She Lived, and Served, and Died: Caroline Barr, Black Domestic Workers, and the Threat of Memory in Lafayette County
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@ University of Mississippi Libraries
Herron, Kaimara
Description
This project explores the lives of Caroline Barr and other Black women domestic workers from the 1830s to 1940 in Oxford, MS. The purpose is to challenge prevailing public and scholarly treatments of Caroline Barr that rely on romantic notions and racist perceptions of Black women domestic workers in the Old and New South. Barr is most well-known by scholars and casual readers as author William Faulkners Mammy Callie. His knowledge and memories of Caroline Barr as his devoted and faithful mammy has shaped subsequent academic, literary, and public interest in her. Under this framework, she is left peripheral, silenced, and fragmented. By removing her from William Faulkners shadow, this thesis offers a more robust interpretation of Caroline Barr as a historical subject in her own right. Re-contextualizing Barrs life among Black women illuminates their infinite humanity in the face of racial and gendered social expectations, political subjugation, and anti-Black violence that defined the South. This project challenges the production of knowledge about Caroline Barr and other Black domestic workers in the archive and at Rowan Oak as a former plantation and contemporary public history site.
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2019 01 01 T08:00:00 Z