Ex-Centric Souths E-Book

AAVV

• Herausgeber: Publicacions de la Universitat de València
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Biblioteca Javier Coy d'Estudis Nord-Americans
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Seitenzahl: 436

Beschreibung

"Ex-Centric Souths: (Re)Imagining Southern Centers and Peripheries" adds a voice in ongoing attempts to chart new routes and to decenter the South in many ways in the hope of exploring Southern identity and multiple Souths. The articles collected in this volume bring to the forefront the translocal and transnational connections and relationships between the South and the circum-Caribbean region; they address the changing nature of Southernness, and especially its sense of place, and finally they investigate the potential of various texts to narrate and revisit regional concerns. Some contributions hold up to view topics ignored and marginalized, while other decontextualize themes and issues central to Southern studies by telling alternative histories.

Leseprobe

EX-CENTRIC SOUTHS

(RE)IMAGININGSOUTHERN CENTERS AND PERIPHERIES

BIBLIOTECA JAVIER COY D’ESTUDIS NORD-AMERICANS

http://puv.uv.es/biblioteca-javier-coy-destudis-nord-americans.htmlhttp://bibliotecajaviercoy.com

DIRECTORAS

Carme Manuel(Universitat de València)

Elena Ortells(Universitat Jaume I, Castelló)

EX-CENTRIC SOUTHS

(RE)IMAGININGSOUTHERN CENTERS AND PERIPHERIES

Urszula Niewiadomska-Flis, ed.

Biblioteca Javier Coy d’estudis nord-americansUniversitat de València

Urszula Niewiadomska-Flis, ed.Ex-Centric Souths: (Re)Imagining Southern Centers and Peripheries

1ª edición de 2019

Reservados todos los derechosProhibida su reproducción total o parcial

ISBN: 978-84-9134-563-3

Ilustración de la cubierta: Aleksander BednarskiDiseño de la cubierta: Celso Hernández de la Figuera

Publicacions de la Universitat de Valènciahttp://[email protected]

Edición digital

“[Let’s] reimagine the or a South or multiple Souths to take full measure of the significance of alternative memories, histories, and modes of cultural expression.”

Barbara Ladd

“Literary Studies: The Southern United States, 2005”

Table of Contents

(Re)imagined SouthsURSZULA NIEWIADOMSKA-FLIS

PART I TRANSNATIONAL SOUTH: THE CARIBBEAN CONNECTION

Imagining the South Through the Caribbean: Spatial Narratives of Liberty in the Novels of Holcombe and LivermoreDENIZ BOZKURT-PEKAR

Migrant Bodies and the Transnational South: Dissecting Colonial Presence in Ana Lydia Vega’s “Encancaranublado”PAULA BARBA GUERRERO

Un-grounding Identity, Re-thinking Connections in Erna Brodber’s LouisianaSOFIA GKERTZOU

PART II TRANSCENDING THE SOUTHERN SENSE OF PLACE

Hot Hot Heat: The U.S. South in Benedict Andrews’s Production of A Streetcar Named DesireJULIA SATTLER

Revisiting Southern Home Places: Insider/Outsider Dialectic in Southern Short FictionIRINA KUDRIAVTSEVA

A Mythical Interpretation of the Southern Gothic in Cormac McCarthy’s FictionSZYMON WNUK

Between Radiance and Darkness: The South as Grotesque in The Heart is a Lonely HunterELISA CORIA

PART III THE SOUTHERN URGE TO TELL

Revisiting The Heart is a Lonely Hunter: Carson McCullers’s “Ironic Parable of Fascism”CONSTANTE GONZÁLEZ GROBA

“But why?”: Racial Guilt and the Southern Paradox in Willie Morris’s North Toward Home and Lillian Smith’s Killers of the DreamMICHAŁ CHOIŃSKI

The Night of the Hunter: The Storied South on ScreenMARIE LIÉNARD-YETERIAN

Advertising the Deep South in 2018: An Analysis of Destination Image Through Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia Travel GuidesGIULIANO SANTANGELI VALENZANI

Acknowledgements

Editing Ex-Centric Souths: (Re)Imagining Southern Centers and Peripheries has been a rewarding and challenging experience. Since editing a volume is an intensely collaborative process, I would like to thank the individuals that helped make this happen.

First, I would like to gratefully acknowledge the talented contributors who made Ex-Centric Souths a vehicle for their research interests. Thank you all for graciously addressing all editorial queries with impressive talent and patience.

I would also like to thank the reviewers, who were engaged in reading portions of the book manuscript: Patrycja Antoszek (John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Poland), Karolina Majkowska (Maria Curie-Sklodowska University in Lublin, Poland), Jadwiga Maszewska (University of Łódź, Poland), Agnieszka Matysiak (Maria Curie-Sklodowska University in Lublin, Poland), Gerald Preher (Lille Catholic University, France), Elżbieta Rokosz Piejko (University of Rzeszów, Poland), María del Carmen Rueda Ramos (University of Rovira i Virgili, Spain), Gabriel Scala (Delta State University, Mississippi, USA), and Beata Zawadka (University of Szczecin, Poland). A sincere thank you for their constructive criticism and diligent reading of Ex-Centric Souths which helped bring the manuscript to the level of professionalism we should aspire to attain.

And finally, it is my great pleasure to extend thanks to Carme Manuel, of Universitat de València, for her kindness, professionalism, and believing in my research projects.

(Re)imagined Souths

Urszula Niewiadomska-FlisJohn Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Poland

The South today is as much a fiction, a story we tell and are told, as it is a fixed geographic space below the Mason Dixon Line.

Tara McPherson, Reconstructing Dixie 1

The South is an imagined community made up of a multiplicity of communities, similarly imagined. Some of these communities are more imagined than others … what all these communities have in common is the act of imagination.

Richard Gray, “Forward: Inventing Communities, Imagining Places” xxiii

In “Southern Distinctiveness, Yet Again, or, Why America Still Needs the South” Larry Griffin asks, “When we talk about ‘the South,’ … which South, exactly, are we talking about?” (62). Griffin’s question implies there is no single, homogenous South. He is not alone in his assumption. There have always been many Souths, overlapping and/or contradicting each other. Yet, the South conjured up in the American imagination is more often than not depicted, for better or for worse, as an exceptional, peculiar region. The South is imagined in multiple ways. Sometimes it takes a meandering journey through external terrains, revisited places and themes, or new narratives to find the South one is looking for. This book hopes to add a modest voice in ongoing attempts to chart new routes and to decenter the South in many ways in the hope of exploring Southern identity and multiple Souths.

