The Bohemian South: Creating Countercultures, from Poe to Punk eds. by Shawn Chandler Bingham and Lindsey A. Freeman (review)

Hipsters read Garden and Gun magazine; bohemians read the Oxford American. Those likely to debate the previous statement will find much to enjoy in The Bohemian South: Creating Countercultures, from Poe to Punk. In this entertaining and insightful collection of essays, editors Shawn Chandler Bingham and Lindsey A. Freeman provide a tour of an alternative South that ranges widely over the region. The editors' decision to cover such a broad swath of southern cultural life has resulted in a highly readable volume but one that suffers from organizational problems.

The Bohemian South contains sixteen entries, plus an introductory essay and an afterword by the editors. The contributors hail from a range of disciplines, including sociology, English, history, and environmental studies, among others. The editors have organized the essays in chronological order, a decision that diminishes the volume's overall impact. In her afterword, Freeman explains that the process of historicizing this study of bohemianism proved important to understanding its role in contemporary southern life, but the decision to loosely order the essays chronologically instead of thematically hinders the reader's ability to easily grasp the major intellectual currents of bohemianism in today's South.

This is a minor criticism of a collection of essays that is consistently informative, often intellectually adventurous, and, in more than a few cases, just plain fun to read. The selections that explore the role of bohemianism in the development of postindustrial southern cities prove particularly insightful. Richard Florida's theory of the creative class and how it has affected the recent life of southern cities acts a unifying element for chapters on Memphis, Tennessee, Austin, Texas, and North Carolina's Research Triangle. In the case of Austin, Joshua Long shows how the city's placement atop Florida's "'Creativity Index'" both helped and hurt the city (p. 295). Tech companies and entrepreneurs moved into the city in droves, but in remaking Austin, they often replaced the city's authentic bohemianism with one that commercialized what was cool in an effort to make it more easily consumable. In the case of Memphis, Zandria F. Robinson explores the weaknesses in Florida's conceptual model, particularly how its "prevailing assumption of whiteness and maleness … obscured race and gender disparities in creative labor, compensation, and consumption" (p. 227). These issues appear central to reimagining southern cities, where race is often the primary consideration for leaders aiming to reshape urban landscapes.

A second set of essays focuses on southern music, including Grace Elizabeth Hale's discussion of the importance of the Athens, Georgia, music scene (birthplace of R.E.M.) to the creation of a southern bohemian diaspora and Daniel S. Margolies's engaging exposé of several musicians from the region's "trainhopping" subculture (p. 212). This essay in particular reveals the difficulty in trying to come to terms with the meaning of bohemian both as a lifestyle and as a category of cultural analysis. While one musician clearly fits the bill, choosing to live in a small hand-built home on the side of a North Carolina mountain, the musician approaches bohemian identity with caution. Another musician goes further, openly rejecting lifestyle labeling and choosing instead to simply see her life as one that exists outside the mainstream.

The largest and most diverse group of essays focuses on southern writing. Bingham offers an engaging comparative study of Garden and Gun and the Oxford American (both of which currently reside on this reviewer's coffee table). Despite perceiving differences in target audiences based on each magazine's appearance and content, Bingham argues that both provide a place for southerners to experiment with notions of regional identity as well as to "tinker with some of the same myths of the one-dimensional South: that it is the land...