This latest volume of JAS features a special issue, Fictions of Speculation, devised, organized, and prepared for publication by guest editors Hamilton Carroll and Annie McClanahan. Effortlessly interweaving an array of inter- and multidisciplinary modes, methodologies, and approaches, Carroll and McClanahan's special issue comes to grips with the representation of the aftermath of the 2007–8 financial crisis and the ongoing global recession in contemporary US culture. Beginning with a theoretically groundbreaking introduction by Carroll and McClanahan, this issue includes essays by leading scholars in the field – Aimee Bahng, Gerry Canavan, Eva Cherniavsky and Tom Foster, Laura Finch, Leigh Claire La Berge, Andrew Pepper, Katherine Sugg, Michael Szalay, and Evan Calder Williams – in order to come to grips with an array of genres, themes, modes, and paradigms. Across this special issue, all the contributors do powerful justice to the interlocking and yet divergent relationships between literature, film, visual culture, activism, economics, political ideologies, and historical frameworks as they intersect with dominant financial structures in contemporary US society.
We are delighted to feature two responses to the forum on the field of New Southern Studies that was published in JAS last year. Written by leading scholars Jon Smith and Ted Ownby, the two responses develop as well as compellingly add to a number of the issues outlined in the original intellectual exchange. While Jon Smith provocatively interrogates “What the New Southern Studies Does Now,” Ted Ownby cuts to the heart of the question by asking, “Is There Still a South?”. Both scholars examine key questions regarding ongoing definitions of the “New Southern Studies” while also asking a key and still to be answered question: “how does the New Southern Studies affect the writing and teaching of the American South?”
The reviews section leads in print with a thought-provoking roundtable discussion of the multiauthored volume Historians across Borders: Writing History in a Global Age. Four reviewers discuss the book in light of their own geographical locations and experiences of writing US history, before editors Stephen Tuck and Michael Heale provide a response. Online, Anita Schmale and Giles Scott-Smith offer a challenging essay in which they reflect on three books covering the topic of economic inequality in the United States, all of which were published in the same year as Thomas Piketty's original and highly influential French text Le capital au XXIe siècle (2013).
We then include thirty-eight reviews distributed across our print and online platforms. The print section is led by a joint and an individual review that examine three books historicizing key moments of conflict in Native American history. The online reviews section opens with a cluster of four titles dealing with the history of American music and the influence of music on American literature.
