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What the New Southern Studies Does Now

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 October 2015

JON SMITH
JON SMITH*
Affiliation:
English Department, Simon Fraser University. Email: [email protected].
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Extract

For fifteen years, the New Southern Studies (NSS) has been doing battle on two very different fronts. To Americanists, we have tried to talk about what Houston Baker and Dana Nelson, in the essay that named the movement, called “the national formation of the United States and the dynamics of race, region, and citizenship entailed by, as it were, a putatively split and decidedly Manichean geography”; to southernists, we have talked about the need to get beyond what the same pair of writers called “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.” Although in both struggles we keep bumping up against putatively objective scholars’ unacknowledged and deeply self-serving fantasies about who “we” are (whether as “Americans” or “southerners,” “radical” Americanists or Atticus Finch-y liberal white southernists), the former arguments – as Baker and Nelson's diction suggests – have tended to be more abstract, theoretical, ambitious, interesting, and smart; the latter, in contrast, have always felt like a rearguard action.

Type
Responses to New Southern Studies Forum
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 49 , Special Issue 4: Fictions of Speculation , November 2015 , pp. 861 - 870
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press and British Association for American Studies 2015 

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References

1 Baker, Houston A. Jr. and Nelson, Dana D., “Preface: Violence, the Body, and ‘The South,’” American Literature, 73, 2 (2001), 231–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 231, 232.

2 This essay was written before the publication of Go Set a Watchman.

3 “Forum: What's New in Southern Studies – And Why Should We Care?”, Journal of American Studies, 48, 3 (2014), 691–733CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Page references are given parenthetically in the text.

4 Sharon Monteith and Suzanne W. Jones, “Introduction: South to New Places,” in Jones and Monteith, eds., South to a New Place: Region, Literature, Culture (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002), 1–19, 3.

5 Kreyling, Michael, “Toward ‘a New Southern Studies,’” South Central Review, 22, 1 (Spring 2005), 4–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 9, 11.

6 Bové, Paul, “Agriculture and Academe: America's Southern Question,” Boundary2, 14, 3 (Spring 1986), 169–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Doug Marlette, “At Least That's One Confederate Monument They Can't Tear Down,” Southern Cultures 7, 1, (Spring 2001), 1.

8 See http://uncpress.unc.edu/books/T-3095.html, accessed 28 Jan. 2015.

9 For a full discussion of how an academic field can be structured less by ideas and principles than by a set of feelings please see chapter 1 of Jon Smith, Finding Purple America: The South and the Future of American Cultural Studies (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013).

10 Cheryl English Martin and Charles H. Martin, review of Look Away! The U.S. South in New World Studies, Journal of Southern History, 72 (Feb. 2006), 240, cited in Gleeson.

11 Russ Castronovo and Susan Gillman, “Introduction: The Study of the American Problems,” in Castronovo and Gillman, eds., States of Emergency: The Object of American Studies (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 1–16, 3, 13.

12 Carpenter, Bennett, Goldblatt, Laura, Hanson, Lenora, Vitale, Anna, Wissa, Karim, and Yale, Andrew, “Feces on the Philosophy of History! A Manifesto of the MLA Subconference,” Pedagogy, 14, 3 (Fall 2014), 381–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 384.

13 Adolph Reed, “Django Unchained, or, The Help: How ‘Cultural Politics’ Is Worse Than No Politics at All, and Why,” Nonsite.org, 9, at http://nonsite.org/feature/django-unchained-or-the-help-how-cultural-politics-is-worse-than-no-politics-at-all-and-why, accessed 1 Feb. 2015.

14 Tomlinson, Barbara and Lipsitz, George, “American Studies as Accompaniment,” American Quarterly, 65, 1 (March 2013), 1–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 8, 9, original emphasis.

15 Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1956), viii.

16 Villa, Raúl Homero and Sánchez, George J., “Introduction: Los Angeles Studies and the Future of Urban Culture,” American Quarterly, 56, 3 (Sept. 2004), 499–505CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 499.

17 My argument here about transnational American studies’ updated “errand into the wilderness” recapitulates George Handley's in Postslavery Literatures in the Americas: Family Portraits in Black and White (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000), 28–29.

18 Jon Smith and Deborah Cohn, “Introduction: Uncanny Hybridities,” in Smith and Cohn, eds., Look Away! The U.S. South in New World Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 1–19, 11–15.

19 Duck, Leigh Anne, “Southern Nonidentity,” Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies, 9, 3 (July 2008), 319–30, 329CrossRefGoogle Scholar.