johnson who told me to “send it in” when I almost gave up. And much gratitude to RR reviewers Shirley Wilson Logan and Candace Epps-Robertson whose works I much admire.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Christina L. Moss

Christina L. Moss is an assistant professor in Rhetoric and Media at the University of Memphis. She researches Southern identity and culture with a particular focus on critical regionalism at the intersections of race, class, and gender. Her essays include analysis on Southern rhetoric, the television show Queen Sugar, country music, rhetoric, pedagogy, and activism and commemoration around Selma, AL. She just finished a forthcoming co-edited volume on Southern regionalism entitled Reconstructing Southern Rhetoric with the University Press of Mississippi.

She may be reached at [email protected]