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Noelle Morrissette

Anne Spencer between Worlds provides an indispensable reassessment of a critically neglected figure. Looking beyond the poetry she published during the Harlem Renaissance, Noelle Morrissette provides a new critical lens for interpreting Spencer’s expansive life and imagination through her archives, giving particular focus to her manuscripts authored from 1940 to 1975.

Through its attentiveness to Spencer’s published and unpublished work, her work as a librarian and an activist, and the political dimensions of her writing, Anne Spencer between Worlds transforms our understanding of Spencer. It offers a sustained examination of poetry and ecology, and the relationships among race, gender, and archives, through its analysis of the manuscripts that Spencer produced and revised throughout her life. Morrissette argues that the expansiveness, depth, and range of Spencer’s writing has not been appreciated because she did not publish this incomplete, ongoing work. She also demonstrates that careful reading of the manuscripts challenges many of the assumptions that have governed Spencer’s reception.

In Anne Spencer between Worlds, Spencer emerges as a deeply engaged political poet who used the creative possibilities of the unpublished manuscript to explore pressing political and cultural concerns and to develop experimental cultural forms. In her unpublished manuscripts, Spencer pushed beyond the lyric mode to develop experimental forms that were alert to the expressive possibilities of the epic, prose, correspondence, and mixed genres. Indeed, Spencer’s manuscripts serve as witnesses of historical and poetic junctions for the poet and for the attentive reader of her archives.

University of Georgia Press

The New Southern Studies Ser.

Anne Spencer between Worlds

Jedidiah Evans

Born in Asheville, North Carolina, Thomas Wolfe (1900–1938) was one of the most influential southern writers, widely considered to rival his contemporary, William Faulkner—who believed Wolfe to be one of the greatest talents of their generation. His novels— including Look Homeward, Angel (1929); Of Time and the River (1935); and the posthumously published The Web and the Rock (1939) and You Can’t Go Home Again (1940)—remain touchstones of U.S. literature.

In Look Abroad, Angel, Jedidiah Evans uncovers the “global Wolfe,” reconfiguring Wolfe’s supposedly intractable homesickness for the American South as a form of longing that is instead indeterminate and expansive. Instead of promoting and reinforcing a narrow and cloistered formulation of the writer as merely southern or Appalachian, Evans places Wolfe in transnational contexts, examining Wolfe’s impact and influence throughout Europe. In doing so, he de-territorializes the response to Wolfe’s work, revealing the writer as a fundamentally global presence within American literature.

Look Abroad, Angel -Thomas Wolfe and the Geographies of Longing: Thomas Wolfe and the Geographies of Longing

Benjamin S. Child

A familiar story holds that modernization radiates outward from metropolitan origins. Expanding on Walter Benjamin’s notion of die Moderne, The Whole Machinery explores representations of people and places, objects and occasions, that reverse that trajectory, demonstrating how modernizing agents move in a contrary direction as well—from the country to the city. In a crucial reconsideration, these figures aren’t pulled by or into urban modernity so much as they bring alternate—and transformative—iterations of the modern to the urban world.

Upending the U.S. South’s reputation as either retrograde or unresponsive to modernity, Benjamin S. Child shows how the effects of national and transnational exchange, emergent technologies, and industrialization animate environments and bodies associated with, or performing, versions of the rural. To this end, he also exposes the shadow side of the cosmopolitan modern by investigating the rural sources—the laboring bodies and raw materials—that made such urban spaces possible, thus taking a broader survey of landscapes created by the Atlantic world’s histories of uneven development.

In this investigation of the rural modern that considers multiple media and forms of technology, Child’s sources range widely, encompassing a spectrum of texts and their networks of transmission, reception, and signification. These include novels, poems, and short stories but also radio broadcasts, sound recordings, political pamphlets, photographs, magazine articles, newspaper reports, and agricultural bulletins. Folding such expressive artifacts into his larger arguments, Child considers how they both reflect and form modern(ist) culture. The result is a geography of southern modernism that includes an unexpected combination of landmarks, both actual and imagined: Twisted Oak, Arkansas, and Tukabahchee County, Alabama; Manhattan, Manchester, and Moscow; Tuskegee and Gobbler’s Knob, North Carolina.

