WHATEVER "DOING" SOUTHERN LITERARY STUDIES IN THE TWENTY-FIRST century means, <i>The Oxford Handbook of the Literature of the U.S. South</i> exemplifies it, both in terms of its wild successes and its warty contradictions. The <i>Handbook</i> is a massive text, coming in at 563 pages with twenty-seven individually-authored chapters, a wide-ranging project edited by Fred Hobson and Barbara Ladd. The lineup of participants is impressive, and the volume's usefulness to readers at all stages of academic life is immediately apparent. From its careful designation of itself as about the "U.S. South," this volume situates its subject simultaneously within the nation and against a transnational backdrop, rendering "south" anything but a stable directional marker.

The <i>Handbook</i> is not, of course, the first to do so. Southern studies has been experiencing an identity crisis for some time now, caught between a scholarly certainty that "the South" has long been a harmful construction and a conviction that tracking its power across postcolonial landscapes yields new insight into configurations of space and place in the nation, throughout the hemisphere, and across the globe. Stir in an affective attachment to all of the elements of "southernness" that continue to resonate with popular audiences, and you can see how Scott Romine concludes in his essay that just because "southern identity doesn't make sense doesn't mean that it doesn't make meaning" (171). Of the scholarly pursuit of that meaning, Michael Kreyling observes some chapters later: "it is difficult to imagine any age as intent ... upon reinventing itself as the present in southern studies. We are stretched between the accomplishments of our predecessors, and the imperative <i>not</i> to repeat them" (414).

The volume's introduction does not, however, enumerate those "accomplishments," instead concentrating on recent paradigm shifts in the field. Southern literary scholarship has moved from what the editors characterize as a relative confidence in the boundaries of "the South" and definitions of a "southerner" to a fluidity that shades once glibly applied terms, including "place" and "identity," with suspicion. Long associated with a conservative mind-set of shared whiteness and privilege, the study of southern literature and culture has recently become "one of the most exciting projects in American literary studies" (2) because "Today we no longer study southern literature but southern literatures, no longer southern culture but southern cultures, indeed, no longer the South but many Souths" (9). As opposed to the bid for exceptionality characterizing so much of the twentieth century, Hobson and Ladd assert that "literary nationalism ... is now profoundly problematized" (13); as a result, regionalism is both fractured and foundational to a productive tension between the local and the global. Thus the <i>Handbook</i> throws open the doors to the messy imprecision of studying any designated "place" in the twenty-first century.

That is not to say that the volume is disorganized. Structurally it resorts to the most common apparatus for a comprehensive study: a historical chronology in four parts that begins with "Contact to the Civil War," and proceeds through "The Civil War and Beyond," "Southern Modernisms," and "After Southern Modernisms: Writing in the Late-Twentieth-Century and Contemporary South." Readers can examine the table of contents for themselves. I have classified the essays by the strategies authors use to, in Romine's terms, "approach a monolithic South in which we no longer believe" (169), because doing so reveals not only <i>what</i> we study in southern studies today, but also <i>how</i> we do our work.

For example, many entries turn to the skills we have all honed professionally: that is, they carefully examine texts, and where those texts land in some broader discussion of southernness is unresolved. This approach in no way diminishes their usefulness; in fact, a textual focus means these contributions may have the most immediate impact on syllabi. Three essays, for instance, have the potential to ground the intersection of sexuality studies with region. In his wide-ranging "Masculine Sentiment, Racial Fetishism, and Same-Sex Desire in Antebellum Southern Literature," Michael P. Bibler draws from the work of eight authors to suggest that "male homoeroticism was clearly permissible--even expected--in the slaveholding South" (140), viewed as "central, not oppositional, to the construction of masculine intimacy during this time" (153). Gary Richards's essay, likewise concerned with sexuality, limns the consequences of locating Tennessee Williams at the center of southern sexuality studies, and, what's more, of concentrating on a narrow range of his plays, to the neglect of others and of his fiction. Katherine Henninger's "Southern Religion's Sexual Charge and the National Imagination" is an expertly historicized piece also concerned with sexuality in the South, but expressly as it intersects with the Southern Baptist backdrops to Randall Kenan's <i>A Visitation of Spirits</i> and Dorothy Allison's <i>Bastard Out of Carolina</i>. Particularly provocative is the dual meaning of "charge" from her title: charge as indictment but also as electrification, allowing Henninger to play with that doubleness in paradoxical representations of the South over time.

