Future Souths, Speculative Souths, and Southern Potentialities

This is a moment for relentless forward gazing, an impulse already evident, for example, at two conferences in 2013: race in space, a gathering at Duke University, where Mae Jemison spoke about her project 100 Year Starship, and the meeting of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association, with the theme of making meaning in networked worlds. In several ways, the path that I want to propose for southern studies and particularly the study of southern literature is inflected by the conversations at these conferences. It is also informed by my tangential interest in speculative fictions—not necessarily of the literary variety—and by a desire to see more scholarship that goes beyond underscoring the tensions and anxieties of various Souths, scholarship attuned to the generative possibilities and (I, perhaps naively, suggest) the hopes that might emerge from the sites that we call Souths.