By Veronica Davis Gerald and Jesse Edwards Gantt Jr.
Sands Publishing

Coastal English professor and Gullah scholar Veronica Gerald became concerned when she noticed a couple of recent trends. Gullah cuisine was showing up in restaurants in the guise of other food styles—Lowcountry cuisine, Southern cooking, Calabash style—but when you looked at the recipes, they were of Gullah origin. Not only that, but other Gullah traditions such as basketweaving, storytelling, dancing and music were becoming increasingly popular with mostly white audiences while more subtle traditions were being swallowed up—braiding, hand clapping, even the naming of African-American children.

“Gullah culture is getting hybrid-ized,” she said, complaining that some customs are going by the wayside, while others are being called by the wrong names.

When she vented her frustration to Jesse Gantt, a chef and restaurateur in Beaufort, her friend challenged her to do something about it. So the two of them wrote a Gullah cookbook, testing 197 recipes and gathering all the history and description of the culture they could find. It came together a year later in a comprehensive spiral-bound book with recipes as common as biscuits and as uncommon as oxtails and gravy.

But while the recipes hold their own in the kitchen, the opening section of this book provides a thorough overview of Gullah life and culture. “I wanted to introduce other aspects of the culture, to fill in some of the missing cultural gaps,” she says. “I didn’t want it to be too one-dimensional. And I wanted to give it respect.”

From saying grace in Gullah language, to slave cooking, to the origin of Gullah food—it’s all covered here, with an emphasis on the rice culture so important to the slaves who brought the methods for growing the grain to this country.

Rice, which happens to be Gerald’s favorite food, provides autobiographical context for this English professor-turned-cookbook author. “Rice was our entry into the American culture,” says Gerald, a descendant of slaves from three of the plantations—Brookgreen, Laurel Hill and Springfield—that now comprise Brookgreen Gardens. Her great-great-great grandparents, Jack and Diane Rutledge, were slaves who helped build the largest of all the great Waccamaw Neck rice plantations. To preserve her culture, Gerald has been involved for a number of years in interviewing elderly Gullah people on various aspects of the culture. Interviewing often leads to an invitation to supper, and many of the dishes she sampled ended up in the book.

Gerald has been at Coastal since 1980. She was also director of history and culture for three years at the historic Penn Center on St. Helena Island near Beaufort, the site of one of the first free schools for African-Americans. Gerald has held professorships at Illinois State University and Morehouse College, and she has received various awards for her work in the preservation of the Gullah culture, including the South Carolina Governor’s Award in Humanities. Next on her culinary writing agenda is a book tentatively titled Healing Pots about the recipes that heal, from chicken soup to poultices and herbal potions.

Gerald recently opened her own arts and crafts shop, Ultimate Gullah, in Conway.

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Diez mujeres notables en la historia de America Latina
By James and Linda Henderson
Aguilar Press

In the early 1970s, before women’s studies became an established field in academic curricula, Coastal politics professor Jim Henderson had the idea of writing a book examining the lives of prominent Latin American women. He had just finished his doctoral studies in Latin American history at Texas Christian University, and he and his wife Linda—now an associate professor of business at Coastal and chair of the accounting department—were living in a tiny house near Grambling State University in Louisiana, where he was teaching.

“I bribed Linda, who was working on her doctorate at Louisiana Tech at the time, into helping me with the book by promising her a bigger share of office space in the house for her doctoral studies,” says Henderson. “She ended up doing the profiles, and I handled the historical and cultural background.”

The book they eventually produced, Ten Notable Women of Latin America, was published in 1978 and was widely used a supplemental text in college and university survey courses on Latin American history.

Early this year the book was brought out in Spanish by Aguilar, a major Spanish language publisher. During Coastal’s spring break in March 2003, the Hendersons traveled to Bogota for a media reception arranged by Aguilar to promote the publication of the new edition.