The Whole Machinery: The Rural Modern in Cultures of the U.S. South, 1890-1946

Gina Caison

Red States uses a regional focus in order to examine the tenets of white southern nativism and Indigenous resistance to colonialism in the U.S. South. Gina Caison argues that popular misconceptions of Native American identity in the U.S. South can be understood by tracing how non-Native audiences in the region came to imagine indigeneity through the presentation of specious histories presented in regional literary texts, and she examines how Indigenous people work against these narratives to maintain sovereign land claims in their home spaces through their own literary and cultural productions. As Caison demonstrates, these conversations in the U.S. South have consequences for how present-day conservative political discourses resonate across the United States.

Assembling a newly constituted archive that includes regional theatrical and musical performances, pre-Civil War literatures, and contemporary novels, Caison illuminates the U.S. South’s continued investment in settler colonialism and the continued Indigenous resistance to this paradigm. Ultimately, she concludes that the region is indeed made up of red states, but perhaps not in the way readers initially imagine.

Red States: Indigeneity, Settler Colonialism, and Southern Studies

Martyn Bone

Where the New World Is assesses how fiction published since 1980 has resituated the U.S. South globally and how earlier twentieth-century writing already had done so in ways traditional southern literary studies tended to ignore. Martyn Bone argues that this body of fiction has, over the course of some eighty years, challenged received readings and understandings of the U.S. South as a fixed place largely untouched by immigration (or even internal migration) and economic globalization.

The writers discussed by Bone emphasize how migration and labor have reconfigured the region’s relation to the nation and a range of transnational scales: hemispheric (Jamaica, the Bahamas, Haiti), transatlantic/Black Atlantic (Denmark, England, Mauritania), and transpacific/global southern (Australia, China, Vietnam). Writers under consideration include Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, John Oliver Killens, Russell Banks, Erna Brodber, Cynthia Shearer, Ha Jin, Monique Truong, Lan Cao, Toni Morrison, Peter Matthiessen, Dave Eggers, and Laila Lalami.

The book also seeks to resituate southern studies by drawing on theories of “scale” that originated in human geography. In this way, Bone also offers a new paradigm in which the U.S. South is thoroughly engaged with a range of other scales from the local to the global, making both literature about the region and southern studies itself truly transnational in scope.

Where the New World Is: Literature about the U.S. South at Global Scales

The work of considering, imagining, and theorizing the U. S. South in regional, national, and global contexts is an intellectual project that has been going on for some time. Scholars in history, literature, and other disciplines have developed an ad­vanced understanding of the historical, social, and cultural forces that have helped to shape the U. S. South. However, most of the debates on these subjects have taken place within specific academic disciplines, with few attempts to cross-engage.

Navigating Souths broadens these exchanges by facilitating transdisciplinary conversations about southern studies scholarship. The fourteen original essays in Navigating Souths articulate questions about the significances of the South as a theoretical and literal “home” base for social science and humanities researchers. 

They also examine challenges faced by researchers who identify as southern studies scholars, as well as by those who live and work in the regional South, and show how researchers have responded to these challenges. In doing so, this book project seeks to reframe the field of southern studies as it is currently being practiced by social science and humanities scholars and thus reshape historical and cultural conceptualizations of the region.

Navigating Souths: Transdisciplinary Explorations of a U.S. Region

Anthony Szczesiul

Hospitality as a cultural trait has been associated with the South for well over two centuries, but the origins of this association and the reasons for its perseverance of­ten seem unclear. Anthony Szczesiul looks at how and why we have taken something so particular as the social habit of hospitality—which is exercised among diverse individuals and is widely varied in its particular practices—and so generalized it as to make it a cultural trait of an entire region of the country.

