Brian Ward
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780813044378
- eISBN:
- 9780813046471
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Florida
- DOI:
- 10.5744/florida/9780813044378.003.0002
- Subject:
- History, Cultural History
This chapter uses the memoirs of Caryl Phillips and the theoretical writings of Atlantic historian David Armitage as the springboard for a wide-ranging critical survey of scholarly and creative ...
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This chapter uses the memoirs of Caryl Phillips and the theoretical writings of Atlantic historian David Armitage as the springboard for a wide-ranging critical survey of scholarly and creative attempts to place the American South in an Atlantic World framework. Spanning a variety of traditional disciplinary and temporal divides, it evaluates those efforts in the context of other moves within American Studies and the New Southern Studies to place the nation and the region in Global and Hemispheric (or New World) contexts. Noting the tremendous technical challenges posed by situating the American South within a comprehensive Atlantic World framework, the essay stresses the value of “granular” approaches to the mutually constitutive relationships between the American South and the Atlantic World: a granularity evident in studies that focus primarily on particular places, individuals, groups, moments, or themes in order to trace the significance of much broader Atlantic forces as they flow in and out of the South.Less
This chapter uses the memoirs of Caryl Phillips and the theoretical writings of Atlantic historian David Armitage as the springboard for a wide-ranging critical survey of scholarly and creative attempts to place the American South in an Atlantic World framework. Spanning a variety of traditional disciplinary and temporal divides, it evaluates those efforts in the context of other moves within American Studies and the New Southern Studies to place the nation and the region in Global and Hemispheric (or New World) contexts. Noting the tremendous technical challenges posed by situating the American South within a comprehensive Atlantic World framework, the essay stresses the value of “granular” approaches to the mutually constitutive relationships between the American South and the Atlantic World: a granularity evident in studies that focus primarily on particular places, individuals, groups, moments, or themes in order to trace the significance of much broader Atlantic forces as they flow in and out of the South.
Jon Smith
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780813060699
- eISBN:
- 9780813050928
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Florida
- DOI:
- 10.5744/florida/9780813060699.003.0003
- Subject:
- History, Cultural History
The Creating and Consuming the South volume may be less about moving the field forward than about bringing ideas from the early 2000s (and even the 1970s) to the attention of theory-averse southern ...
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The Creating and Consuming the South volume may be less about moving the field forward than about bringing ideas from the early 2000s (and even the 1970s) to the attention of theory-averse southern historians. Most new southern studies today is not interested in questions of “southern identity,” even as constructed, virtual, or “postsouthern.” These latter terms in practice not only move us backward toward old agrarian categories, but also function to preserve what Jodi Dean calls the “postpolitical,” an inherently conservative effect of postmodernism that forecloses real political activity on the left. To illustrate its points, the chapter takes issue with Michael O’Brien for his misunderstanding of both postmodernism and the empirical roots of the new southern studies, and with Scott Romine for his postpolitical relativism.Less
The Creating and Consuming the South volume may be less about moving the field forward than about bringing ideas from the early 2000s (and even the 1970s) to the attention of theory-averse southern historians. Most new southern studies today is not interested in questions of “southern identity,” even as constructed, virtual, or “postsouthern.” These latter terms in practice not only move us backward toward old agrarian categories, but also function to preserve what Jodi Dean calls the “postpolitical,” an inherently conservative effect of postmodernism that forecloses real political activity on the left. To illustrate its points, the chapter takes issue with Michael O’Brien for his misunderstanding of both postmodernism and the empirical roots of the new southern studies, and with Scott Romine for his postpolitical relativism.
Michael O’Brien
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780813044132
- eISBN:
- 9780813046211
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Florida
- DOI:
- 10.5744/florida/9780813044132.003.0012
- Subject:
- History, American History: 19th Century
Two recent, interconnected, and intriguing developments have been the projects of globalizing southern history and that literary scholarship which has come to be called the “New Southern Studies.” ...
