The Bohemians Band

The Bohemian South

From the southern influence on nineteenth-century New York to the musical legacy of late-twentieth-century Athens, Georgia, to the cutting-edge cuisines of twenty-first-century Asheville, North Carolina, the bohemian South has long contested traditional views of the region. Yet, even as the fruits of this creative South have famously been celebrated, exported, and expropriated, the region long was labeled a cultural backwater. This timely and illuminating collection uses bohemia as a novel lens for reconsidering more traditional views of the South. Exploring wide-ranging locales, such as Athens, Austin, Black Mountain College, Knoxville, Memphis, New Orleans, and North Carolina’s Research Triangle, each essay challenges popular interpretations of the South, while highlighting important bohemian sub- and countercultures. The Bohemian South provides an important perspective in the New South as an epicenter for progress, innovation, and experimentation. Contributors include Scott Barretta, Shawn Chandler Bingham, Jaime Cantrell, Jon Horne Carter, Alex Sayf Cummings, Lindsey A. Freeman, Grace E. Hale, Joanna Levin, Joshua Long, Daniel S. Margolies, Chris Offutt, Zandria F. Robinson, Allen Shelton, Daniel Cross Turner, Zackary Vernon, and Edward Whitley.

The Bohemian Ethos

The iconoclastic ingenuity of bohemians, from Gerard de Nerval to Allen Ginsberg, continually captivates the popular imagination; the worlds of fashion, advertising, and even real estate all capitalize on the alternative appeal of bohemian style. Persistently overlooked, however, is bohemians' distinctive relationship to work. In this book, sociologist Judith R. Halasz examines the fascinating junctures between bohemian labor and life. Weaving together historiography, ethnography, and personal experiences of having been raised amidst downtown New York's bohemian communities, Halasz deciphers bohemians' unconventional behaviors and attitudes towards employment and the broader work world. From the nineteenth-century harbingers on Paris' Left Bank to the Beats, Underground, and more recent bohemian outcroppings on New York's Lower East Side, The Bohemian Ethos traces the embodiment of a politically charged yet increasingly precarious form of cultural resistance to hegemonic social and economic imperatives.

German-Bohemians