All over God's creation: Global Jim Crow in the texts of Lillian Smith, Richard Wright, Zelda Fitzgerald, Evelyn Scott, Zora Neale Hurston, and Toni Morriso

Combining insights from postcolonial, feminist, and race theory, with particular attention to the burgeoning field of global southern studies, this dissertation examines how authors of the Jim Crow South reveal the connections between their native region and others throughout the globe. The global connections Lillian Smith, Zelda Fitzgerald, Richard Wright, Evelyn Scott, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison draw suggest that the exploitation often seen as unique to the Jim Crow South is anything but. The authors in this study describe the aspects of Jim Crow present in other locales and critique the ways that Jim Crow logic circumscribes identity throughout the globe. Such critiques often take the form of parodying or de-naturalizing identity categories and performances. The presence of Jim Crow logic outside of the US South results from the global presence of similar exploitative social structures in other regions. This study focuses exclusively on southern texts that are often overlooked and emphasizes the ways that constructions of place influence those of identity. This project also pays particular attention to the ways authors inadvertently reify ideologically-informed identity categories. These authors, while de-naturalizing certain aspects of exploitative ideology, sometimes unintentionally employ them, illustrating how insidious Jim Crow logic is. Jim Crow logic continues to shape lives in the present-day, and examining its history through literature can help to rectify those continuing injustices.