Creating and Consuming the American South ed. by Martyn Bone, Brian Ward, and William A. Link (review)

Creating and Consuming the American South joins two other edited volumes—Creating Citizenship in the Nineteenth-Century South (Gainesville, Fla., 2013) and The American South and the Atlantic World (Gainesville, Fla., 2013)—growing out of a series of conferences devoted to new and interdisciplinary perspectives on the region. In his introduction to the present collection of thirteen essays, Martyn Bone observes that the New Southern Studies emphasis on the constructed nature of the U.S. South has, after over a decade of scholarship, become a truism. He announces that the current volume seeks to “move beyond” this notion to examine the relationship between the imagined and the real South—to investigate how ideas about the region have shaped the social and economic realm and vice versa (p. 16).

The book has a narrow chronological scope, with most of the essays focusing on the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Yet if temporally limited, the essays are broad-ranging in their methodology, bringing the insights of literary studies, queer studies, cinema studies, dramaturgy, musicology, ecocriticism, and other fields (only one essay is penned by a historian) to bear on the question at hand. The volume’s topical and theoretical diversity may prove frustrating to readers searching for larger, cohesive insights about the relationship between the idea of the South and its reality, but this very eclecticism is part of the point. After all, scholars of the New Southern Studies have resisted imposing unitary interpretations on the region and have sought to explode the very notion of “the South.”

The three essays in the book’s first section provide historical and theoretical overviews of creating and consuming the South. W. Fitzhugh Brundage traces the history of Americans’ fascination with the South’s presumed authenticity back to its roots in the early twentieth century, when folklorists and others saw in the South a heritage to romanticize. Scott Romine examines the commodity fetishism of “contemporary southern foodways” and finds that the commercial invention of a southern multicultural food tradition testifies to the lessening “social and historical force” of the South as an idea (p. 51). In an incisive critique of the volume’s focus, Jon Smith argues that continuing to analyze the U.S. South as an imagined place does not serve the field well. “We need to get beyond postmodernly identifying ‘the South’ as created and consumed,” he writes, “to actually setting aside the notion as a conceptual or identitarian tool” (p. 76).

The second section is composed of five methodologically and topically diverse case studies. E. Patrick Johnson uses oral histories to explore how black gay men have appropriated a range of southern spaces to form their own sense of place and selfhood. Michael P. Bibler reads Scott Elliott’s novel Coiled in the Heart (New York, 2003) to argue that literary critics’ preoccupation with symbolic renderings of the southern landscape tends to slight the actual problems currently facing the southern environment. Adam Gussow chronicles his own efforts to create and sell an upcountry Mississippi blues harmonica festival by tapping into the emergent “blues tourism” the state now cultivates (p. 140). Anne Dvinge argues that New Orleans’s Preservation Hall jazz transcends any division between tradition and tourism. And Helen Taylor explores that city’s post-Hurricane Katrina “global branding” of its arts and culture (p. 183).

The third section consists of five transnational examples of the book’s theme. Frank Cha examines Gulf South Vietnamese Americans’ efforts to rebuild their communities and their cities in the wake of Katrina. Paige A. McGinley reads Gertrude Stein’s 1934 opera Four Saints in Three Acts “through a global-southern lens” (p. 231). In doing so McGinley argues that the opera, while set in Spain, actually staged the U.S. South through a “logic of substitution” that McGinley terms “transitive blackness” (p. 230...