Two very fine essays about poetry make readily apparent the genre's fundamental connection to local specificities. Relying primarily on close reading, John Lang, in "Nature and Spirituality in Contemporary Appalachian Poetry," finds Fred Chappell, Robert Morgan, Charles Wright, Kathryn Stripling Byer, and Lynn Powell all encountering the natural world as the locus of what can be known about the divine or as the site of immersion that can replace it. Those encounters, however, are neither nostalgic nor purely linguistic but often quite material and sometimes intimately connected to the human body. Daniel Cross Turner stakes out his own terrain in "Made Things: Structuring Modernity in Southern Poetry": built environments and transregional spaces, organized within the essay under the headings of "The City," "The Factory," and "The Suburbs." He reads Brenda Marie Osbey's post-Katrina New Orleans, Ron Rash's Carolina mills, Allison Hedge Coke's agribusiness, and Charles Wright's suburbs and yardscapes, and concludes with Dan Albergotti's suggestion that the physical world always infuses the human one to degrees that exceed our overconfident sense of dominion.

Other contributions more definitively situate texts against their historical and cultural backdrops, sometimes destabilizing the very idea of narrative in the process. Eric Gary Anderson's assertion that Europeans enter a world "already richly textualized" (21) unsettles all hasty definitions of literacy, and his brilliant reading of John Lawson's 1709 <i>A New Voyage to Carolina</i> as a document that opens spaces for readers to hear "cross-talk" (22) between colonizer and colonized offers support for his conclusion that intertextuality continues to mark Native American expression "as both a metaphor and as a strategy" (26). Professor of Spanish Ruth Hill, in "Before Hypodescent: Whitening Equations in South America and the American South," quickly dispenses with easy assertions about the "one-drop" rule, instead tracing a long history of legal and social negotiations that acknowledged the realities of racial hybridity as they played out across the Americas. In "The Long Shadow of Torture in the American South," historian W. Fitzhugh Brundage uses the 1834 fire at the Lalaurie mansion in New Orleans to suggest that there <i>were</i> limits to the abuses of enslaved bodies that even white southerners would tolerate--when publicly revealed. He points to the horrific events practiced on this site to mark a shift among antislavery advocates from a condemnation of the institution to a focus on affective responses to individual pain, a key turning point in stoking northeastern outrage and putting the South on the defensive against claims that slavery maddened white practitioners, even as it destroyed black bodies and lives.

Individual texts linked to the now capaciously defined period of "Reconstruction" reconfigure our understanding of the period as one in which literature not only reflects contemporary political situations but also intervenes in them. John W. Lowe, in "Not-So-Still Waters: Travelers to Florida and the Tropical Sublime," reads a series of travel narratives that establish the exotic allure of that South. Anthony Wilson pairs Charles Chesnutt's <i>The Marrow of Tradition</i> (1901) and Thomas Dixon's <i>The Leopard's Spots</i> (1902) as counternarratives of the 1898 Wilmington massacre, even though Dixon almost scrupulously avoids mention of the event; in fact, it is his silence, and his emphasis on silencing, that anchors Wilson's argument. Stephen Knadler approaches Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's <i>Iola Leroy,</i> as well as her "Fancy Sketches" for the <i>Christian Recorder</i>, through what he terms "affective surrogation" (242), a shift from "journalistic realism to pedagogy of optimism" (241) in an effort to elevate emancipation's promises over slavery's horrors.

Essays featuring more recent literature also concentrate on the relation of text to context. James W. Coleman, in "Reimagining the South of Richard Wright," hones in on works by Albert Murray, Raymond Andrews, and Ernest Gaines in which they suggest that resistance to white oppression comes, not exclusively from the character of the alienated black loner, but also from community-endowed black agency. In the infrequently examined genre of the personal letter, Will Brantley finds invaluable the individual collections of Flannery O'Connor, Katherine Anne Porter, Lillian Smith, and Zora Neale Hurston as they situate their authors historically, culturally, and artistically. Suzanne W. Jones's essay, "Their Confederate Kinfolk: African Americans' Interracial Family Histories," confronts racial mixing through three contemporary texts dependent on interracial love: Carrie McCray's <i>Freedom's Child</i> (1998), Neil Henry's <i>Pearl's Secret</i> (2001), and Thulani Davis's <i>My Confederate Kin folk</i> (2006). Collectively these books "share the same goal of demonstrating that Americans are far more interracially related than we realize" (410).

