Each day, countless southerners pass symbols and monuments dedicated to white supremacy and the “Old South”: statues, cemeteries, plantations, downtown squares, and even regional theatre stages. Some may only glance at them, ignorant to their history, while others recall the physical and psychological trauma embedded by generations of enslavement.

Through the eyes of actors and everyday people, Southern Stages offers an engaging new model for interrogating the performance of southernness, as well as how memory and imagination intersect in spaces that have shaped hundreds of years of American history. Chandra Owenby Hopkins employs cultural memory and lived realities of Black and white communities to examine the earliest and most enduring southern stages: the playhouse and the public square.

Chandra Owenby Hopkins is associate professor of theatre and dean of the Converse College for Women at Converse University. Her work has appeared in Theatre Journal, Theatre History Studies, and Theatre Survey. Hopkins lives in Spartanburg, South Carolina.