Reimagining the Southern Imaginary

Despite invoking those old southern staples of monumentalism and place, one could properly call co-editors Deborah Barker and Kathyrn McKee's collection of essays a "landmark" study. Of course there have been many essays and book chapters on southern films strewn through journals and anthologies over the past decade. There have also been single-authored books on the topic, such as Alison Graham's Framing the South (2001), and books that intermix film analyses with other media, such as Tara McPherson's Reconstructing Dixie (2003). But American Cinema and the Southern Imaginary marks the first significant essay compilation on the subject since Warren G. French's The South in Film (1981) and Edward D. C. Campbell's The Celluloid South (1981), both of which are now long in the tooth. Barker and McKee's collection recalibrates understandings of visual culture within and across traditional delineations of the region. It does so by incorporating the cultural-historicist bent and critiques of regional exceptionalism associated with the New Southern Studies, in combination with the theoretical acumen of new media studies. The multi-authored format is ideal for capturing something of the sheer multiplicity of filmic visions of the South. This enables an impressive historical and generic range (silent to contemporary eras, studio system to indies, documentaries to exploitation films, chick flicks to vamp shows, etc.), cross-hatching matters of economics, ethnicity, and sexuality with the cinematic atmospherics of various southernnesses. The volume contains fourteen essays that address more than thirty movies classed as "southern film," though one of its central concerns is to reassess questions of regional and genre definition—what is meant by "southern," even what is meant by "film" as such.

As Barker and McKee put it in their capable "Introduction: The Southern Imaginary," after the "postsouthern" and New Southern Studies (NSS) watersheds, critical cathexis on an essentialist and/or exceptionalist southern identity has yielded to the idea of a South that is "as much imagined and represented as it is concrete, as much created and performed as it is organic." That redoubled "as much" is a serious, if by now familiar, load-bearing wall. Current scholarship has devoted much time to treading the Möbius strip of the region's relative "realness," spinning back-and-forth the paradox between the conceptual and the experiential, the lived and the imaged. But the balanced Introduction and nuanced essays give this knotty matter a riveting turn of the screw. The editors rightly credit Michael Kreyling for picking the lock of traditional southernism, opening transit from "postsouthern" (parodic pantomine of received forms, the past as pastiche) to "transouthern"/"global South" (the transnational dimensions of the region, what James Peacock calls "grounded globalism," something well-nigh visualized in the global media of film trafficking in the South). This genealogy—one opposed by Jon Smith, who has tried to distance the achievements of the "post-southern" line—has been supported through elaborations by Thomas F. Haddox, Martyn Bone, and Scott Romine that limn the line from "PoSo" to "TranSo" and "GloSo," as well as Jay Watson's contribution to this anthology, "Mapping out a Postsouthern Cinema."

If the volume's title strikes a monolithic tone, we learn from the Introduction and the essays that the cinematic South is not double, but multiple. The finely layered chapters, however, press beyond touting multiplicity itself as endgame; the exponential representations of southernness are given, if not "true" depth, the powerful illusion of same—not unlike the cinematic medium's play in the interstices of made image and the impression of depth projected onscreen. Through recourse to variegated historical contexts that infuse and are infused by the films under study, the essays underscore cinema as a symbolic, transparent medium that nevertheless carries "the stain of the real...