Gina Caison

Tuesday, November 6, 7:30 p.m., Burling Lounge

Dramatic (Dis)Unity on Roanoke Island

Gina Caison will examine how popular narratives of Roanoke Island, North Carolina, depend on Native American history in order to establish settler‐colonial land claims for the region we now call the U.S. South. These dramatic interpretations of Roanoke reappear across time, often buttressing myths of southern exceptionalism at the expense of living Native peoples. She argues that understanding the history of Roanoke Island and the way it recurs and evolves through popular narratives offers a way to interrogate the troubling obsession with loss that appears in some approaches to Native American and southern studies.

Gina Caison is an assistant professor of English at Georgia State University where she teaches courses in southern literatures, Native American literatures, and documentary practices. Her book Red States: Indigeneity, Settler Colonialism, and Southern Studies was published this fall from UGA Press, and her co-edited collection Small-Screen Souths: Region, Identity, and the Cultural Politics of Television (2017) is available from LSU Press. In addition to these projects, Dr. Caison’s work has appeared in journals including The Global South, Mississippi Quarterly, The Simms Review, and PMLA. Currently, she is the Chair of the Modern Language Association's Executive Committee on the Forum for Literature of the Southern United States, and she is producer and host of the weekly podcast About South.