In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

PREFACE Spirit and a New Southern Studies The chapters in this book have all been previously published but in a diverse array of publications. Four of them were originally prepared for international southern studies conferences, and four more began at annual professional associations and symposia. All of those were published in volumes of essays or in journals; the remaining chapters also first appeared in journals or in collections of essays. The introduction and afterword appear for the first time here. The essays reflect a common interest in the interdisciplinary study of the American South, with a special focus on cultural history. They reflect my graduate training in American history and American studies, and they draw from my later work in the southern studies curriculum at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi. As editor of the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture and The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, I became interested in a variety of theories, methodologies , genres, and perspectives; in these chapters I cite evidence from the South’s writers, musicians, folk artists, politicians, preachers, and policy makers, among others. The southern studies program at the University of Mississippi focuses typically on text and context, and this volume reflects those concerns, broadly understood. Most of the essays in this volume deal with the period from the post–Civil War era into modern times. One special concern throughout is the South’s regional identity, and the essays in part 1 trace a rough development of that from the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth. A second special concern is how religion in the South has affected regional identity and cultural expression. The particular focus of this volume is on manifestations of “spirit” in the South, which include southern patriotic spirit, southern prophecy, and religious ecstasy. I argue that “southern spirit” is both constructed and performed, and the volume encourages further consideration of spirit as a dimension of a new southern studies. In 2001, Houston Baker Jr. and Dana D. Nelson called for “a new Southern studies, an emerging collective already producing a robust x Preface body of work in current American studies scholarship,” and since then a variety of publications and conferences have contributed to efforts to extend the long-standing scholarly interest in the interdisciplinary study of the U.S. South. Baker and Nelson suggested that a new southern studies should “reconfigure our familiar notions of Good (or desperately bad) Old Southern White Men telling stories on the porch, protecting white women, and being friends to the Negro.” Indeed, nothing has been more fundamental to “re-visioning” the study of the South than the inclusion of blacks and women as formative figures in the southern cultural imagination . Baker and Nelson called the emerging new approaches to the South at the turn of the twenty-first century a “paradigm shift,” with the potential to complicate “old borders and terrains” and “to construct and survey a new scholarly map of ‘the South.’” They identified religion as a possible topic for a new southern studies when they used the term “thick” to describe “not only the heaviness of summer atmospherics” but also the “viscous dynamics of every day labor, politics, and religion that characterize life in the deep South.”1 Nonetheless, they did not explore matters of the spirit in their essay, nor did they include an article on religion in the special issue of American Literature that launched the explicit discussion of a new southern studies. Literary critic Michael Kreyling responded to the Baker and Nelson essay with an analysis of works that might contribute to the reimagining of southern studies, also using the term “paradigm shift” and noting that the study of “southern literature” had evolved into “southern studies.” He saw this field struggling to absorb several “new discourses,” especially memory studies and interest in globalization. He concluded that a new southern studies “surrenders its traditional claim to regional and historical distinctiveness, finds a common language in public debates over globalization of identities, and takes its chances in the dangerous, new, postmodern world where construction replaces essence.” However, Kreyling, too, failed to raise religion as an analytical category to explore in a new southern studies.2 Another early seminal text in the reinvigorated interdisciplinary study of the South was Kathryn McKee and Annette Trefzer’s special 2006 issue of American Literature, “Global Contexts, Local Literatures: The New Southern Studies.” They brought great clarity to the scholarly [3.138.174...

Share