The first remapping, to use Robert Brinkmeyer’s phrase,1 concerns the time-honored binaries (such as the South/North dyad) which have been challenged and dismantled. Scholars have opened the South up to themes going beyond the U.S. and embracing more international, hemispheric and global perspectives. The New Southern Studies came into being as a challenge to celebrating Southern exceptionalism and distinctive southern cultural identity within U.S. nationalistic historiography.2 Hence a contemporary discourse of Southern studies expands “to absorb several ‘new’ discourses: memory and trauma studies and a new geography spurred by interest in globalization being the most prominent” (Kreyling, “Toward” 4). This trend towards deconstructing the South’s repressed guilt, mythmaking, and other regional fantasies – but also towards viewing the South transnationally – is present not only in literary humanities, but also in social sciences, cultural studies, and historical research.

Since the South’s center of gravity is shifting from the local to the global, the New Southern Studies also ushered in discussions which sought larger connections, and went beyond local issues of race, ethnicity and gender. After all, W.E.B. Du Bois identified relation of the civilized (white) world to the oppressed races as the social problem of the twentieth century, he would claim that “the color line belts the world” (42). Analyzing the South through the prism of a larger population of the colonized and oppressed pushes the boundaries of Southern studies and opens the Southern canon to include literatures of the Global South. Smith explains that “the U.S. South is tied tightly to postplantation cultures throughout the New World, and, with appropriate qualification, throughout much of the Third World or global south” (“Hot Bodies” 104). The second (re)imagining of the South might involve another critical look at the elements of regional differences. Despite scholarly attempts to prove that the South has never been an exceptional region3 or that the South is disappearing,4 in times when regionalism is much maligned because of its connotations with parochialism, the South is doing more than just fine.5 Elements of often mythologized Southern exceptionalism, such as a sense of place, storytelling and paternalistic honor, still receive critical attention, this time through the prism of comparative studies of the U.S. South. Still another approach in (re)imagining the South is to revisit canonical Southern texts from a new perspective. Reevaluations of established texts with new critical lenses broaden their impact and offer more analytical potential in comparative studies. And finally, looking at the ways the South is narrated through the texts of popular culture might reconceptualize Southern studies.

When in the late 1960s Henry Kissinger said, “Nothing important can come from the South. The axis of history starts in Moscow, goes to Bonn, crosses over to Washington, and then goes to Tokyo. What happens in the South is of no importance” (qtd. in Hersh 263), he clearly did not imagine how the Global South could challenge Western and Eurocentric societies. Trained as a historian, Kissinger was obviously not interested in literary humanities and cultural studies; hence he did not foresee the advent of Global South literatures which could decenter the Anglophone literary world. Adopting transnational and postcolonial perspectives, however, allows literary critics6 to track transnational cultural influences, see their manifestations and in so doing (re)invent the South in global connections. They center American studies in general, and Southern studies in particular, on critical discussions of race, ethnicity, culture, and/or nation in a global perspective. Through transnational lenses, translocal networks, and alternative histories scholars have begun extending the field of Southern studies. Instead of analyzing Southern literature and culture in isolation from the rest of the world, scholars started crossing cultural and/or geographical demarcations to push the regional boundaries of the US. The New Southern Studies repertoire reveals the porous boundaries of the region, engages in comparative studies with those south of the American South, and in so doing redraws the map of the South.

Scholars of the New Southern Studies often deal with minority literatures, search for transnational connectivity between the South and other global regions,7 and employ postcolonial conceptual models and theory.8 Before this the South represented the Other in the American imaginary; the contradictory differences between the North and the South were a result of what French geographer J.F. Staszak names, “a discursive process by which a dominant in-group (‘Us,’ the Self) constructs one or many dominated outgroups (‘Them,’ the Other) by stigmatizing a difference real or imagined – presented as a negation of identity and thus a motive for potential discrimination” (43). As such there existed an “asymmetry in power relations” since “only the dominant group [the North] is in a position to impose the value of its particularity (its identity) and to devalue the particularity of others (their otherness) [the South] while imposing corresponding discriminatory measures” (Staszak 43). The discourse of power defined the nation’s relationship with the othered region, much as in colonial subjugation, where the differences are exposed to justify the colonial power (Bhabha 118). This Us/North versus Them/South duality is perceptively captured in a quote from Orville Vernon Burton in which he appropriated Orientalist/colonialist discourse to talk about the South:

In the following passages by Said, I have substituted the words northern or Yankee for Said’s Orientalist, European, West, and the like, and the words South or southern for Orient, Arab, (Mid)East, and so on; all the other words belong to Edward Said: “Every statement made by Yankees … conveyed a sense of the irreducible distance separating northern from southern … [T]heir estrangement from the South simply intensified their feelings of superiority about northern culture … [The] central argument is the myth of the arrested development of the South … [and] theses of southern backwardness, degeneracy, and inequality with the North. (12)9

The South served as a “negative reference point” against the North, and by extension the nation (Cobb 3). Building on Edward Said’s work on orientalism, David Jansson argues that the U.S. created and sustained a privileged national identity due to “internal orientalism,” a process which both endowed the imagined place called “the South” with objectionable qualities and exoticized the region with alluring but peculiar traits. Internal orientalism, as opposed to “regular” orientalism, Jansson explains, “allows the residents of the othered region some degree of access to the national political, cultural, and economic institutions. As a result, it becomes more likely that negative representations of the othered region will be complemented by positive representations” (“A Geography of Racism” 267).

Richard Gray points out that southerners are still driven “to position themselves with others in their locality, commonality of interest or area, and against or apart from others elsewhere” (“Forward” xxiii). Regional attachment and sensibility cannot be simply circumscribed by the region’s geographical referents. Historical events, religion, its peculiar economic system, racism, foodways, dialects, and other (im)material forms/representations of culture define the South as a socio-cultural construct and differentiate it from other imagined communities. Similarly, Scott Romine’s suggestion that the word South is “one of the few words which mean nothing much without quotes” (The Real South 3), somehow reverberates with W.J. Cash’s observation from his 1941 classic The Mind of the South:

if it can be said there are many Souths, the fact remains that there is also one South. That is to say, it is easy to trace throughout the region … a fairly definite mental pattern, associated with a fairly definite social pattern – a complex of established relationships and habits of thought, sentiments, prejudices, standards and values, and associations of ideas. (xlviii)

Thus, regional community, apart from being delineated by geographical vectors, is also a cultural ideological construct. A sense of belonging and attachment seems to be created, performed and narrated into existence in the case of both regional and national communities.

While Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities examines nation-building and the formation of nationalism, his notion of imagined community can be applied to regions as well. Offering a theoretical perspective on regionalisms, Andrew Hurrell already realized this analytical possibility: “As with nations, so regions can be seen as imagined communities which rest on mental maps whose lines highlight some features whilst ignoring others” (41).10 Applying Anderson’s theory to regions, Brasell explains that, “[l]ike the nation, residents of a region do not know each other although some claim they hold an ‘image of their communion’ as a community, ‘conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship,’ ‘regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail’” (5). Thus the South can be conceptually negotiated and imagined through regional attachment, sensibility and its inhabitants’ sense of belonging. Brasell goes on to explain that “just as the nation ‘has finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond which lie other nations’ and therefore is not ‘coterminous with mankind,’ so too claims of the region (even if deterritorialized) as having finite boundaries beyond which lie other regions and therefore is not coterminous with the nation” (5).

Southern scholars such as Helen Taylor, Tara McPherson, Jon Smith, Deborah Cohn, and Scott Romine have already advanced, to use Romine’s explanation, “understanding of contemporary southern narrative as an archive of improvisations grounded in space and time, a register of imagined relations to artificial territorialities, themed spaces, virtual terrains, built environments, localities, and ‘the global’” (The Real South 17).11 By analyzing how the South’s imagined community is shaped by social formations and circulated through various forms of cultural production (literature, mass media, etc.) these scholars interrogate how the region creates its own narrative not just through nationalist imaginings, but also through transnational connections. Such a doubling of critical perspectives – transnational/hemispheric and subnational/regional imaginaries of the local, which coexist and intersect with each other – offers an opportunity for a reconfiguration of centers and peripheries in the imagined South.

In the U.S. the “North” and the “South” are not equal and symmetrical terms. Far from being purely descriptive and neutral geographic directions, they are “are foundationally hierarchical terms: rather than denoting an equally weighted, descriptive binary, ‘North’ serves as center and norm, while ‘South’ stands as deviation, in need of intervention and reform from without” (Greeson, Our South 12). When the South is removed from the hierarchical North/South dyad by the New Southern Studies, the South is no longer positioned as the exotic/peculiar Other at the margins of the American imaginary. Disentangling the South from the North/South dichotomy shifts old paradigms from the local/national towards the transnational/hemispheric.12 In their introduction to American Cinema and the Southern Imaginary Barker and McKee see this expansion of the Southern imaginary to be necessary

because never more so than today has the South failed to call forth a set of stable defining features. The site of dramatic demographic shifts, transnational industry, and fissured red state power, the South has, if anything, become a more complicated and necessary idea to examine in assembling national, hemispheric, and global narratives of power and identity. (2)

Such critical analyses of the South question and challenge, rather than reject the boundaries, and in so doing they hybridize cultural practices. Barker and McKee observe, “[r]ecent scholarship is not invested in denying the particularities of place or in disavowing the contributions of earlier work. Rather than identify the factors isolating locations, it seeks to plumb the nexus of the local, the national, and the global to track the resonances linking them” (2-3).

Additionally, “old” Southern studies’ discussions about “our familiar notions of Good (or desperately bad) Old Southern White Men telling stories on the porch, protecting white women, and being friends to the Negro” (Baker and Nelson 231) are pushed from the center of concerns of Southern studies to its margins. Such a de-centering of discourse allows the New Southern Studies to “construct and survey a new scholarly map of ‘The South’” (Baker and Nelson 243). As such, the South can be vicariously explored through the transgressions of its center. Explorations of the peripheries of what have been considered core features of “Southernness” stretch the traditional boundaries of regional identification. Hence, cultural practices and literary representations which are incorporated and/or transgressed redefine the centers and peripheries of Southern studies. The New Southern Studies concentrates on boundary crossings, rather than on creating a fixed Southern imaginary. Southern cultural identities and practices are redefined through adoption of diasporic, translocal, cross-cultural perspectives, which rescue them from the exclusion and marginality of the “old” Southern studies discourse. Additionally Southern studies scholars can redefine the central/marginal discourse of canonical texts and find connections with other texts when viewed through such critical lenses.

The center and its margins are not separable; they are constructed within interrelating and dependent hierarchies of superiority and inferiority. In the process of nation-building the South became the margins to the center; it became the “antithesis” of the nation and repository of American guilt (Griffin 56-9).13 Yet, this differentiation in the construction of subjectivity is partially built on the repressed belief and fear of latent similarity between the South and the rest of the nation. Therefore, what is despised and denied, and thus peripheral and marginalized as the Other, can actually be seen as symbolically central to the American imaginary and as such constituting one of the core elements of the dominant culture. Greeson points to this contradictory impulse in construction of national/regional identities: “what is materially peripheral to the modern nation often becomes symbolically central to it” (2). Thus, evocative, conflicting images of the South depend on radically different perspectives in the discourse of power and hierarchy:

our South appears in U.S. literature to embody both sides of the disavowed binary: simultaneously colonial and colonized, it diverges from the nation writ large on the basis of its exploitativeness— as the location of the internal colonization of Africans and African Americans in the United States—and on the basis of its exploitation—as the location of systemic underdevelopment, military defeat, and occupation. This South, which emblematizes the familiar coercive forms of human society, is from the start essential to conceptualizing “the United States” as a new national form. (Greeson 3)

Similarly, Jon Smith and Deborah Cohn assert that the American South is “compellingly … both familiar and exotic, both Self and Other … [it is] a space simultaneously (or alternately) center and margin, victor and defeated, empire and colony, essentialist and hybrid, northern and southern (both in the global sense)” (9).