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Two recent, interconnected, and intriguing developments have been the projects of globalizing southern history and that literary scholarship which has come to be called the “New Southern Studies.” Both are worth encouraging but also merit a scrutiny, and both are of help in making sense of the problem of citizenship. The former is of direct relevance to the nineteenth century; the latter has, for the most part, been preoccupied with the twentieth or, at least, the status of the South since the defeat of the Confederacy. At the heart of the former project are economic historians and occasionally sociologists, who have been making a case for the deep engagement of the southern economy and its attendant social relations in a wider global market. In fact, the entanglement of the South with international markets has been fairly continuous since the seventeenth century. For the “New Southern Studies,” the more complicated of the two projects-in part because it is more interdisciplinary and so has more balls to keep in the air, in part because Southern literary studies has long been marked by the anxiety of influences-the focus is generational conflicts, multicultural sensitivities, and the bemusing if exhilarating premises of postmodernism and postcolonialism.Less
Two recent, interconnected, and intriguing developments have been the projects of globalizing southern history and that literary scholarship which has come to be called the “New Southern Studies.” Both are worth encouraging but also merit a scrutiny, and both are of help in making sense of the problem of citizenship. The former is of direct relevance to the nineteenth century; the latter has, for the most part, been preoccupied with the twentieth or, at least, the status of the South since the defeat of the Confederacy. At the heart of the former project are economic historians and occasionally sociologists, who have been making a case for the deep engagement of the southern economy and its attendant social relations in a wider global market. In fact, the entanglement of the South with international markets has been fairly continuous since the seventeenth century. For the “New Southern Studies,” the more complicated of the two projects-in part because it is more interdisciplinary and so has more balls to keep in the air, in part because Southern literary studies has long been marked by the anxiety of influences-the focus is generational conflicts, multicultural sensitivities, and the bemusing if exhilarating premises of postmodernism and postcolonialism.
Kathleen Diffley (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- March 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781617030253
- eISBN:
- 9781617030260
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781617030253.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, American History: 19th Century
In the wake of the Civil War, Constance Fenimore Woolson became one of the first northern observers to linger in the defeated states from Virginia to Florida. Born in New Hampshire in 1840 and raised ...
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In the wake of the Civil War, Constance Fenimore Woolson became one of the first northern observers to linger in the defeated states from Virginia to Florida. Born in New Hampshire in 1840 and raised in Ohio, she was the grandniece of James Fenimore Cooper and was gaining success as a writer when she departed in 1873 for St. Augustine. During the next six years, she made her way across the South and reported what she saw, first in illustrated travel accounts and then in the poetry, stories, and serialized novels that brought unsettled social relations to the pages of Harper’s Monthly, the Atlantic, Scribner’s Monthly, Appletons’ Journal, and the Galaxy. In the midst of Reconstruction and in print for years to come, Woolson revealed the sharp edges of loss, the sharper summons of opportunity, and the entanglements of northern misperceptions a decade before the waves of well-heeled tourists arrived during the 1880s. This book’s sixteen chapters are intent on illuminating, through her example, the neglected world of Reconstruction’s backwaters in literary developments that were politically charged and genuinely unpredictable. Drawing upon the postcolonial and transnational perspectives of New Southern Studies, as well as the cultural history, intellectual genealogy, and feminist priorities that lend urgency to the portraits of the global South, this book investigates the mysterious, ravaged territory of a defeated nation as curious northern readers first saw it.Less
In the wake of the Civil War, Constance Fenimore Woolson became one of the first northern observers to linger in the defeated states from Virginia to Florida. Born in New Hampshire in 1840 and raised in Ohio, she was the grandniece of James Fenimore Cooper and was gaining success as a writer when she departed in 1873 for St. Augustine. During the next six years, she made her way across the South and reported what she saw, first in illustrated travel accounts and then in the poetry, stories, and serialized novels that brought unsettled social relations to the pages of Harper’s Monthly, the Atlantic, Scribner’s Monthly, Appletons’ Journal, and the Galaxy. In the midst of Reconstruction and in print for years to come, Woolson revealed the sharp edges of loss, the sharper summons of opportunity, and the entanglements of northern misperceptions a decade before the waves of well-heeled tourists arrived during the 1880s. This book’s sixteen chapters are intent on illuminating, through her example, the neglected world of Reconstruction’s backwaters in literary developments that were politically charged and genuinely unpredictable. Drawing upon the postcolonial and transnational perspectives of New Southern Studies, as well as the cultural history, intellectual genealogy, and feminist priorities that lend urgency to the portraits of the global South, this book investigates the mysterious, ravaged territory of a defeated nation as curious northern readers first saw it.