In selecting the women profiled in the book, Henderson says their goal was to convey a sense of the history and dramatic color of the region. “We decided to chronicle 500 years of Latin America, from Columbus to Castro—but do it by examining the lives of 10 extraordinary women,” he said. “We wanted the biographical line-up to represent ethnic and occupational diversity across a wide geographical spread.”

The book offers profiles of La Malinche, the Indian slave and consort of Cortéz who played a pivotal role in the Spanish conquest of Mexico; Catalina de Erauzo, the renegade Basque nun who became a notorius outlaw in Peru; Chilean poet Gabriel Mistral; Eva Peron of Evita fame; Tania, the Cuban guerrilla fighter and companion of Che Guevera; and five others.

The lives of these 10 women, in Henderson’s view, prove “that individuals have the power to rise above the circumstances and impersonal forces of history through sheer force of intelligence, perseverance and character.”

Henderson’s new publisher has requested a second volume of profiles to bring the story up to the present time. Henderson is working on it now, but solo this time. “Linda has all the office space she needs,” he said.

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English in the Southern United States
Edited by Stephen J. Nagle and Sara L. Sanders
Cambridge University Press

People from Horry County don’t sound the same as people from the Smoky Mountains, whose dialect differs from New Orleans English; and Texans speak a variation on Southern English all their own.

Southern English is not an easily classified, single entity, point out Steve Nagle and Sara Sanders, English professors at Coastal and co-editors of English in the Southern United States, the most recent volume in Cambridge University Press’ Studies in English Language Series. “There are many factors that contribute to this variation including historical influences like the settlement pattern of British colonists and the influence of the African-American population; even 17th-century prison records from London show some features that we now consider typical of Southern American English,” says Nagle.

The history, sound, grammar and use of Southern English are among the topics covered in the book, a collection of essays written by a team of linguistics experts and published in January 2003. The book was conceived at the 1998 meeting of the Southeastern Conference on Linguistics as a “festschrift,” a collection of celebratory writing, to honor a highly respected colleague in the field, Michael Montgomery.

“Michael has done phenomenal work on language variety,” says Nagle. “He’s been in the forefront of the field for a number of years, and continues to be an active researcher in his retirement.” The book was planned as a surprise homage to Montgomery, but the surprise was blown when the publisher’s agent asked the respected expert to review the book. “It was a natural place for them to turn,” Sanders explained.

Designed to offer a thorough presentation of linguistic research on Southern English suitable for use in seminars on that topic, the book’s 13 chapters concentrate on the distinctiveness of regional linguistic varieties in the United States, the significance of Southern English as a marker of regional identity, and the “folkloric appeal” of Southern language and culture.

Sanders, a South Carolina native, first became interested in the study of language during her graduate school days at the University of South Carolina. “I intended to go for an English lit degree and write a master’s thesis on Shakespeare,” but then she took a linguistics course that changed her focus. Nagle, originally from Brooklyn, N.Y., was on leave from Coastal pursuing doctoral work when they met at USC and discovered a shared scholarly interest in second-language learning and Southern English. They married in 1987, and Sanders joined her husband on the Coastal faculty.

The couple celebrated the book’s publication with colleagues at a linguistics conference at Georgetown University where Montgomery was presented with a copy signed by all its authors.

After retiring in June, Nagle is concentrating on his other loves—rock music and tennis. He is thinking about writing a book on English auxiliary verbs in the South. Nagle and Sanders are also research partners in a project which includes linguistic analysis of metaphors in a collection of hospice illness narratives.

In August, Nagle and Sanders received the 2003 Governor’s Award for the Humanities for their “significant contributions to the cultural life of South Carolina” and for creating “a greater public understanding and appreciation of the humanities.” The award is given annually by the S.C. Humanities Council.

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Ultimate Questions: Thinking About Philosophy
By Nils C. Rauhut
A.B. Longwood, Penguin Academics Series

In philosophy, even more than other scholarly disciplines, it is sometimes difficult to engage students in the active learning process—to get them to participate in meaningful conversation and read important works of classical philosophers such as Socrates.

