Creating and Consuming the American South
Creating and Consuming the American South
This book explores how an eclectic selection of narratives and images of the American South have been created and consumed. The thirteen essays move beyond both traditional accounts of southern identity as either declining or enduring, and more recent postmodernist accounts of the South as imagined or invented. Instead, the contributors emphasize how narratives and images of "the South" have real social, political, and economic ramifications, and that they register at various local, regional, national, and transnational scales. Featuring distinguished scholars writing from a wide range of multi- and interdisciplinary perspectives—history, literary studies, performance studies, popular music, and queer studies—the volume both challenges and expands on established understandings of how, when, where, and why ideas of the South have been developed and disseminated.
The essays are broad-ranging in their methodology, bringing the insights of literary studies, queer studies, cinema studies, dramaturgy, musicology, ecocentricism, and other fields . . . to bear on the question at hand.’—Journal of Southern History ‘Offers new perspectives on southern music . . . ‘southern family values’ . . . and the agrarian tradition. . . . Recommended.’—Choice ‘Provocative and insightful.’—North Carolina Historical Review
This wide-ranging volume reminds us consistently that the U.S. South has always been an invention but one that exerts uncanny mobility across multiple borders and histories.'—Melanie Benson Taylor, author of Reconstructing the Native South: American Indian Literature and the Lost Cause 'The quality and variety of the essays, the intelligent introduction, the rich topic, and the suggestive perspective add up to an important volume. It furthers thinking and analysis of the south in world context and theoretical dimensions.'—James L. Peacock, author of Grounded Globalism: How the U.S. South Embraces the World
Martyn Bone is associate professor of American literature at the University of Copenhagen. Brian Ward is professor in American studies at Northumbria University. Brian Ward is professor in American studies at Northumbria University. William A. Link is Richard J. Milbauer Professor of History at the University of Florida. They are coeditors of Creating Citizenship in the Nineteenth-Century South and The American South and the Atlantic World.
Contents List of Figures vii Preface: Understanding the South ix Introduction. Old/New/Post/Real/Global/No South: Paradigms and Scales 1 Martyn Bone Part I. Creating and Consuming the “Real” South 1. From Appalachian Folk to Southern Foodways: Why Americans Look to the South for Authentic Culture 27 W. Fitzhugh Brundage 2. God and the MoonPie: Consumption, Disenchantment, and the Reliably Lost Cause 49 Scott Romine 3. Toward a Post-postpolitical Southern Studies: On the Limits of the “Creating and Consuming” Paradigm 72 Jon Smith Part II. Creating and Consuming the South: Case Studies 4. Southern (Dis)Comfort: Creating and Consuming Homosex in the Black South 97 E. Patrick Johnson 5. Serpents in the Garden: Historic Preservation, Climate Change, and the Postsouthern Plantation 117 Michael P. Bibler 6. Creating and Consuming “Hill Country Harmonica”: Promoting the Blues and Forging Beloved Community in the Contemporary South 139 Adam Gussow 7. Pride at Preservation Hall: Tourism, Spectacle, and Musicking in New Orleans Jazz 158 Anne Dvinge 8. Recovering through a Cultural Economy: New Orleans from Katrina to Deepwater Horizon 178 Helen Taylor Part III. Creating and Consuming the South in Transnational Contexts 9. Creating a Multiethnic Gulf South: Vietnamese American Cultural and Economic Visibility before and after Katrina 203 Frank Cha 10. A “Southern, Brown, Burnt Sensibility”: Four Saints in Three Acts, Black Spain, and the (Global) Southern Pastoral 226 Paige A. McGinley 11. Southern Regionalism and U.S. Nationalism in William Faulkner’s State Department Travels 248 Deborah Cohn 12. The Feeling of a Heartless World: Blues Rhythm, Oppositionality, and British Rock Music 268 Andrew Warnes 13. Me and Mrs. Jones: Screening Working-Class Trans-Formations of Southern Family Values 289 John Howard Afterword: After Authenticity 309 Tara McPherson List of Contributors 325 Index 329
