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Precious soil, I say to myself, by what singular custom of laws is that thou wast made to constitute the riches of the freeholder? What should we American farmers be without the distinct possession of the soil? It feeds, it clothes us, from it we draw even a great exuberancy, our best meat, our richest drink, the very honey of our bees comes from this privileged spot. j. hector st. john de crèvecoeur, Letters of an American Farmer (1784) Trains afford us the best views of allotments, a secret landscape. . . .Allotments signal that you are now passing through the edgelands as emphatically as a sewage works or a power station. They thrive on the fringes, the in-between spaces; on land left over (or left behind) by the tides of building and industrial development, in pockets behind houses or factories, and in ribbons along the trackbeds of railways. . . . Seen from the train, they seem to hark back towards feudal, swineherd England, subsistence strips for the poor outside the pasture land and deer parks. They are gardens that make no secret of their physics and chemistry, blowsily revealing an infrastructure of water butts and pipework, all the ad hoc plastic groundsheets and carpet offcuts. They flaunt their functionality; the domestic garden with its hands dirty, busy and raddled with agriculture’s businesslike clutter. They don’t fit in. Minutes after leaving a central station, and the privatised shiny surfaces of the city, and there they lie, a cobbling together, like a refugee camp for those fleeing consumerism. paul farley and michael symmons roberts, Edgelands: Journeys into England’s True Wilderness (2011) In the pages that follow I would like to reflect a little on my monograph Savage Barbecue: Race, Culture, and the Invention of America’s First Food (2008). I would like to do this in order to offer some ideas about an area to which, I believe, the emerging discipline of southern food studies would do well to give deep thought over the coming years. Focusing on what I now CHAPTER 15 ▶ Edgeland Terroir Authenticity and Invention in New Southern Foodways Strategy andrew warnes 346 Andrew Warnes recognize to be a source of scholarly confusion reflected in Savage Barbecue, the following observations in particular concern the relationship between this emerging discipline and the neighboring fields of southern studies and postnationalist American studies. The area of confusion that I have in mind lies in the vague hinterland between two keywords—buzzwords, even—now familiar to us all. These buzzwords, authenticity and invention, really do crop up everywhere nowadays .Although its modern usage is sometimes traced to advertising,authenticity today just as often appears on commodities themselves, on the skin of the thing itself asserting the integrity of spice rubs and sauces, sunglasses and skateboards, record companies and sporting merchandise galore. And invention, if a little less ubiquitous, still gets plenty of airtime in commodity capitalism, and appeals most especially to the authors and editors working in the diverse and multifaceted world of history publishing; The Invention of America’s First Food, indeed.And yet, although already the subject of some academic debate, the sheer ubiquity of these buzzwords suggests that their relationship to each other requires still more attention. Quite how they re- flect on each other remains, for many of us, unclear. If true generally, moreover, this need grows all the more urgent when critical attention turns to the American South. On southern grounds, after all, ideas of authenticity and invention at once acquire added urgency and develop new character. In no other American region does quite so much kitsch or knowingly ersatz culture flourish in such close proximity with so many traditions that present themselves as time honored and anything but invented. But the blossoming, on the same southern grounds, of all manner of appeals to the “real” America and all manner of flagrantly invented Americana tends, I think, to place a particularly strong temptation before so-called southernists. The habit, widespread among English speakers, of treating authenticity and invention as mutually exclusive and almost as opposites of each other tends, I think, to encourage us to deal with the bewildering variety of southern culture by placing some of it into one and some into the other camp. Southernists, of course, are far from alone in this. For many different reasons, however, the opposition between authenticity and invention cuts especially deeply into their discourse, sometimes drawing up battle lines before discussions can...

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