Changing Approaches, New Directions in Southern Studies

Southward, Ho! Changing Approaches, New Directions in Southern Studies BY DAVID MOLTKE-HANSEN This essay was first presented in 1997 at the meeting of the Southern Publishers Association in Charlottesville , Virginia. The editors invite you to respond electronically to the questions raised in this article via the Southern Cultures list. For information about participating in the list, see the inside back cover of this issue of Southern Cultures. Southern studies are at a critical juncture. Old interests and paradigms are losing their hold; new ones are emerging but have yet to dominate. Novel forms ofacademic communication and publication are multiplying. Never before have southernists had the intensity and number ofinteractions now proliferating on the Internet . As a result, the field is ripe for new investment, strategic innovation, and critical direction. The South is neither the place nor the subject it once was. Each year, on average , more than six hundred scholars in varied disciplines—graduate students, professors, curators, and historic-site interpreters—from forty states and a dozen countries join the hundreds of other researchers who mine the archives of the Southern Historical and Folklife Collections of the University ofNorth Carolina at Chapel Hill. Across the country, more than 2,000 other repositories of southern history make their resources available to researchers in southern studies. Research topics and approaches have changed dramatically over the past decade. Many ofthe history students now present themselves as doing new cultural rather than new social history, for instance, and many of their professors are reinventing themselves as new cultural historians. The South that was the nation's chief problem no longer looms large in the minds offoundation officers and federal officials. Increasingly, southerners know nothing about their Civil War ancestors. Even the passion for racial and economic reform ofthe 1960s and 1970s seems to have waned as an inspiration for scholarship . The old reasons to write about the South just aren't as compelling as they once were. Indeed, the South does not appear to have the unity as a subject that it previously had. In the last two decades, scholars who once looked largely at how southerners' assumptions about race, class, and gender shaped common world views and relations have shown the region to be a place ofdivisions as well as solidarities . Some scholars have even come to view the assertions of southern unity "7 as aggressive acts intended to impose hegemonic control The old reasonsover diverse peoples and cultures. , -, ; . ,/There are new reasons to be interested in the South, to write about the , „ „ , , , . . , however. Polls and, yes, psychological experiments show Southjust aren t as that southern identity continues to have meaningnot just . //·,/in terms of self-understanding but also in terms of becompellin ç as they ,. , . , c , & ..., , . . -?o ^y havior and attitudes. Southerners still act and think, as Once Were.well as define themselves, differentiy than do other Americans . Moreover, such intermediary geographic and cultural identities are becoming more, not less, important internationally , as the European Union, NAFTA, and other multinational arrangements reduce the relative significance of national borders. And when national borders are important, it is often, as in the case ofBosnia, because they are being bloodily redefined in terms ofcultural and ethnic identities. This international renaissance of interest in, and ongoing critical reappraisal of, regionalism has led the American Historical Association to join other learned societies in calling for the concerted, comparative study of regions. New programs at the University ofBonn, the Wirtschafts University ofVienna, and Chapel Hill have anticipated the call. Yet those trying to promote or build on such comparative and interdisciplinary work have significant problems to overcome—problems with which publishers , too, need to deal. Comparative and interdisciplinary study demands a good deal extra of the student. Too often, scholars do not know enough to do such work well. Even the scholars who have adequate backgrounds often know how to communicate with only two audiences: other specialists in their disciplines and, with luck, the students in their classrooms. Scholars within discrete disciplines bring particular assumptions to bear; have different habits, expectations, and codes of communication and conduct; and mean different things when talking, for instance, about community or historical, social, and personal agency. They find it difficult to...