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⡘ 1 Introduction The Southern Imaginary Deborah E. Barker and Kathryn McKee All movies smell of a neighborhood and a season. —Walker Percy, The Moviegoer In Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, the movies tell people who they are and where they are: suspended in a South that is as much imagined and represented as it is concrete, as much created and performed as it is organic . The neighborhoods and the seasons Binx Bolling smells borrow their scents, at least in part, from the movies that have themselves shaped his expectations for ordinary, non-Hollywood space. In Ordering the Fa- çade: Photography and Contemporary Southern Women’s Writing, Katherine Henninger maintains that the U.S. South’s visual legacy is as strong as or stronger than its fabled oral tradition.1 Henninger’s argument focuses primarily on the South’s rich photographic history, but likewise in film the “South” takes on a variety of sometimes contradictory meanings that nonetheless converge to locate it as a primarily visual and visualized place that may shape all subsequent encounters of it for the moviegoer. Yet the last collection of essays devoted exclusively to the topic, The South in Film, was published in 1981.2 Since that time, crucial changes have occurred in both southern studies and film studies that call for a reevaluation and rethinking of what we mean when we talk about southern film. Capitalizing on innovations in media studies, southern cultural studies , and the global South, American Cinema and the Southern Imaginary is an exploration of the various ways in which the southern imaginary is constitutive of American cinema and of the ways in which the makers of movies—from Hollywood films to independents and documentaries, and from silent films to the latest technological innovations—have imagined the “South” both to construct and to unsettle national narratives.3 In bringing together the authors in this collection our purpose is to publish new essays that help to theorize and contextualize the evolving and expanding field of southern film. The essays included here complicate the 2 Deborah E. Barker & Kathryn McKee foundational term “southern,” in some places literally stretching the traditional boundaries of regional identification until they all but disappear, while in others limning a persistent and sometimes self-conscious performance of place that only intensifies its power. The authors in this collection , then, contribute to what Houston Baker and Dana Nelson first called the “new Southern Studies” by “construct[ing] and survey[ing] a new scholarly map of ‘The South’” as it pertains to cinematic representations of the region and the decided sway they hold over the national and international imaginary.4 The collection is not, however, an attempt to define what makes a film southern or to categorize the southern as a genre comparable to the Western (a filmic type that represents region to the nation and uses it as emblematic of particularly American qualities, such as the wide-open sky of limitless individualism).5 By invoking in our title the southern imaginary and its relation to American cinema, we do not mean to suggest that we have access to a real, historically knowable South or an authentic southernness that has somehow been corrupted or romanticized by Hollywood. The southern imaginary (and the cultural work it performs) is not contained by the boundaries of geography and genre; it is not an offshoot or subgenre of mainstream American film but is integral to the history and the development of American cinema. Therefore, we use the term “southern imaginary” precisely because of its evocative, overdetermined , and contradictory impulses and its many critical and theoretical resonances. For the purposes of this essay collection, we can think of the southern imaginary as an amorphous and sometimes conflicting collection of images, ideas, attitudes, practices, linguistic accents, histories, and fantasies about a shifting geographic region and time. Some of the essays in this volume mine the southern imaginary in places traditionally associated with the geographic or literary South, but others examine inflections of the southern imaginary that emerge in far less likely places. An expanded concept of the southern imaginary is necessary because never more so than today has the South failed to call forth a set of stable defining features. The site of dramatic demographic shifts, transnational industry, and fissured red state power, the South has, if anything, become a more complicated and necessary idea to examine in assembling national, hemispheric, and global narratives of power and identity. U.S. southern studies...

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