A number of other essays borrow the subtitle of Owen Robinson's essay ("The South and the World") to create the transnational backdrops to their arguments. In his reading of <i>The Dying Confession of Joseph Hare</i> (1818), Thomas Ruys Smith merges the tropes of southwestern humor and a transatlantic fascination with the outlaw hero, leading him straight to Confederate bad boys John Mosby and Harry Gilmor. Harilaos Stecopoulos provocatively situates two of Mark Twain's later works, <i>The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson</i> (1894) and <i>Following the Equator</i> (1897), against the global backdrop of British imperialism in India, a location present in both texts but ambivalently rendered by an author persistently rethinking his own white racial identity. Robinson himself identifies <i>Absalom, Absalom!</i> (1936) as the best example of both an investigation of "the South" within "the United States" and of "the South" within the broader context of the hemisphere, as Yoknapatawpha always "exists in intricate interrelation with many other places" (266). Robert H. Brinkmeyer also works globally, situating Richard Weaver's conservative views within an international context, arguing that he outpaces even the Agrarians in his pitting of a traditional "South" against a radical, rapacious "North," a harbinger of a world coming undone in which the South acts as an outpost of premodern values. Opposite Weaver, Brinkmeyer positions Lillian Smith and her condemnation of an authoritarian segregated southern society. Leigh Anne Duck, in aligning the work of James Agee and Walker Evans in <i>Let Us Now Praise Famous Men</i> (1941) with the 1933 Spanish film <i>Land Without Bread</i> (<i>Las Hurdes</i>) by surrealist director Luis Bunuel, likewise suggests ways in which the local and the global engage one another on levels foundational to a text's construction, asking "how we can augment our understanding of southern representations by situating them amid broader geographic and aesthetic frameworks" (292).

Three essays in "After Southern Modernisms" actively complicate alignments of the region's literary output along a strict racial binary, broadening the definition of "region" and emphasizing human movement. Maria DeGuzman reintroduces to readers Latinx writer Judith Ortiz Cofer, author of <i>The Latin Deli</i> (1993) and member since 2009 of the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame, but the names of Achy Obejas, Lorraine M. Lopez, and Bias Falconer may be less familiar. Most importantly, DeGuzman's essay rejects terms like "'emergent' communities" (455) for Latinx people in the South, given that they have been both present and writing for more than five hundred years. Martyn Bone takes a slightly different tack but reaches a similar end, focusing on the role of immigrants in fiction by Susan Choi, Ha Jin, Robert Olen Butler, Lan Cao, and Cynthia Shearer. His well-historicized essay takes the measure of Jim Crow's transferability to other populations, as well as the ways in which the black/white binary renders groups outside of it illegible. For Leslie Bow, racially anomalous figures throw that customary racial divide into high relief and redirect the flow of influence outward rather than inward. In her readings of two films, <i>Miss India Georgia</i> (1998) and <i>Daughter from Danang</i> (2002), and of Monique Truong's novel <i>Bitter in the Mouth</i> (2011), "emphasis lies not on the ways in which circuits of global migration transform the South, but, in fact, the opposite" (499), particularly as the presence of Asian Americans in texts about the region implicate it, and the nation, in broader colonialisms.

