W. Ralph Eubanks, born in Mount Olive, Mississippi, graduated from the University of Mississippi in 1978. He has gone on to attain a master’s degree from the University of Michigan, work in the Library of Congress, the Virginia Quarterly Review, and to author two works of nonfiction “Ever is a Long Time: A Journey Into Mississippi’s Dark Past” and “The House at the End of the Road.” He has taught at the University of Virginia and Millsaps College previously but has returned to his alma mater, exactly four decades after his senior year, as a visiting professor of Southern Studies and English. He is currently teaching two classes: “Civil Rights and Activism in Literature” and “Images of the South.”

As a native Mississippian and alumni of the University of Mississippi, what is it like being back on campus? 

I’m a little bit older than the last time I was here [chuckles.] It’s interesting seeing the changes. It’s a much bigger place than it was when I left here 40 years ago, a little more crowded than it was then. I’m amazed by the line for Starbucks every day. It’s also been a very positive experience for me working with students and seeing some commonalities with my time here, but also I think there’s a level of sophistication among students today that I don’t think my generation, coming out of small towns in Mississippi, had.

What events from your early life shaped your pursuits today?

I think actually moving from being a pre-med major to studying literature and psychology. That’s really what I should have done from the beginning. One of my professors read a paper that I did on Keats and said, “Young man, why are you a pre-med major?” and I didn’t have an answer for him.

I think also one of the things for me is teaching “Invisible Man” to my students here. Being in a classroom here, that book and that idea of invisibility, was a big part of my time here [as a student], and pushing against being invisible was a lot of what propelled me through my four years here. And I didn’t realize it until I was teaching it in the classroom on Tuesday how much that book meant to me while I was a student here. I hadn’t really thought of that in probably 40 years.

You have a broad background: psychology, English, journalism. How have these different skills prepared you for what you’re doing now?

For teaching literature, my course on Civil Rights and literature, I’m drawing on a lot of my background in English. But also, when you teach “Invisible Man” you also talk about the psychology of the character, which has always been a big part of what I’ve done. My master’s thesis was on the idea of perception in the work of Henry James, so really using Gestalt theory in analyzing the work of Henry James. So psychology has played a role in how I’ve looked at literature for a long time, and it’s also in how I get my students to approach writing. I think that  I know a lot of them are going to go and do more upper level academic work, so I want them to do the academic framing for their work, but I’m also a little more flexible if they want to do something that’s more along the lines of a personal essay for a class. I will allow that as well because I see that there is room for both.

You are a published author and journalist, but you’ve also served as the publisher for the Library of Congress. What have you learned from working on both sides of the publishing industry?

One of the things about working both sides of the desk is that you know a little too much about how the sausage is made. So you know a lot about how the business works, and sometimes that’s a good thing, and sometimes it’s a bad thing. Because I’ve worked in the industry for 30 some odd years and I know a lot about how things work. On the other side of it, that’s a positive because it gives me a sense of how to approach something in a way that I know an editor is going to be interested in it.

You’re currently teaching a  class on Images of the South. How did you first become interested in photography?

It was when I was at the Library of Congress. In my role of director of publishing, one of the hats that I wore was editor in chief/ editorial director. We are the home for the Farm Security Administration collection, the WPA program that documented America during the depression, so that whole archive of photographs is there as well as the archive of Look magazine from the 1940s to the early 1970s. So there are some really amazing photography collections there; I probably worked on 40 different photography books.

A lot of teaching this “Image of the American South” class is, what’s really shaped the way we think of the South? What are the images and what are the stories that have shaped that and how are these really passed down?  I teach “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” the Walker Evans images because if you look at the other work that was published around the same time it does not hold up the way that that did.

The context changes over time, and that’s what I really find interesting about photography is that there is a language for talking about it. There are different ways of seeing. And what I try to do with my students is help them think about how to analyze a photograph, how to think about the impact of the image and the image with text. The image as a narrative, the text as a narrative, and how do they fit together?

What are some images that have resonated with you?

The Marion Post Wolcott in Belzoni, Mississippi of the theatre with the colored entrance. Maude Clay’s Dog in the Fog. This is kind of my obsessive collecting, but the images that I really love, I own.

The photographs that WEB Dubois commissioned for the Paris Expedition, I did a whole book of those photographs, and those images really stayed with me. I was introduced to them early in my career at the Library of Congress and I saw them and I had never seen these images of black communities with business and prosperity. It was just a different window into the African American South, and I always knew I wanted to do a book about those images, which I ended up doing. It’s called A Small Nation of People, and it’s probably my favorite book that I’ve worked on, it’s probably had the least number of sales, but I know the editor who acquired it at Harper said its the book that she’s proudest of having worked on and I feel the same way.

Are there any problems you’ve run into while teaching on this campus?

I think one challenge, not just for this university but I think any university these days, is that I’m teaching largely classic 20th Century texts which involve a lot of unique cultural references that students today don’t necessarily have in their toolkit.

Teaching “Invisible Man” and talking about the language of “signifying in the dozens”, it’s not anything my students really know about that aspect of African American vernacular speech – it has morphed into hip-hop away from its “down home” roots. That’s probably my greatest challenge, contextualizing for them what some of these things mean. That’s why so often I’ll start my class with a foundational text like “The Strange Career of Jim Crow” in my Civil Rights and literature class and Susan Sontag’s “On Photography” in my Images of the American South class, as a way of thinking about and talking about photography.

In your most recent book, The House at the End of the Road, you seek to learn more about your family’s history. What did you learn about yourself through that writing process?

The big thing that I learned, and this is something that I will never forget, is having my DNA done, sitting down with the geneticist at Penn State who helped me understand the readings. What came out of that for me is that I realized I no longer looked at people and said that I knew their story, which is what we always tend to do. It’s perfectly natural to notice someone’s race or ethnicity upon meeting them, that’s part of our common humanity. It’s what we do, it’s a survival technique, but I no longer think that I know a lot about that person’s ethnicity because there is so much that we don’t know. Having my DNA analyzed then basically deconstructed the idea of race for me in a way that has had a profound effect on me.

You’ve previously worked at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, and you have strong ties to Ole Miss. These are both schools who have dealt with some intense race-related incidents in the past, as well as the present. What do you see as the role of professors on these campuses?

I think to bring some clarity to them. Before I came here I wrote a piece called Triumph of the Wills that’s published in the Virginia Quarterly Review, and that piece will tell you a lot. I actually open with talking about Ole Miss in ’62 and how the images of Charlottesville and Ole Miss in ’62-there’s a direct line between the two of them. I remember ’62 quite vividly. I was quite young but I still remember what it looked like, what the atmosphere was. In a lot of ways, it’s like it happened yesterday. That’s something that my students only know from seeing it in books. So for me, having lived some of that, that’s what brings that clarity.

I see my role here as to try to be a clarifying force in whatever way I can.

 

Reconciliation of one’s love for the South with its painful past and still uncomfortable present is a common theme in a lot of Southern art and literature. How do you personally reconcile this place?

It’s what I have to do every day. It’s not that I am reconciled but it’s a continuous process. I’m much more comfortable here than I was, say 15 years ago, but that comfort doesn’t in any way hamper my awareness of changes in things that are going on around me. It’s had an impact on what I see, but it’s in some way sharpened how I look at it. Reconciliation doesn’t necessarily mean looking away, it means looking more closely.