The margins can trouble the center by transgressing its hierarchy, order, and boundaries. Such hierarchy inversion will reveal the mechanisms of ordering and discriminations which have been used by the center to structure and legitimate the established order. By responding to the literary canon of the center, marginalized literary voices can deconstruct Southern regional identities, cultural practices and constructions. The position of authors marginalized due to their race, gender, ethnicity or sexuality who decide to write back14 is charged with destabilizing power: their ex-centric view and experience of the Souths (sic) recover them from estranged and distorted representation of their Souths. The title of this volume – Ex-Centric Souths: (Re)Imagining Southern Centers and Peripheries – announces a critical perspective which attempts to interrogate the Southern imaginary and rescue it from fragmentation, reduction, misrepresentation, and distortion in the national imaginary. Ex-centric writings, capitalizing on the Greek ἐξ, meaning “from out of” or “away from,”15 intend to rescue the Southern imaginary from an ontological condition of estrangement and reductionism. This volume aims to do what Barbara Ladd suggested Southern scholars do; that is, to

reimagine the or a South or multiple Souths to take full measure of the significance of alternative memories, histories, and modes of cultural expression. Alterity in the southern United States designates not only the submerged voices of women, minorities, and the poor but also colonial, postcolonial, regional, and transnational textualities obscured by cultural nationalism. (“Literary Studies” 1633)

Such act of reimagining of the Souths radically repositions marginalized histories, reclassifies voices which have been minimized, obscured and distorted, and recovers cultures and narratives which have been made ex-centric.

* * *

Ex-Centric Souths is organized around three central concepts, all of which reimagine the centers and peripheries of the American South. The first section, “Transnational South: the Caribbean Connection,” begins by locating the American South in the broader context of the circum-Caribbean region. The second, “Transcending the Southern Sense of Place,” examines some of the concerns connected with one of the South’s most mythologized traits – Southern sense of place. The final section, “The Southern Urge to Tell,” addresses the narrative and rhetorical potential of various texts of culture to revisit, understand and explain the region. The overwhelming majority of the contributions contain a wealth of new approaches and daring conceptualizations of the region. Ex-Centric Souths features the work of both established and emerging scholars, providing varied and interdisciplinary approaches to Southern centers and peripheries. Even though the articles give a strong sense of the South’s complexity, the coverage of topics is certainly not exhaustive, nor could it ever be.

Part I of the book interrogates obscured cultural and literary relationships between the American South and countries in the Caribbean basin. Once scholars adopted a comparative, transnational geographic frame to Southern studies,16 they began seeking historical and imaginative connections with the Caribbean and/or South America. Jon Smith identifies such commonalities, which become an inspiration for many circum-Caribbean writers:

the history of colonial plantations, race slavery, race mixing, vibrant African cultural survival, disappeared bodies, a predilection for the baroque …, poverty, state-sponsored right-wing terrorism, insular communities, creole nativism, and what Woodward famously called “the experience of military defeat, occupation, and reconstruction.” (“Hot Bodies” 104-105)

A transnational, hemispheric perspective exposes the artificiality and arbitrariness of national barriers in a region where creolization, immigration, and a slave economy created a common collective experience.

Similar experiences of the collective traumatic experiences of the subaltern, plantation economies based on capitalist abuse of human chattel, and creolization create a Pan-American communal experience and the collective memory of a larger region. Literatures of the Caribbean, Latin America, and the American South express distrust of colonialism and a feeling of dispossession. Geo-cultural affinities are reflected in literary modes adopted by authors from across the Caribbean basin: literary modes of the grotesque, realism and magical realism, gothic, and counter-pastoral fiction in the respective national literatures. Authors reveal the transnational connections and unity of shared history and expose “subterranean” links between the American South and the Caribbean islands, redrawing the southernmost borders of the American South in the process. Cross-cultural readings of the South as a hemispheric region in the fictions of Lucy Holcombe, Elizabeth Livermore, Ana Lydia Vega, and Erna Brodber gathered in this volume tell the story of circum-Caribbean and inter-American cultural traffic and intersections.

This section begins with Deniz Bozkurt-Pekar’s article “Imagining the South Through the Caribbean: Spatial Narratives of Liberty in the Novels of Holcombe and Livermore,” which brings a new appreciation for the presence and significance of antebellum conceptualizations of liberty in the context of the “peculiar institution” and plantation economies of both the South and the Caribbean. Bozkurt-Pekar analyzes two novels – Elizabeth D. Livermore’s Zoë; or the Quadroon’s Triumph and Lucy Holcombe’s The Free Flag of Cuba – which respectively endorse Yankee transcendentalist abolitionism and Southern secessionism along with pro-slavery arguments. With the coexistence of divergent ideologies, the Union seems to be at a crossroads and these two opposing antebellum visions of the South (ideal transcendentalist republicanism versus pro-slavery southern filibusterism) serve as possible futures of the pre-war nation.

Strong ties to the Caribbean and the transnational connection are even more visible in Paula Barba Guerrero’s contribution, “Migrant Bodies and the Transnational South: Dissecting Colonial Presence in Ana Lydia Vega’s ‘Encancaranublado.’” Barba Guerrero interrogates the old southern plantation dynamics in the context of the Global South. Situating her analysis within the discourse of identity, migration, cultural memory and theories of space, Barba Guerrero is able to evocatively interrogate the porous and invisible border which prevents the migrant’s entry into the postbellum South. Her analysis of Vega’s tale reveals that southern hospitality, one of the core features of the region which in theory should regenerate and heal the migrant, is denied to the immigrants from the rimlands of the Caribbean.

Migration, dislocation of cultural identity and the concept of belonging are also taken up by Sofia Gkertzou in her article “Un-grounding Identity, Re-thinking Connections in Erna Brodber’s Louisiana.” Gkertzou problematizes the construction of black identities as depicted in Brodber’s novel Louisiana. Since no single, homogenous black collective identity exists (as cultural reductionism would have it), the novel plays with various narratives styles, voices, genres, spatial and temporal transferences, in order to express cultural and historical connections between the Caribbean and the U.S. South. Louisiana becomes a geographic and cultural double where the South is dislocated, “collaborative interdependence” between the U.S. and the Caribbean is enacted, and, following Glissant’s rhizomatic poetics, community of color is re-thought of as a circuit, since “each and every identity is extended through a relationship with the Other” (Glissant 11).

