Look Away!: The U.S. South in New World Studies(New Americanists)

About the Book

Examines what happens to the paradigms of the American south if we understand the "south" hemispherically, to include Latin America and the Caribbean Presents work by respected scholars in comparative literature, American studies, and Latin American studies Look Away! considers the U.S. South in relation to Latin America and the Caribbean. Given that some of the major characteristics that mark the South as exceptional within the United States - including the legacies of a plantation economy, slave trade, and military defeat - are common to most of the Americas, Look Away! points to postcolonial studies as perhaps the best perspective from which to comprehend the U.S. South. At the same time it shows how, as part of the United States, the South - both centre and margin, victor and defeated, and empire and colony - complicates ideas of the postcolonial. The twenty-two essays in this comparative, interdisciplinary collection rethink southern U.S. identity, race, and the differences and commonalities between the cultural productions and imagined communities of the U.S. South and Latin America.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction: Uncanny Hybridities / Jon Smith and Deborah Cohn
1
1. THE U.S. SOUTH AND THE CARIBBEAN
A New World Poetics of Oblivion / George B. Handley 25
Delta Desterrados: Antebellum New Orleans and New World Print Culture / Kirsten Silva Gruesz 25
Slave Resistance on the Southeastern Frontier: Fugitives, Maroons, and Banditti in the Age of Revolution / Jane Landers 80
Martinique/Mississippi: Edouard Glissant and Relational Insularity / J. Michael Dash 94
Crossing the Mason-Dixon Line in Drag: The Narrative of Loreta Janet Velazquez, Cuban Women and Confederate Soldier / Jesse Aleman 110
Citizenship and Identity in the Exile: Autobiographies of Gustavo Perez Firmat / Steven Hunsaker 130
Travel and Transference: V.S. Naipaul and the Plantation Past / Leigh Anne Duke 150
2. RETHINKING RACE AND REGION
Things Fall Apart: The Postcolonial Condition of Real Rock and The Leopard’s Spots / Scott Romine 175
This Race Which Is Not One: The “More Inextricable Compositeness” of William Faulkner’s South / John T. Matthews 201
Richard Wright: From the South to Africa---and Beyond / Richard King 227
Forward into the Past: California and the Contemporary White Southern Imagination / Robert H. Brinkmeyer Jr. and Debra Rae Cohen 251
American Films/American Fantasies: Moviegoing and Regional Identity in Literature of the Americas / Lois Parkinson Zamora 268
3. WILLIAM FAULKNER AND LATIN AMERICA
Wonder and the Wounds of “Southern” Histories / Stephanie Merrim 311
Southern Economies of Excess: Narrative Expenditure in William Faulkner and Carlos Fuentes / Wendy B. Faris 333
Cant Matter/Must Matter: Setting up the Loom in Faulknerian and Postcolonial Fiction / Philip Weinstein 355
"Wherein the South Differs from the North”: Tracing the Noncosmopolitan Aesthetic in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude / Dane Johnson 383
William Faulkner and the Cold War: The Politics of Cultural Marketing / Helen Oakley 405
William Faulkner, James Agee, and Brazil: The American South in Latin American Literature’s “Other” Tradition / Earl Fitz 419
4. FROM PLANTATION TO HACIENDA: GREATER MEXICO AND THE U.S. SOUTH
Embodying Greater Mexico: Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton and the Reconstruction of the Mexican Question / John-Michael Rivera 451
Remembering the Hacienda: History and Memory in Jovita Gonzalez and Eve Raleigh’s Caballero: A Historical Novel / Vincent Perez 471
POSDATA
Beyond Translation: Jorge Luis Borges Revamps William Faulkner / Ilan Stavans 495
Contributors 505
Index 511

About the Author :

Jon Smith is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Montevallo in Montevallo, Alabama.

Deborah Cohn is Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Indiana University, Bloomington. She is the author of History and Memory in the Two Souths: Recent Southern and Spanish American Fiction.

Review :
"Look Away! is an important collection that expands the vocabularies and national symbol systems that scholars can deploy to think comparatively about the Americas. It is especially useful in breaking the binary between North and South that has so restricted southern literary and historical studies."--Patricia Yaeger, author of Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women's Writing Jon Smith is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Montevallo in Montevallo, Alabama. Deborah Cohn is Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Indiana University, Bloomington. She is the author of History and Memory in the Two Souths: Recent Southern and Spanish American Fiction.