Grounded in critical theory, southern studies, archival methodologies, and anticolonial thought, Record, Document, Archive illuminates how the U.S. South is made knowable through the acts, objects, and systems that produce records, documents, and archives. Rather than treating "the South" as a fixed geography or predetermined object of study, this innovative, forward-thinking collection reframes region as an ontological and epistemological project shaped by—and resistant to—Eurocentric regimes of documentality.
Bringing together activists, archivists, and scholars across disciplines, the essays in Record, Document, Archive trace the extent to which documentality has governed life and death in the U.S. South, from Indigenous Removal, enslavement, and Jim Crow to contemporary regimes of immigration enforcement, border policing, and the legal erasure of queer and undocumented lives. "Record" emphasizes embodied, affective, and more-than-human acts of marking experience. "Document" interrogates the pedagogical, legal, and evidentiary force of documentation, highlighting counter-hegemonic methods that unsettle dominant southern narratives. "Archive" addresses curation, access, and governance, advancing liberatory memory work that confronts archival violence and privilege while imagining new possibilities for justice-oriented futures.
By attending to the anticipatory acts that precede narrative and law, Record, Document, Archive opens pathways toward "southern elsewheres"—modes of knowing, remembering, and belonging that resist rigid epistemologies and orient scholarship toward liberation.
About the Author :
Stephanie Rountree is associate professor of English at the University of North Georgia and the coeditor, with Lisa Hinrichsen and Gina Caison, of Remediating Region: New Media and the U.S. South and Small-Screen Souths: Region, Identity, and the Cultural Politics of Television.
Lisa Hinrichsen is associate professor of English at the University of Arkansas and the author of Possessing the Past: Trauma, Imagination, and Memory in Post-Plantation Southern Literature.
Gina Caison, the Kenneth M. England Professor of Southern Literature at Georgia State University, is the author of Erosion: American Environments and the Anxiety of Disappearance and Red States: Indigeneity, Settler Colonialism, and Southern Studies.
Review :
"Where the previous two essay collections edited by Rountree, Caison, and Hinrichsen explore representations of the South and southernness in understudied formats of television and new media, this new installment in their brilliant tryptic takes that important methodology and intentionally blows it up. Focusing on the dualities of its three keywords as both nouns and verbs, Record, Document, Archive does not just introduce us to curious objects lingering or forgotten in libraries and the palimpsests of culture. Instead, the volume gives us vital tools to begin making our own way toward 'southern elsewheres'—toward alternative and maybe only half-knowable (re)constructions of region built through the complexities of human and more-than-human relationships across time and space. From the precolonial past to the anticolonial present, from lesbian herstories to environmental futures, this volume challenges us to rethink both the objects of study and the acts of studying them. And in that regard, this book might be better understood as a kind of decolonial treasure map, if such a thing makes sense—one that does not lead us to the discovery of some single truth about what we call 'the South,' but that helps us reconsider the pursuit and production of knowledge itself and begin charting a path toward an elsewhere that is nothing less than the whole world. Everybody working in U.S. southern studies will read this book. Everybody else needs to read this book." - Michael P. Bibler, author of Cotton's Queer Relations: Same-Sex Intimacy and the Literature of the Southern Plantation, 1936–1968
"A sparkling collection where theoretical sophistication, innovative research, and a commitment to social justice combine in a multifaceted examination of how the U.S. South, real, imagined, and anticipated, has been constructed and understood. Organized around the dynamic processes of recording, documenting, and archiving the region's histories and cultures, Record, Document, Archive offers exciting new perspectives on a South made of many, often surprisingly contrarian, Souths." - Brian Ward, author of Martin Luther King in Newcastle upon Tyne: The African American Freedom Struggle and Race Relations in the North East of England "Record, Document, Archive presents an innovative approach to the act of recording, in all its various interpretations. The original quality of the collection is foregrounded in the structure of the book itself, which follows the process of utilizing text (defined in a multitude of ways) to constitute, shape, and expand formulations of regional identity. The collection reconfigures traditional conceptions of documentation and archive, and presents an array of engagements with the praxis, ranging from nineteenth-century contexts to alternative modes of record in the twenty-first century. In doing so, the essays in the collection effect a thoughtful balance between the material, the abstract, and the ephemeral, making the book a much-needed addition to the canon of studies of the U.S. South and literary studies more broadly." - Katharine A. Burnett, author of Cavaliers and Economists: Global Capitalism and the Development of Southern Literature, 1820–1860
