Plenary Paper Discussant Commentary 2

A treatise that begins with the statement I am not a fan of country music, but I am a radio flipper, certainly gets my attention. Like the author, I am also not a big fan of country music (except for Dolly and Reba, who doesn’t love them)? Music reviews aside, Winders’ invocation of how country music lyrics illustrate competing nodes of diffusion that work to question geographical imaginations of southern ‘authenticity’ is truly fascinating.

When it comes to the material and social changes in the southern landscape over the years, I have some firsthand experience. While attending graduate school at Florida State in Tallahassee, then getting my first teaching job at Georgia Southern University in Statesboro, I would occasionally take long drives into the rural countryside, stopping along the way to stroll through the many small towns that dot the landscape. At least to this non-southerner, southern rural culture initially appeared permanently fixed in both time and space. In subsequent years, however, I began to notice some changes in these cultural nodes of rural southern life. The Baptist churches in these small towns, still very much iconographic symbols of African- American and white vernacular southern culture, began sharing religious space with a Catholic church, built to accommodate the large numbers of Hispanic migrant laborers who work the farm fields. Signs that advertised we speak Spanish began appearing in the windows of the mom and pop stores along Main Street. Mexican restaurants suddenly appeared where the local country diners once stood. So in a rural context, I most certainly agree with Winders’ thesis of the changing nature of material, social and cultural spaces in the south.

I was pleased to see Winders incorporate Doreen Massey and David Harvey’s theoretical lens of time-space compression into her narrative on ‘re-placing’ southern geographies. This is a fitting juxtaposition, where global capitalism has shrunk both space and time, and where old attachments to place and identity (in this case southern place and identity), are thrown into a maelstrom of multiple meanings. Her discussion of southern urban/rural dualities and those liminal spaces in between are particularly relevant here, as she correctly calls into question the false assertion of a ‘southern culture’. There are many different place-specific contingencies that give rise to the south’s geographical imagination, particularly when placed against a backdrop of racialized constructions of identity. Extending the discussion further, Winders’ invokes the extra-scalar implications of competing southern identities from the scale of the body, and the implications of otherness that goes along with bodily attributions, such as the ‘in-betweenness’ of black and white skin (i.e., brown). Indeed, Winders’ statement that “the southern voice has never been a solo act” has never been more real than today. I might disagree, however, with Winders’ statement that African-American southerners tend to “dis-identify” with the South. The well documented migration back to the south of those children and grandchildren of African Americans who fled north in the early part of the 20^th Century has allowed millions to reclaim their own southern heritage. This mass migratory movement, I believe, has major implications for contributing to the ‘re-placing’ of Southern identity.

There simply is no American style historical memory for newly arrived Latino immigrants as there is for generations of white and African American southern born Americans, where the mythos of the American South embeds itself as a racial project, playing off of 300 years of struggle and rebirth. I wholeheartedly agree with Winder’s assessment about the need for further inquiry into Latino migration and its regional and national impacts on identity, along with her call to be more proactive into these inquiries. As well, the interdisciplinary nature of this subject is undeniably of great value to scholarly work in geography. Last but not least, Winders’ makes a call for GIS to be incorporated into these qualitative methodological frameworks. Indeed, there are numerous non-profit organizations and institutes in the rural south that are just now beginning to see GIS as a valuable resource, and they are using it from a variety of social and...