Historians have offered a variety of explanations of the origins and cultural practices of hospitality in the antebellum South. Economic historians have at times portrayed southern hospitality as evidence of conspicuous consumption and competition among wealthy planters, while cultural historians have treated it peripherally as a symptomatic expression of the southern code of honor. Although historians have offered different theories, they generally agree that the mythic dimensions of southern hospitality eventually outstripped its actual practices. Szczesiul examines why we have chosen to remember and valorize this particular aspect of the South, and he raises fundamental ethical questions that underlie both the concept of hospitality and the cultural work of American memory, particularly in light of the region’s historical legacy of slavery and segregation.

The Southern Hospitality Myth: Ethics, Politics, Race, and American Memory

In Keywords for Southern Studies, editors Scott Romine and Jennifer Rae Greeson have compiled an eclectic collection of new essays that address the fluidity of southern studies by adopting a transnational, interdisciplinary focus. The essays are structured around critical terms pertinent both to the field and to modern life in general.

The nonbinary, nontraditional approach of Keywords unmasks and refutes standard binary thinking—First World/Third World, self/other, for instance—that postcolonial studies revealed as a flawed rhetorical structure for analyzing empire. Instead, Keywords promotes a holistic way of thinking that begins with southern studies but extends beyond.

Keywords for Southern Studies

Emron Esplin

Edgar Allan Poe’s image and import shifted during the twentieth century, and this shift is clearly connected to the work of three writers from the Río de la Plata region of South America—Uruguayan Horacio Quiroga and Argentines Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar. In Borges’s Poe, Emron Esplin focuses on the second author in this trio and argues that Borges, through a sustained and complex literary relationship with Poe’s works, served as the primary catalyst that changed Poe’s image throughout Spanish America from a poet-prophet to a timeless fiction writer.

Most scholarship that couples Poe and Borges focuses primarily on each writer’s detective stories, refers only occasionally to their critical writings and the remainder of their fiction, and deemphasizes the cultural context in which Borges interprets Poe. In this book, Esplin explores Borges’s and Poe’s published works and several previously untapped archival resources to reveal an even more complex literary relationship between the two writers. Emphasizing the spatial and temporal context in which Borges interprets Poe—the Río de la Plata region from the 1920s through the 1980s—Borges’s Poe underlines Poe’s continual presence in Borges’s literary corpus. More important, it demonstrates how Borges’s literary criticism, his Poe translations, and his own fiction create a disparate Poe who serves as a precursor to Borges’s own detective and fantastic stories and as an inspiration to the so-called Latin American Boom.

Seen through this more expansive context, Borges’s Poe shows that literary influence runs both ways since Poe’s writings visibly affect Borges the poet, story writer, essayist, and thinker while Borges’s analyses and translations of Poe’s work and his responses to Poe’s texts in his own fiction forever change how readers of Poe return to his literary corpus.

Borges's Poe: The Influence and Reinvention of Edgar Allan Poe in Spanish America

Erich Nunn

Sounding the Color Line explores how competing understandings of the U.S. South in the first decades of the twentieth century have led us to experience musical forms, sounds, and genres in racialized contexts. Yet, though we may speak of white or black music, rock or rap, sounds constantly leak through such barriers. A critical disjuncture exists, then, between actual interracial musical and cultural forms on the one hand and racialized structures of feeling on the other. This is nowhere more apparent than in the South.

Like Jim Crow segregation, the separation of musical forms along racial lines has required enormous energy to maintain. How, asks Nunn, did the protocols structuring listeners’ racial associations arise? How have they evolved and been maintained in the face of repeated transgressions of the musical color line? Considering the South as the imagined ground where conflicts of racial and national identities are staged, this book looks at developing ideas concerning folk song and racial and cultural nationalism alongside the competing and sometimes contradictory workings of an emerging culture industry. Drawing on a diverse archive of musical recordings, critical artifacts, and literary texts, Nunn reveals how the musical color line has not only been established and maintained but also repeatedly crossed, fractured, and reformed. This push and pull—between segregationist cultural logics and music’s disrespect of racially defined boundaries—is an animating force in twentieth-century American popular culture.