Regionalisms Now
The fifth chapter of The Center of the World: Regional Writing and the Puzzles of Place-Time is titled “Regionalisms Now.” It mobilizes the analytic categories developed in previous chapters in an examination of place-focused cultural production in several media. Examples are drawn from television, popular romance and mystery novels, and literary fiction. These works are not treated as embodiments of an ideal genre or lineal descendants of local color; the argument is that the concept of region remains relevant for contemporary culture and that narrations of place continue to project temporality. The chapter offers extended readings of the authors Ernest Hebert and Wendell Berry, and posits the parable of the global village as an emerging genre.