GHOST DANCING ON THE CRACKER CIRCUIT: The Culture of Festivals in the American South. University Press of Mississippi, 1997

From 1988 through 1996 I traveled around the South exploring community festivals, episodes of public culture where local history is put on display, celebrated, repainted or stashed out back under the porch, too cracked to stand much handling, but too valuable to throw away. "Ghost Dancing on the Cracker Circuit" is the product of those travels. It's a travelogue-slash-social history of a certain South full of Andy and Barney look-alikes, rattlesnake hunters and tobacco queens, with Baudrillard, Geertz, Gramsci and Foucault stirring the syrup kettle.

THE CRITICS SAY...

Every so often, a book comes out that is entirely, refreshingly new – not just in approach and style, but in idea, scope and theme. Rodger Lyle Brown…decided to weave his journeys to Southern festivals into a tale that has a most ambitious task: to show that the way Southerners celebrate history and heritage is part of a tapestry of melancholy that illustrates the fading of community. He succeeds mightily….For anyone interested in the South, social history or the human condition, this is a book that is not to be missed.

— Associated Press

Rodger Brown’s Ghost Dancing on the Cracker Circuit may very well be one of the most exciting pieces of new scholarship on the festival in quite some time…Brown eventually pulls out the academic stops and presents modern festival behavior in the American South as postmodern ghost dancing. This makes for a very exciting advance in festival scholarship…

— Journal of Communication

Brown tours the Southland to watch small-town residents rally around a past that may or may not have happened, holding out hope against a frightening future…Along the way, [he] writes fascinating asides on everything from how to catch rattlesnakes to the carnival nature of pigs, from banana trains to tobacco harvesting, from the Scopes monkey trial to the Hatfield-McCoy feud…Ghost Dancing on the Cracker Circuit makes a terrific tour guide both to the best of Southern kitsch and the often scrambled thinking of the eggheads that yokels used to laugh at on ‘Green Acres’…

— Asheville Citizen-Times

What saves Ghost Dancing from the lockstep presumptions of the cultural studies methodology is Brown’s utter finesse with language and the wacko cultural spectacles whose mechanics he drolly recounts. A highly entertaining, jocular book that’s compulsively readable (a rarity in academic discourse), Brown’s account of his cultural roadtrip is interior in its sympathies, shedding a tear for a dying culture, while exterior in its shrewd measure of the same culture via the dispassionate academic’s field guide of Fredric Jameson and Raymond Williams.

— Creative Loafing