As with the contributions in Part I, the following articles in Part II do not cover all possible areas of Southern sense of place, but they present a broad view of “Southern place [that] is becoming a much more fluid concept” (Monteith and Jones, “Introduction” 3). Articles gathered in this section expand the meaning of the traditional “sense of place,” which was often associated with regionalism. In so doing they answer Barbara Ladd’s suggestion to “reconceptualize place as a site of cultural dynamism” (“Dismantling the Monolith” 32). Even though as a concept a “region is of indeterminate scale, its boundaries negotiable, overlapping, reiterative, and perspectival” (Nyerges and Adams 4) some (im)material social and cultural aspects underline its formation. A sense of place is one such aspect that continues to define the South as a region, and as Scott Romine observes “[o]f the several stock answers to the perennial question ‘What is southern literature?’, the importance of ‘place’ (or the presence of ‘sense of place’) surely ranks near the top of the list” (“Where is Southern Literature” 5). Despite being contested in times of a shifting sense of the South as a region,17 a sense of place is still captured by and evoked in Southern literature:18

Memory and community have both been problematized in recent work. The famous southern sense of place disappeared from the conversation for a while. Many southernists, like others in the United States academy, prefer “space,” perhaps for its familiar liberatory connotations, to “place,” which carries with it suggestions (questionable) of stasis and subjection. But place, formerly evoked in lyrical appeals, is now being theorized with respect to discourses of space, and a new sense of place is emerging in postcolonial, environmentalist, and feminist paradigms and practices. (Ladd, “Literary Studies” 1636)

Regardless of whether it is a positive or negative point of reference, in these times when Southerness is being redefined, “place needs to be constructed not as a stable site of tradition and history within a progressive nation, but as something more provisional, more fleeting, more subversive, and likewise more creative – a locus for economic, political, discursive, and more broadly cultural transactions, a site of memory and meaning both for the past and the future” (Ladd, “Dismantling the Monolith” 39-40).

This section begins with Julia Sattler’s analysis of the role of stage production and the choice of the lead actress in “Hot Hot Heat: The U.S. South in Benedict Andrews’s Production of A Streetcar Named Desire.” Performance criticism furnishes an entry point for discussions of how a contemporary stage design and the choice of the lead actress (Gillian Anderson) re-imagine the South for non-Southern audience of London’s Young Vic (2014) and St. Ann’s Warehouse in New York (2016). Sattler analyzes how the Southernness is mediated through minimalistic, functional stage design, and interchanging “realism” and “magic” which result from the collision of the gallant Old South and industrial New South. She also pays critical attention to the implications of the rotating stage, which underscore “a contemporary imagination of a place that cannot be fixed, that is forever twisting, turning, fleeting” (Sattler).

Irina Kudriavtseva explores the South’s communities and contours in “Revisiting Southern Home Places: Insider/Outsider Dialectic in Southern Short Fiction.” Kudriavtseva analyzes different scenarios of departures from and returns to the South in short stories penned by Peter Taylor, Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty and Bobbie Ann Mason in an attempt to demonstrate how Southerners revisiting their home place in the South redefine their region. The temporary displacement and homecoming afford those returning a dual position of both insider and outsider to Southern culture. Paying attention to the social, cultural, psychological, and/or moral dimensions of characters returning to their home places in the South allows Kudriavtseva to problematize regional hierarchies and cultural stereotypes. The liminal position of these southern characters illustrates in-between identities and social roles suspended between different geographical and cultural settings of the heterogeneous South.

A different kind of Southern setting is explored in Szymon Wnuk’s “A Mythical Interpretation of the Southern Gothic in Cormac McCarthy’s Fiction.” Wnuk’s study of Outer Dark (1968), Blood Meridian (1985), and The Road (2006) intersects with several fields of critical inquiry: region as an imagined place, Southern Gothic and Christian mythology. Reading these novels through the lens of Christian mythology opens new interpretative directions in McCarthy’s criticism. Tracing McCarthy’s literary journey outside the conventional boundaries of the South, Wnuk analyzes McCarthy’s transposition of Southern Gothic to a non-southern landscape. Wnuk sets out to depict how an interplay of Gothic convention and Biblical references destabilizes regional identities of the imagined South and transcends traditional boundaries of Southern regional writing.

The final article in this section, Elisa Coria’s “Between Radiance and Darkness: The South as Grotesque in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter,” also re-evaluates traditional Southern gothic spaces – this time, however, in connection with the literary mode of the grotesque in Carson McCullers’s debut novel. The space of a mill town in Georgia in the 1930s, and the southern landscape of that time in general, evokes themes of seclusion, exclusion and eventual transgression. Coria demonstrates that McCullers’ characters suffer from loneliness and isolation due to the repressive dictates of a society which assesses the value of individuals based on a combination of class difference (the poor), sexual orientation (the queer), physical attributes (the ugly), or ideology and worldview. What transpires from Coria’s analysis is a belief that the grotesque allows McCullers to express concerns about southern society and destabilize normative identities of social pariahs who live in “the margins between their hometowns and the dream of a world outside of the South, but they also inhabit parts of this southern space that are in-between: these are liminal spaces that represent the divide, or threshold, between here and there” (Coria).

The title of Part III – “The Southern Urge to Tell” – is a riff on the subtitle of Fred Hobson’s seminal work Tell About the South: The Southern Rage to Explain, in which Hobson explores the southern urge toward self-examination. The final part of Ex-Centric Souths offers an informative reassessment of various ways in which Southerners narrate, discuss, and explain their region to others and to themselves. This section opens with Constante González Groba’s “Revisiting The Heart is a Lonely Hunter: Carson McCullers’s ‘Ironic Parable of Fascism’,” which reconsiders the novel through the prism of how manifestations of fascism can shed some light on southern society and culture. Providing a rich historical and social context, González Groba comments on how Jim Crow racial practices and policies of the 1930s and early 1940s led to the South being associated with Nazi Germany (the plight of Jews in Germany vide the situation of African Americans in the South). His insightful analysis of the spiritual and psychological, rather than political dimensions of fascism traces how McCullers dramatizes the lonely and alienated individual’s susceptibility to fascism. Using the concept of “authoritarian personality” and the rise of totalitarianism as a critical framework, González Groba examines the central position of John Singer, a lonely deaf-mute who becomes the confidant of four different individuals: a teenage girl, an alcoholic socialist, a black doctor, and a quiet and reflective bar owner. Seen from this analytical angle, Singer becomes a fitting metaphor for the Southerners’ preference for fantasies such as southern tradition or white supremacy over self-analysis which would challenge self-destructive fantasies existing at the basis of complex and inconsistent reality.

