Bücher der Reihe New Directions in Southern Studies

In this far-reaching literary history, John Wharton Lowe remakes the map of American culture by revealing the deep, persistent connections between the ideas and works produced by writers of the American South and the Caribbean. Lowe demonstrates that a tendency to separate literary canons by national and regional boundaries has led critics to ignore deep ties across highly permeable borders. Focusing on writers and literatures from the Deep South and Gulf states in relation to places including Mexico, Haiti, and Cuba, Lowe reconfigures the geography of southern literature as encompassing the "e;circumCaribbean,"e; a dynamic framework within which to reconsider literary history, genre, and aesthetics. Considering thematic concerns such as race, migration, forced exile, and colonial and postcolonial identity, Lowe contends that southern literature and culture have always transcended the physical and political boundaries of the American South. Lowe uses cross-cultural readings of nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers, including William Faulkner, Martin Delany, Zora Neale Hurston, George Lamming, Cristina Garcia, Edouard Glissant, and Madison Smartt Bell, among many others, to make his argument. These literary figures, Lowe argues, help us uncover new ways of thinking about the shared culture of the South and Caribbean while demonstrating that southern literature has roots even farther south than we realize.

By the late twentieth century, Houston's South Asian community had become one of the most prosperous in the metropolitan area and one of the largest in the country. Mining archives and using new oral histories, Uzma Quraishi traces this pioneering community from its midcentury roots to the early twenty-first century.

When Tammy Wynette sang "D-I-V-O-R-C-E", she famously said she "spelled out the hurtin' words" to spare her child the pain of family breakup. In this innovative work, Ted Ownby considers how a wide range of writers, thinkers, activists, and others defined family problems in the twentieth-century American South.

In this groundbreaking study, Adam Gussow takes the full measure of the devil's presence in the blues. Working from original transcriptions of more than 125 recordings released during the past ninety years, Gussow explores the varied uses to which black southern blues people have put this trouble-sowing, love-wrecking, but also empowering figure.

Baptized in PCBs: Race, Pollution, and Justice in an All-American Town

Federal Fathers and Mothers: A Social History of the United States Indian Service, 1869-1933

Indicted South: Public Criticism, Southern Inferiority, and the Politics of Whiteness

When Zandria Robinson returned home to interview African Americans in Memphis, she was often greeted with some version of the caution ""I hope you know this ain't Chicago"". In this important new work, Robinson critiques ideas of black identity constructed through a northern lens and situates African Americans as central shapers of contemporary southern culture.

From Storyville brothels and narratives of turn-of-the-century New Orleans to plantation tours, Bette Davis films, Elvis memorials, Willa Cather's fiction, and the annual prison rodeo held at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, this title considers spatial and ideological evolutions of southern plantations after slavery.

Southscapes: Geographies of Race, Region, and Literature

Lynch mobs in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century America exacted horrifying public torture and mutilation on their victims. Here, Amy Wood explains what it meant for white Americans to perform and witness these sadistic spectacles and how lynching played a role in establishing and affirming white supremacy.

Proposing a different way to map intersections of photography and American literature, this work demonstrates the importance of pinpointing specific cultural and subcultural history. It traces the visual and literary cultures of southern womanhood that have ordered the image of ""the South"".