Scales

This chapter rethinks scales as an opportunity for sustainability studies to engage with decolonial strategies that stand against the confinement of Southern studies as local knowledge, compared to the Western knowledge that is seen as universal. Examples of plurinational ‘scale-jumping’ in Ecuador and kinship networks in Northeast Madagascar redefine the ordering of scales to redress complicated histories of ecological and social colonization.

Introduction

The introduction contextualizes the current state of whiteness studies and southern literary studies and argues that considering these lines of criticism alongside one another results in a more complete understanding of the underlying assumptions that have been made about poor whites and those deemed 'white trash.' In addition to analysing the history of the term, the introduction considers recent developments in southern studies scholarship, especially ways in which scholars have sought to expand recent definitions of the term “South.” The chapter also discusses the history of whiteness studies and argues that increased attention to the attitudes that middle- and upper-class whites have had toward poor whites is a fruitful line of scholarship. Finally, the introduction provides an early focus on the works of Erskine Caldwell and Flannery O'Connor as representative authors who complicate ideas that whiteness is homogeneous and universal.

Maimed Souls

The conclusion gestures toward hope for the future of studies regarding poor whites and white trash, noting that work remains to be done, especially in the way that mental or physical disability is often presented as a form of inferior whiteness. Flannery O'Connor's work, for example, gestures toward the importance of these issues. In the closing pages, the conclusion also expresses hope that new avenues of southern literature, such as the rise of Asian American authors writing about the South, receives increased attention. Finally, the conclusion considers the 2016 election and the attention paid to the rural and urban divide and its relationship to how contemporary discourse considers poor whites as a racial other. It closes by noting that the idea that prejudice against poor whites is strictly a southern phenomenon has been complicated in recent years, and that both southern studies and whiteness studies are continually evolving fields of inquiry.

Trans Manhood: The Intersections of Masculinities, Queerness, and the South

Using qualitative interviews with trans men across the Southeastern United States, this article examines how regional constructions of masculinities and manhood shape how trans men understand and do gender in this region of the country. This analysis is situated at the intersections of three areas of study—southern studies, masculinities studies, and trans studies—and demonstrates how trans masculinities in the South broaden the conversations occurring in each. The key finding in this study is that trans men, despite not being assigned male-bodied at birth and despite not being socialized as boys/men through childhood, understand and do masculinities and manhood in similar ways to their southern cis counterparts. Through three primary mechanisms, southern trans men uphold southern gender ideology and performances of masculinities. These mechanisms include (a) understanding gender as binary and essential; (b) performing stereotypical versions of southern manhood; and, (c) maintaining mastery, honor, and independence.

Southern Studies as Area Studies: Faulkner and Provincial Nationalism during the Cold War

This chapter considers William Faulkner’s role as a literary giant and cultural ambassador during the Cold War and how his canonization into both American and southern literature reveals the usefulness of southern identity and values to the diplomatic ambitions of America on the world stage. His canonization help establish connections between area studies, American studies, and southern studies. This role is explored through close reading of Intruder in the Dust (1948), and Faulkner’s prominence in Louis D. Rubin, Jr. and Robert Jacob’s Southern Renascence (1953), the first published collection of scholarship on southern literature. Both cast the racial problems in the South as moral ones that can be solved by an exceptional culture of honor and tradition, which in turn bolsters American democratic values and dismisses race as a serious social and political problem at a moment when the country attempts to exert hegemonic influence on the world stage.

Faulkner and the Native South

With the rise of new scholarly paradigms in the study of Native American histories and cultures, and the emergence of the Native South as a key concept in US southern studies, the time is more than ripe for a critical reassessment of Native sites, characters, communities, customs, narratives, ways of knowing, and other indigenous elements in the writings of William Faulkner—and of Faulkner’s significance for Native American writers, artists, and intellectuals. From new insights into the Chickasaw sources and far-reaching implications of Faulkner’s fictional place-name “Yoknapatawpha,” to discussions that reveal the potential for indigenous land-, family-, and story-based worldviews to deepen understanding of Faulkner’s fiction (including but not limited to the novels and stories he devoted explicitly to Indian topics), the eleven essays of this volume take the critical analysis of Faulkner’s Native South and the Native South’s Faulkner beyond no-longer generative assessments of the historical accuracy of his Native representations or the colonial hybridity of his Indian characters, turning instead to indigenous intellectual culture for new models, problems, and questions to bring to Faulkner studies. Along the way, readers are treated to illuminating comparisons between Faulkner’s writings and the work of a number of Native American authors, filmmakers, tribal leaders, and historical figures. Faulkner and the Native South brings together Native and non-Native scholars in a stimulating and often surprising critical dialogue about the indigenous wellsprings of Faulkner’s creative energies and about Faulkner’s own complicated presence in Native American literary history.

Native Southern Transformations, or, Light in August and Werewolves

In the world of Light in August, a cotton warehouse tank can look like the torso of a beheaded mastodon and an elderly couple "might have been two muskoxen strayed from the north pole, or two homeless and belated beasts from beyond the glacial period." Here and elsewhere in the novel, Faulkner's reach transforms characters and environs. While none of the major characters is native to Jefferson, let alone Indigenous, some are astonishingly non-native and most if not all become more non-native and more homeless as the novel unfolds. With these and other unsettlements in mind, the chapter places Light in August alongside Mongrels, a native southern werewolf novel by Blackfeet writer Stephen Graham Jones. Tracking the monsters and the mongrel transformations in both novels, the chapter presents and argument for the transformative methodological value of native southern studies.

Southern Religion, Southern Culture

Over more than three decades of teaching at the University of Mississippi, Charles Reagan Wilson's research and writing transformed southern studies in key ways. This book pays tribute to, and extends, Wilson's seminal work on southern religion and culture. Using certain episodes and moments in southern religious history, the chapters examine the place and power of religion in southern communities and society. It emulates Wilson's model, featuring both majority and minority voices from archives and applying a variety of methods to explain the South's religious diversity and how religion mattered in many arenas of private and public life, often with life-or-death stakes. The book first concentrates on churches and ministers, and then considers religious and cultural constructions outside formal religious bodies and institutions. It examines the faiths expressed via the region's fields, streets, homes, public squares, recreational venues, roadsides, and stages. In doing so, the book shows that Wilson's groundbreaking work on religion is an essential part of southern studies and crucial for fostering deeper understanding of the South's complicated history and culture.

Introduction

The introduction situates the literary movement of Southern lesbian feminism within Southern Studies, histories of feminism and lesbian feminist, and queer studies, and suggests that the archive of Southern lesbian feminism revises and challenges each scholarly speciality.