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.

Table of Contents:
List of Figures Preface: Understanding the South Introduction. Old/New/Post/Real/Global/No South: Paradigms and Scales — 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 — W. Fitzhugh Brundage 2. God and the MoonPie: Consumption, Disenchantment, and the Reliably Lost Cause — Scott Romine 3. Toward a Post-postpolitical Southern Studies: On the Limits of the "Creating and Consuming" Paradigm — Jon Smith Part II. Creating and Consuming the South: Case Studies 4. Southern (Dis)Comfort: Creating and Consuming Homosex in the Black South — E. Patrick Johnson 5. Serpents in the Garden: Historic Preservation, Climate Change, and the Postsouthern Plantation — Michael P. Bibler 6. Creating and Consuming "Hill Country Harmonica": Promoting the Blues and Forging Beloved Community in the Contemporary South — Adam Gussow 7. Pride at Preservation Hall: Tourism, Spectacle, and Musicking in New Orleans Jazz — Anne Dvinge 8. Recovering through a Cultural Economy: New Orleans from Katrina to Deepwater Horizon — 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 — Frank Cha 10. A "Southern, Brown, Burnt Sensibility": Four Saints in Three Acts, Black Spain, and the (Global) Southern Pastoral — Paige A. McGinley 11. Southern Regionalism and U.S. Nationalism in William Faulkner's State Department Travels — Deborah Cohn 12. The Feeling of a Heartless World: Blues Rhythm, Oppositionality, and British Rock Music — Andrew Warnes 13. Me and Mrs. Jones: Screening Working-Class Trans-Formations of Southern Family Values — John Howard Afterword: After Authenticity — Tara McPherson List of Contributors Index

About the Author :
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.

Review :
“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