Introduction: Why Native Southern Literatures Matter

This special issue seeks to provoke new conversations in a field that so far has tracked closely with southeastern geography, histories, and tribes. Most of the essays published by Native South since its 2008 debut have excavated new territories within the spaces traditionally dominated by settler academics, principles, and narratives about slavery, segregation, and their biracial legacies. These contributions have been fertile interventions, and our appreciation for the richly textured lives, cultures, politics, economies, and narratives of southeastern Indigenous peoples have been immeasurably enriched as a consequence. But as Native South—both the journal and the field it speaks to and for—enters its second decade, the editors seek both to complement and to complicate these projects. First and foremost, this issue turns attention to the still underappreciated literary and artistic productions of southeastern Native peoples, particularly contemporary narratives that, in various ways, reject the multiple and often conflicting conscriptions of history, space, place, identity, and belonging that adhere in haunted geographies like the South. Because such texts tend to be at once messy, volatile, experimental, speculative, revisionary, and recursive, they offer ideal vehicles for both asserting and interrogating the continued utility of the compound designator "Native South," a place and a space that matter deeply in ways both haunting and hopeful, traumatic and transcendent.