“It is my hope,” writes Nils Rauhut in the preface of his new book, “that especially those students who begin reading this book with a sense of dread and the desire to read as little as possible will discover that they enjoy reading every page. Doing philosophy is not only fun, but also highly addictive.”

Ultimate Questions: Thinking About Philosophy was published this past summer by A.B. Longman as the first philosophy text in the Penguin Academics Series. The more than 100 interactive questions in the middle of each chapter were tested and refined by Coastal students Amanda Stepp, Jason Fishel and Mary Boyd. “They were instrumental,” said Rauhut. “The students gave me good feedback, and they did some research and ended up reading the whole book.” And, since it was written specifically for students, that was an invaluable aid to the professor.

The “Food for Thought” questions are provocative and deal with a wide range of subjects from the morality of the death penalty to the existence of God. “The exercises are designed to elicit the students’ reactions to philosophical problems and to give students a chance to test whether they have grasped important philosophical concepts,” the preface reads.

It’s a first book for Rauhut, who believes it suitable for anyone interested in philosophy since it’s “written in a way that’s very accessible” to the less academic reader, he says. “The key is making people want to read it, to appeal to a nonreading general public.”

Rauhut studied philosophy and history at the University of Regensburg (Germany) where he was also a journalist for a daily newspaper. He received a master’s degree in philosophy from the University of Colorado at Boulder, and a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Washington in Seattle. He taught at Weber State University in Ogden, Utah, and he has been on the Coastal faculty since 1998. He and his wife Karin have a toddler son, Christian.

Ultimate Questions will be marketed to a large audience since the academic series has a strong national presence for the publisher. It could be that students from Rauhut’s alma mater on the West Coast will be debating the same philosophical issues from the same textbook as his students here at Coastal—and many more in between.

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A New Matrix for Modernism: A Study of the Lives and Poetry of Charlotte Mew and Anna Wickham
By Nelljean Rice
Routledge Press

Charlotte Mew and Anna Wickham were poet contemporaries of Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot in the early 20th century. In fact, Woolf even “damned them with faint praise” by passing over their creative genius.

“I had read [the poetry of] these women in the early ’70s and couldn’t get them out of my mind,” said Nelljean Rice, who proceeded to study the work and lives of the two forgotten British writers and make them the subject of her doctoral dissertation. After all, the topic combined her two areas of expertise—British literature and women’s studies—and the mystery of it all intrigued her scholarly sensibilities.

A few years later she got a call from Routledge Press, a publisher specializing in literary theory and women’s studies. The result is her new book, A New Matrix for Modernism: A Study of the Lives and Poetry of Charlotte Mew and Anna Wickham, published in November 2002 and available in the Humanities and Kimbel libraries on campus.

“These women were really feted when they were alive, but after they died, no one even remembered them,” said Rice, adding that their lives were full of soap opera-like drama. “I talk about their poetry and their lives and their place in the poetry scene in London. I try to bring the theory in, but it’s written in such a way that an interested lay person could enjoy it.”

The book is the unraveling of the mystery: why didn’t the work of these two modernist women become as accessible and popular and durable as that of Woolf, of Pound, of D.H. Lawrence (with whom Wickham had an interesting and possibly steamy relationship)? Was it the pre-feminist times? Was it jealously on the part of the more commercially successful, mostly male, writers and poets?

“I kind of make Woolf the ‘bad guy,’” said Rice, “But then, I make Eliot the bad guy, too.” To find out why, pick up A New Matrix for Modernism and learn for yourself—and enjoy some excellent but little-known poetry along the way.

A poet herself, Rice is assistant professor of English and co-director of the Women’s Studies Program. She is married to Coastal English professor and poet Paul Rice, and they have two grown children: son Jesse, a singer/songwriter in Nashville, and Emily, a senior at Davidson and captain of the lacrosse team—and an English major.

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