The next contribution in this section – Michał Choiński’s “‘But why?’ Racial Guilt and the Southern Paradox in Willie Morris’s North Toward Home and Lillian Smith’s Killers of the Dream” – is devoted to an analysis of two parallel scenes in two Southern social autobiographies from the rhetorical and figurative perspective. Both novels depict youthful narrators who do not understand racist rules and are desperately in need of explanations from their parents. Interrogation of literary depictions of the daily paradoxes of life in the Jim Crow South of the 1930s reveals the extent to which the narrators had to confront the logic of racism, and thus revisit their moral principles and remodel their behavior accordingly. Choiński illustrates how prohibitions connected with trespassing on two color-coded spaces – a white home and “unpainted houses” in the segregated area of a hometown – combined with lack of parental explanation and the suppression of curiosity “initiate the complex act of assuming a new perspective on the social and racial issues taken for granted in their childhood” (Choiński).

Marie Liénard-Yeterian’s “The Night of the Hunter: The Storied South on Screen” explores the way storytelling is staged in the film and examines a strong narrative impulse (which is channeled through storytelling) in two artistic forms: literature and cinematography. In her analysis of both the literary original and its cinematic adaptation, Liénard-Yeterian pays attention to the staging of storytelling through stories, songs, dreams and secrets. Storytelling is undoubtedly one of the elements of Southernness conjured up when one thinks and talks about the South. While storytelling is not an inherently Southern phenomenon, it allows Southerners to make sense of reality and connect with others through shared experiences. In both narratives – the novel and its cinematic adaptation – telling stories (both traditional tales and those of personal experiences) and telling secrets bring people together and at the same time tear them apart. Liénard-Yeterian’s analysis proves that as a result of adaptation strategies, including elision, omission, and addition, the film “does not sustain the terror suggested in the book, staging a formulaic Hollywood ending.”

Closing the collection is Giuliano Santangeli Valenzani’s exploration of how contemporary Southern travel guides manufacture a Southern identity which fascinates and attracts northern tourists. “Advertising the Deep South in 2018: An Analysis of Destination Image Through Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia Travel Guides” delves into how tourism of the former Confederacy narrates the South’s cultural heritage: from picturesque and pastoral plantations and the Lost Cause mythology, through the troubled history of the Civil Rights Movement. Relying on Karen Cox’s tourism studies, Santangeli Valenzani analyzes the South’s modification of its marketing and promotional campaigns in travel advertising and tourism literature. Travel guides and brochures of the Deep South reveal that the region lured white tourists with a self-projected image of an imagined world of the antebellum romantic past. The South, with its rich culture and history, became a commodity while tourist attractions became consumer products which were to satisfy the tourist gaze. Santangeli Valenzani pinpoints the late 1970s as a watershed for reconceptualization of the region. Now instead of a sanitized version of white Dixie, promotional images tell a story of a more ethnically inclusive South. With the demands of the “black tourism market,” travel guides begin appealing to black tourists also, even if mostly in the context of civil rights tourism and black heritage tourism.

The articles collected in this volume reimagine the centers and peripheries of the American South in an attempt to explore multiple Souths. These essays bring to the forefront the translocal and transnational connections and relationships between the South and the circum-Caribbean region; they address the changing nature of Southernness, and especially its sense of place, and finally they investigate the potential of various texts to narrate and revisit regional concerns. Some contributions hold up to view topics ignored and marginalized, while other decontextualize themes and issues central to Southern studies by telling alternative histories.

Works cited

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd edition. London: Verso, 1991. Print.

Baker, Houston and Dana Nelson. “Preface: Violence, the Body and ‘The South’.” American Literature 73:2 (June 2001): 231-244. Web 15 April 2019. https://read.dukeupress.edu/american-literature/article/73/2/231/4064/Preface-Violence-the-Body-and-The-South

Barker, Deborah and Kathryn McKee. “Introduction: The Southern Imaginary.” American Cinema and the Southern Imaginary. Eds. Deborah Barker and Kathryn McKee. University of Georgia Press, 2011. 1-26. Print.

Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 1994. Print.

Brasell, Bruce. The Possible South: Documentary Film and the Limitations of Biraciality. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2015. Print.

Brinkmeyer, Robert. Remapping Southern Literature: Southern Writers and the West. University of Georgia Press, 2010. Print.

Burton, Orville Vernon. “The South as ‘Other,’ the Southerner as ‘Stranger’.” The Journal of Southern History 79.1 (February 2013), 7-50. Web 10 December 2018. ebscohost.com.

Cash, W. J. The Mind of the South. 1941. New York: Vintage Books, 1991. Print.

Cimakasky, Joseph. The Role of Exaíphnes in Early Greek Literature: Philosophical Transformation in Plato’s Dialogues and Beyond. Lexington Books, 2017. Print.

Cobb, James C. Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity. Oxford University Press, 2005. Print.

Cohn, Deborah. History and Memory in the Two Souths: Recent Southern and Spanish American Fiction. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1999. Print.

Cooper, Christopher A. and H. Gibbs Knotts. The Resilience of Southern Identity: Why the South Still Matters in the Minds of Its People. University of North Carolina Press, 2017. Print.

Du Bois, W.E.B. “The Color Line Belts the World.” Collier’s Weekly (October 20, 1906), collected in W.E.B. Du Bois: A Reader, ed. David Levering Lewis. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1995. 42-43. Print.

Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. University of Michigan Press, 1997. Print.

Gray, Richard. “Forward: Inventing Communities, Imagining Places: Some Thoughts on Southern Self-Fashioning.” South to a New Place: Region, Literature, Culture. Ed. Suzanne W. Jones and Sharon Monteith. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002. xiii-xxiii. Print.

Greeson, Jennifer Rae. Our South: Geographic Fantasy and the Rise of National Literature. Harvard University Press, 2010. Print.

Griffin, Larry J. “Southern Distinctiveness, Yet Again, or, Why America Still Needs the South.” Southern Cultures 6.3 (2000): 47-72. Web. 18 September 2018. https://muse.jhu.edu.

