Keywords for Southern Studies ed. by Scott Romine and Jennifer Rae Greeson (review)

Ever since Raymond Carver published his collection of short stories, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (New York, 1981), the formulation has been well used. From Nathan Englander's homage to Carver in What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank (New York, 2011) to New Yorker parodies—such as Michael Gerber and Jonathan Schwartz's "What We Talk About When We Talk About Doughnuts" (May 10, 1999)—the conceit is now so commonplace, so well-worn, that it has perhaps lost its usefulness. (The September 17, 2015, Huffington Post article, "What We Talk About When We Talk About Hepatitis C," may have been the tipping point.) The thirty short essays that make up Keywords for Southern Studies, edited by Scott Romine and Jennifer Rae Greeson, suggest otherwise. In fact, Thomas F. Haddox employs the phrase in his essay on literature. Whether or not the contributors fall back on this wording—and most do not—the premise nonetheless undergirds much of the work presented here. What we talk about when we talk about segregation, then, or the Native South, or labor, or the black Atlantic, or indeed a whole host of other terms crucial for understanding the American South varies depending on time, place, disciplinary training, who is doing the talking, and who is doing the listening.

The collection effectively and persuasively makes clear that there is nothing fixed or stable about the South. The field of southern studies is similarly unbounded. As the editors of this volume note, southern studies "is remaking itself" (p. 1). How then to pin down something that is constantly in flux? One does not try to do so, of course, for the attempt would be not only foolish, but also quite possibly pernicious. The consequences of limiting, defining, or imagining a fixed way of approaching a field of inquiry are, after all, real. The essays in Keywords for Southern Studies each point out the binds we have written ourselves into when we essentialize. Whatever southern studies is, then, the editors write, "it is mimed by the form of this volume, which does not presume to present a canon, a comprehensive account, or a curated catalog that demarcates the contours of a stable, shared field" (p. 1). Instead, the volume makes available "an idiosyncratic collection of essays on keywords" that its contributors deem "critical for the project of southern studies" (p. 1). The result, the editors readily concede, is a collection that is "contingent and fragmentary, but capacious enough to hold side by side various disciplinary and theoretical approaches, generational affinities, and intellectual perspectives on an arena of inquiry whose boundaries are constantly being renegotiated" (p. 1).

Matthew Pratt Guterl's essay, "Plantation," serves as a useful example. He opens with a reasonable, if accusatory, assumption: "we usually imagine that a plantation is a uniquely southern thing: a big antiquated farm, set in the land of moonlight and magnolias, peopled by large numbers of poor, dark-skinned workers, and presided over by a small white minority" (p. 22). What's more, he continues, "We understand this representation of the plantation to be fixed in time, as an expression of the slaveholding South, from the settlement of the colonies until the Civil War's conclusion" (p. 22). That the word plantation conjures up this image—at once nostalgic and comfortable because the slaveholding plantation, along with its unsavory political implications, was destroyed by war—is itself an argument that has had legs since Lost Cause mythologizers evoked it during the late nineteenth century. A rich vein of scholarship tells us something else altogether, as Guterl makes clear, but a vibrant tourist industry counts on our discounting the plantation complex's "bone-breaking, race-making past" (p. 29). What we talk about when we talk about plantations matters profoundly...