New Southern Studies


What’s so new about it?


What does the New Southern Studies do?

  • challenge received history and conventional definitions of Southernness and Southern literature
  • blur borders, boundaries, maps
  • complicate familiar stories by exploring their layers and trying to tell the not-told
  • identify and explore the presence in the U.S. South of various cultures and ethnicities over time and in the present
  • understand the U.S. South as located squarely within global crosscurrents, now and over time
  • focus on movement and the encounters that result from mobility
  • recognize the richness of the intersection, the overlap, the fortuitous simultaneity

 

What does the New Southern Studies not do?

  • argue for the South’s exclusivity and distinctiveness
  • focus exclusively on the North/South axis that has historically oriented discussions of Southern identity
  • focus exclusively on the traditional landmarks of white Southern identity: the Civil War, Reconstruction
  • accept the white Southern perspective as dominant
  • study a handful of 19th-century texts, move quickly forward to the Agrarians, and then proceed to evaluate books and moments by how “Faulknerian” “non-Faulknerian” they are
  • worry about deciding exactly which states count as Southern
  • keep talking about “the South” and figure people know what you mean