Hersh, Seymour M. The Price of Power: Kissinger in the White House, New York: Summit Books, 1983. Print.

Hurrell, Andrew. “Regionalism in Theoretical Perspective.” Regionalism in World Politics: Regional Organisations and International Order. Ed. L. Fawcett and A. Hurrell. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. 37-73. Print.

Jansson, David R. “‘A Geography of Racism’: Internal Orientalism and the Construction of American National Identity in the Film Mississippi Burning.” National Identities 7:3 (2005), 265-285. DOI: 10.1080/14608940500201797 WEB 20 November 2018.

___ . “Internal Orientalism in America: W.J. Cash’s The Mind of the South and the Spatial Construction of American National Identity.” Political Geography 22 (March 2003): 293-316. Print.

Kreyling, Michael. “Toward ‘A New Southern Studies’.” South Central Review 22.1 (2005): 4-18. Print.

Ladd, Barbara. “Dismantling the Monolith: Southern Places – Past, Present, and Future.” Critical Survey 12.1 (2000): 28-42. Print.

___ . “Literary Studies: The Southern United States, 2005.” PMLA 120.5 (October 2005): 1628-39. Print.

Lassiter, Matthew and Joseph Crespino. “Introduction: The End of Southern History.” The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism. Matthew D. Lassiter and Joseph Crespino. Oxford University Press, 2010. Print.

McKee, Kathryn and Annette Trefzer, eds. “Global Contexts, Local Literatures: The New Southern Studies.” American Literature 78:4 (December 2006). Web 18 February 2019. https://read.dukeupress.edu/american-literature/issue/78/4.

McPherson, Tara. Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined South. Duke University Press, 2003. Print.

Monteith, Sharon and Suzanne W. Jones. “Introduction: South to New Places.” South to a New Place: Region, Literature, Culture. Ed. Sharon Monteith and Suzanne Jones. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002. 1-19. Print.

Nyerges, Aaron and Thomas Adams. “Introduction: Regionalizing American Studies Within and Beyond the Nation.” Australasian Journal of American Studies 36.2 (December 2017).Web 10 January 2018.

Romine, Scott. The Real South: Southern Narrative in the Age of Cultural Reproduction. Baton Rouge: Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008. Print.

___ . “Where is Southern Literature?: The Practice of Place in a Postsouthern Age.” Critical Survey (2000): 5-27. Web 11 January 2018. www.jstor.org.

Smith, Jon. “Hot Bodies and ‘Barbaric Tropics’: The U.S. South and New World Natures.” The Southern Literary Journal 36.1 (Fall 2003): 104-120. Print.

___ . “The U.S. South and the Future of the Postcolonial.” The Global South 1.1 (Winter, 2007): 153-158. Web 15 April 2019. www.jstor.org.

Smith, Jon and Deborah Cohn. “Introduction: Uncanny Hybridities.” Look Away! The U.S. South in New World Studies. Ed. Jon Smith and Deborah N. Cohn. Duke University Press, 2004. 1-24. Print.

Staszak, Jean-François. “Other/Otherness.” International Encyclopedia of Human Geography. Volume 8. eds. Rob Kitchin and Nigel Thrift. Oxford: Elsevier, 2009. 43-47. Print.

Steed, Robert P., Lawrence W. Moreland and Tod A. Baker, eds. The Disappearing South? Studies in Regional Change and Continuity. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1990. Print.

Further reading

Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literature. Routledge, 1989. Print.

Bingham, Shawn Chandler and Lindsey A. Freeman, ed. The Bohemian South: Creating Countercultures, from Poe to Punk. University of North Carolina Press, 2017. Print.

Campbell, Edward Jr. The Celluloid South: Hollywood and the Southern Myth. University of Tennessee Press, 1981. Print.

Cartwright, Keith. Sacral Grooves, Limbo Gateways: Travels in Deep Southern Time, Circum-Caribbean Space, Afro-creole Authority. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013. Print.

Clabough, Casey. “The Imagined South” Sewanee Review 115.2 (2007): 301-307. Print.

Cohn, Deborah N. History and Memory in the Two Souths: Recent Southern and Spanish American Fiction. Vanderbilt University Press 1999. Print.

Edgerton, Adam Kirk. “What’s Wrong With Being From the South? Just Ask an Academic in the North.” The Chronicle of Higher Education. Web January 15, 2019. https://www.chronicle.com/article/What-s-Wrong-With-Being-From/243510.

Gray, Richard. Southern Aberrations: Writers of the American South and the Problems of Regionalism. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 2000. Print.

Grigsby Coffey, Michele and Jodi Skipper, eds. Navigating Souths: Transdisciplinary Explorations of a U.S. Region. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2017. Print.

Hackney, Sheldon. “The South as a Counterculture.” American Scholar 42 (Spring 1973): 283–93. Web 11 January 2018. www.jstor.org.

Handley, George. Postslavery Literature in the Americas: Family Portraits in Black and White. University of Virginia Press 2000. Print.

Henninger, Katherine Renee. “How New? what Place?: Southern Studies and the Rest of the World.” Contemporary Literature 45.1 (2004): 177-85. Web. 18 September 2018. https://muse.jhu.edu.

Jones, Suzanne W. and Sharon Monteith, ed. South to a New Place: Region, Literature, Culture. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002. Print.

Kirby, Jack Temple. Media-made Dixie: The South in the American Imagination. Louisiana State University Press, 1978. Print.

Lowe, John. Calypso Magnolia: The Crosscurrents of Caribbean and Southern Literature. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2016. Print.

Peacock, James and Carrie Mathews, eds. The American South in a Global World. Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2005. Print.

Russ, Elizabeth Christine. The Plantation in the Postslavery Imagination. Oxford University Press, 2009. Print.

Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon, 1978. Print.

Stecopoulos, Harry. Reconstructing the World: Southern Fictions and U.S. Imperialisms, 1898-1976. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008. Print.

Taylor, Helen. Circling Dixie: Contemporary Southern Culture Through a Transatlantic Lens. Rutgers University, Press 2001. Print.

1 I am referring to Robert Brinkmeyer’s titular phrase: Remapping Southern Literature: Southern Writers and the West (2010).

2 See Barbara Ladd, “Dismantling the Monolith: Southern Places – Past, Present, and Future.” Critical Survey 12.1 (2000): 28-42.

