“Southern Stages adds a much-needed new perspective of the US South through the lenses of performance and memory. Hopkins’s work opens the door for a fresh intersectional and interdisciplinary discussion about the American South that fits the current sociopolitical moment in the United States.”—Evan Howard Ashford, author, Mississippi Zion: The Struggle for Liberation in Attala County, 1865–1915

“Hopkins offers a sophisticated exploration of the ways in which the American South as an idea imprints itself on places, objects, and people. As the focus shifts from the plantation, the whip, Confederate ‘daughters’ sanitizing the legacies of their ancestors, to activist-artists striving to monumentalize past horrors to prevent their forgetting, the dynamic interplay of race, memory, history and performance is compellingly revealed.”—Harvey Young, author, Embodying Black Experience