Beyond these introductions to and reconceptualizations of texts and contexts, several essays strike a deeper vein, all to some degree dependent on readings, but all also commenting on historic and contemporary formulations of "the South" with significant consequences for the state of the field. For instance, Lloyd Pratt's distinction in "Locality and the Serial South" between the "series" and the "serial narrative" depends, in a surprising twist, upon the southwestern humor-like qualities of <i>The Beverly Hillbillies</i> to establish his argument: "The static South follows from the South as series" (105), that is, a dependable "'locality'" (104) with a cast of dependable, recurring characters in a plot line that "prizes continuity over contrast" (109). Such southern localities, like the one featured in the television show's theme song, bear only a tangential relationship to material space, even as they stand in for it in the national--and often even the regional--imagination. Scott Romine, in "Southern Affects: Field and Feeling in a Skeptical Age," ranges through the arguments of established and recent scholarship at the same time that he shifts scholarly focus back to the late nineteenth century as a generative point for much of what we study and how we go about it. As he acknowledges wisely and early, the "affective turn'" (163) in literary study poses challenges to scholars committed to constructivist paradigms, as they have long understood emotional perceptions of "the South" as responsible for "a disorganized social reality" (167) that breeds harmful nostalgia at its least toxic, murderous racism at its most virulent. Our work comes, Romine suggests, in attending to the "historical shift from relatively stable, obligatory, and coercive social formations to those characterized by more flexible and protean forms of sociality" (176). Positioning his observations relative to postmodern British studies, Michael Kreyling ventures a linkage in his essay: "all colonial societies (the U.S. South included) have become postcolonial together," a shift accompanied by a kind of "cultural mourning" because "When we study the South today we study something that is, necessarily, lost," taken up as a subject in "an age of multicultures and a predominance of mediated over real experience" (414) in which the South continues as "an after-image on the retina of the American cultural imagination" (421). "[R]egional places in the United States," he concludes "have become evocations of place and history infested with complications" (429-30).

Those complications are exactly what Minrose Gwin wants to talk about in "The Woundedness of Southern Literature, Looking Away," the volume's concluding essay. Whereas Kreyling speaks of an infestation, Gwin talks about what "festerfs] in contemporary southern writing" (516), distinguishing between "'traumatism'" (morbidity, festering) and "'traumatonesis'" (suture, healing), and postulates that it is at the juncture of the two where much southern literature exists and continues to find its relevance (517). Thus Gwin proposes wounding as "a trope that can serve as a double lens for looking both outward to other Souths and other bodies of southern writing and, from those perspectives, inward to new discussions about U.S. southern literature" (517).

If I were to return to the <i>Handbook to</i> reread a single essay, it would be Keith Cartwright's. His approach may be, in the end, the only way forward: he doesn't meditate on causes or consequences; he just plunges innovatively ahead into a dance between "was" and "is." In "Jackson's Villes, Squares, and Frontiers of Democracy," he introduces "Jax-space," "an inescapably chronotopic" "blended time-space" (79) of which the key herald is a connection to the architect of Native American removal whose name pops up all over any map of the southeastern United States: Andrew Jackson. The "epicenter" of "Jax-space," Cartwright explains, is the "space between Jackson, Mississippi, and Jacksonville, Alabama," "a region razed for monocultural cotton production and expansion of chattel slavery via Indian removal and elimination of the Latin (that is, Spanish) menace" (79), meaning that it also necessarily winds through Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Arkansas, and Louisiana, with a far diasporic reach. "Jax-space" is not only about past configurations, however, but also about contemporary life within its cities, characterized by "poverty and a proneness to disease and violence.... racialized legacies of challenge to the formation of meaningful community and functional democracy.... ecological disaster spaces and dumping grounds" (79). Cartwright seeks "a literature of redress to the generalized state of psychic homicide we inhabit" (80), allowing him to discuss the work of, among others, James Weldon Johnson, Alice Walker and even William Faulkner. Cartwright ends, however, with a different Jackson: with his deep South roots, <i>Michael</i> Jackson ushers viewers of the <i>Thriller</i> music video into "southern Gothic terrain" (98) where dance "brings a stunning alacrity to all the dead and all the zombified living of Jaxspace" (99). That may be just another way of saying the past isn't dead, it isn't even past, but in "Jax-space," terms like "past" and "present," "dead" and "alive," lose demarcation and run to the intertextuality of Anderson's opening essay. If that's southern studies, I'm still in.

                           Works Cited

Hobson, Fred, and Barbara Ladd, eds. <i>The Oxford Handbook of the Literature of the U.S. South</i>. New York: Oxford UP, 2016.

KATHRYN B. McKEE

University of Mississippi