3 Matthew Lassiter and Jospeh Crespino claim that “the notion of the exceptional South has served as a myth, one that has persistently distorted our understanding of American history” (7). In their book they rightly claim that while the nation has projected everything negative about itself, such as slavery, segregation, racism, sexism, homophobia, social and political conservatism, religious extremism, and capitalist exploitation, onto the regional other, these are national problems, not just limited to the South.

4 Undeniably, the South has undergone thorough social, demographic, cultural, economic, and political changes (especially after World War II). The twentieth-century process of nationalization, or mainstreaming, might have eroded some of the region’s peculiarity. For some scholars southern cultural and political distinctiveness, due to industrialization and urbanization, is but a residue of past differences, which is slowly fading away anyway. The fear of the South’s convergence with the rest of the nation is well captured in Robert Steed’s and Tod Baker’s collected volume The Disappearing South?: Studies in Regional Change and Continuity.

5 In The Resilience of Southern Identity: Why the South Still Matters in the Minds of Its People Christopher Cooper and Gibbs Knotts illustrate that despite increased mobility, cultural homogenization, diverse population growth, and in-migration, regional identity and identification is definitely far from fading.

6 To name a few: Cohn, Deborah. History and Memory in the Two Souths: Recent Southern and Spanish American Fiction. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt UP, 1999. Cohn, Deborah N. and Jon Smith, eds. Look Away! The U.S. South in New World Studies. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2004. McKee, Kathryn and Annette Trefzer, eds. “Global Contexts, Local Literatures: The New Southern Studies.” American Literature 78:4 (December 2006).

7 While taking a transnational turn, scholars should also bear in mind that a postcolonial approach runs the risk of making a sweeping generalization of various cultures, histories and peoples. Such a totalizing of diverse histories reduces the cultures and peoples of the Global South to a common denominator. In so doing, seeing non-Western cultures as a monolithic Global South, can eventually hegemonize the West.

8 See: Jon Smith. “The U.S. South and the Future of the Postcolonial.” The Global South 1.1 (Winter 2007): 153-158.

9 In a footnote Burton explains that passages included in this collage “come from several different pages, recombined here with ellipses. Said, Orientalism, 228 (first and second parts of the quotation), 260 (third part), 307 (fourth part), 206 (fifth part)” (12).

10 In his book The Possible South: Documentary Film and the Limitations of Biraciality, Bruce Brasell analyzes the South as an imagined community. However, he arrives at the conclusion that “[w]hile some regional institutional structures do exist, … they are too weak to sustain the formation of the region as an imagined community (or social formation), hence its circulation is dependent upon poaching local, national, and global ones as a discursive supplement” (7). He also warns against misusing the term “imagined South”: “a tendency exists among many users of the phrase to equate it with ‘representations of the South,’ which implies a separate external region to which these representations can be compare, thereby inadvertently reinscribing the old truthfulness/fictitiousness dichotomies that the concept was intended to eliminate. To refer to representations as ‘fabrications’ exemplifies the linguistic slippage such as ‘imagined South’ perpetuate, the word simultaneously meaning ‘to construct’ and ‘to pretend’” (Brasell 7).

11 I am referring here to such other publications: Robert Brinkmeyer’s Remapping Southern Literature (2000), Helen Taylor’s Circling Dixie: Contemporary Southern Culture through a

Transatlantic Lens (2001), Tara McPherson’s Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined South (2003), South to a New Place: Region, Literature, Culture, edited by Suzanne W. Jones and Sharon Monteith (2002), Deborah Cohn and Jon Smith’s edited volume Look Away! The U.S. South in New World Studies (2004), and Scott Romine’s The Real South: Southern Narrative in the Age of Cultural Reproduction (2008).

12 Barker and McKee note that “scholars have recognized that the South bears the imPrint. of hemispheric and global affiliations that wrench its notoriously self-absorbed gaze outward, beyond the confines of nation. Interdisciplinary and comparative literary studies are a further means of studying the hemispheric forces that unite locations over and around the boundaries of the nation-state that demarcate them, spilling into Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa” (3).

13 In a similar vein, David R. Jansson explains that “the geographic ideas ‘America’ and ‘the South’ are opposite poles of a binary, and the identity of one cannot be understood except as linked to the identity of the other; therefore, representations of a degenerate South inform an exalted national identity” (“Internal Orientalism in America” 293).

14 I am referring here to Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin’s 1989 classic The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literature.

15 Joseph Cimakasky explains that “ἐξ admits of multiple meanings depending upon usage, but the most general sense of the word is from out of or away from a thing” (9).

16 The most comprehensive book-length studies of Southern-Caribbean connections include: Deborah N. Cohn’s History and Memory in the Two Souths: Recent Southern and Spanish American Fiction (1999), John Lowe’s Calypso Magnolia, George Handley’s Postslavery Literature in the Americas: Family Portraits in Black and White (2000), Elizabeth Christine Russ’ The Plantation in the Postslavery Imagination (2009), and Keith Cartwright Sacral Grooves, Limbo Gateways: Travels in Deep Southern Time, Circum-Caribbean Space, Afro-creole Authority (2013).

17 Interestingly enough, Barbara Ladd questions whether regionalism and a sense of place are interrelated or contradictory terms: “Is a literature ‘grounded in place’ necessarily a ‘regional’ literature?” (“Dismantling the Monolith” 28). To support her query Ladd quotes from Eudora Welty who said, “‘Regional’ is an outsider’s term [that] … has no meaning for the insider who is doing the writing, because as far as he knows he is simply writing about life” (qtd in Ladd, “Dismantling the Monolith” 28). The perspective of the exteriority informs “region,” while “‘place’ and ‘location are subjective, experiential, insiders’ terms” (Ladd, “Dismantling the Monolith” 28).

18 Literature perpetuates the South through evocations of “a sense of place,” as Barbara Ladd observes, “both the past (memory) and the future (invention) are evoked in terms of places - and it is hard to imagine that memory could withstand the destruction of place, or that the future could be imagined except as a place (in both time and space)” (“Dismantling the Monolith” 30).

PART I

TRANSNATIONAL SOUTH: THE CARIBBEAN CONNECTION

Imagining the South Through the Caribbean:Spatial Narratives of Libertyin the Novels of Holcombe and Livermore

Deniz Bozkurt-PekarLeipzig University, Germany