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⡘ 219 Mapping out a Postsouthern Cinema Three Contemporary Films Jay Watson In Inventing Southern Literature, critic Michael Kreyling credits his predecessor Lewis P. Simpson with coining the concept of the “postsouthern .”1 Simpson unveils the term in an essay from his 1980 collection, The Brazen Face of History, that traces a crucial shift in regional literary sensibility from the so-called Southern Renascence of the 1930s and 1940s— whose modernist quest for “a vision of social order at once strongly sacramental and sternly moralistic” was, according to Simpson, complicated and ironized by the contingencies, displacements, and “mystery” of the southern past—to a postwar stance marked by increasing skepticism toward the legitimacy of such grand, stabilizing concepts as myth, community , nature, and history.2 “The Southern Renascence will not come again,” Simpson proclaims, because southern artists could no longer balance regional myth against regional history in credible, mutually illuminating ways.3 Translating Simpson’s argument into the language of a contemporary, theory-influenced generation of literary critics, Kreyling cites the work of Umberto Eco, Linda Hutcheon, and Fredric Jameson to suggest that a postsouthern intellectual landscape is one that has come “to question the natural authority of the foundation term: Southern,” a term that “has been used so much, been invested with so much meaning, that we can no longer distinguish between what if anything is inherent” in regional identity or culture “and what other interests have attached over time.”4 A postsouthern South is thus one that appears to rest on no “real” or reliable foundation of cultural, social, political, economic, or historical distinctiveness, only on an ever-proliferating series of representations and commodifications of “southernness.” So “multivalent” has that term become, writes Kreyling, that it may seem to have “no core.”5 More recently, Scott Romine has embraced this position in his study The Real South, which locates southernness in the ongoing process 220 Jay Watson of constructing and negotiating a regional imaginary rather than in the specific contents or referents of any particular instance of that process.6 In this way the postsouthern is gaining a foothold in southern literary studies, and it is crossing over into other disciplines as well.7 But the concept has been slow to make its way into the burgeoning field of southern film studies. I want to begin to remedy that deficiency here by examining a pair of 1991 films that are set in the contemporary South: Slacker, directed by Richard Linklater and shot in and around Austin, Texas, and Mississippi Masala, directed by Mira Nair and shot primarily in and around Greenwood, Mississippi. Though these films have attracted a signi ficant amount of scholarly attention, virtually none of that scholarship draws on southern problems and paradigms, let alone postsouthern ones, as the basis of analysis or critique.8 Nair’s film, for instance, is at the center of a contentious debate about the nature and authenticity of South Asian identity and agency in a diasporic context, while Slacker is most often discussed as a portrait of disaffected American youth in an era whose spiraling consumerism is complicated by downward mobility among the middle and working classes.9 As I hope to demonstrate here, however, the two films also offer provocative deconstructions and recon- figurations of regional identities, themes, and signifiers, reworkings that it is appropriate and productive to view as postsouthern. They do this, moreover, in significantly different ways. Slacker gets at the postsouthern by way of the postmodern, drawing on a range of effects and motifs now closely associated with what Jameson has christened the “cultural logic of late capitalism,” but also taking these techniques and themes South to a new place, as it were.10 Mississippi Masala, on the other hand, gets at the postsouthern by way of the postcolonial, and in doing so, Nair’s ambitious film takes Simpson’s and Kreyling’s concept in new directions that neither critic seems to have anticipated. Before turning to these works, however, I want to open with a brief look at a third film, which on its release in 1981 stirred my first vague (and decidedly nonscholarly) inklings of something like a postsouthern sensibility or ambience at work in the South of my youth. That film, which hints at the postsouthern without embracing it, is Sharky’s Machine , directed by and starring Burt Reynolds. “You’re from out of state”: Sharky’s Machine Sharky’s Machine (1981) is no cinematic masterpiece, but it...

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