The Bohemian South: Creating Countercultures, from Poe to Punk

From the southern influence on nineteenth-century New York to the musical legacy of late-twentieth-century Athens, Georgia, to the cutting-edge cuisines of twenty-first-century Asheville, North Carolina, the bohemian South has long contested traditional views of the region. Yet, even as the fruits of this creative South have famously been celebrated, exported, and expropriated, the region long was labeled a cultural backwater. This timely and illuminating collection uses bohemia as a novel lens for reconsidering more traditional views of the South. Exploring wide-ranging locales, such as Athens, Austin, Black Mountain College, Knoxville, Memphis, New Orleans, and North Carolina's Research Triangle, each essay challenges popular interpretations of the South, while highlighting important bohemian sub- and countercultures. In addition to tracing the historical legacy of southern bohemians, the collection traverses such contemporary issues as contested memory, the commodification of the bohemian South, and how southern bohemians play with traditions in new ways that compliment, contradict, and commingle with the region's past traditional practices and ideas. The Bohemian South provides an important perspective in the New South as an epicenter for progress, innovation, and experimentation. Contributors include Scott Barretta, Shawn Chandler Bingham, Jaime Cantrell, Jon Horne Carter, Alex Sayf Cummings, Lindsey A. Freeman, Grace E. Hale, Joanna Levin, Joshua Long, Daniel S. Margolies, Chris Offutt, Zandria F. Robinson, Allen Shelton, Daniel Cross Turner, Zackary Vernon, and Edward Whitley.

About the Author :
Shawn Chandler Bingham is Assistant Dean for Academic Affairs, Director of the Interdisciplinary Social Sciences Program, and assistant professor of sociology at the University of South Florida. Lindsey A. Freeman is a sociologist who teaches, writes, and thinks about cities, memory, art, and sometimes James Agee. She is the author of Longing for the Bomb: Oak Ridge and Atomic Nostalgia and assistant professor of sociology at Simon Fraser University.

Review :
"Inspire[s] fruitful discussions on broadening our understanding of the South's role in contemporary America and the need to resist seeing southern life as a monolith of increasingly extreme political conservatism and racial intolerance." -- Journal of Southern History "This diverse collection of essays. . . . Offers a little bit for everyone in terms of how the South was not and is not the Sahara of the South, including scholarly historical research, journalistic essays, and personal recollections of the South and her people."--Georgia Library Quarterly "Timely, engaging, and necessarily eclectic. . . . Marks new trails in the study of 'bohemian groves in Southern soils' that will point scholars to new problems in the region's quirky cultural history."--Journal of Social History