Flashes of a Southern Sprit: Meanings of the Sprit in the U.S. South. By Charles Reagan Wilson. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011, xviii + 249 pp. $59.95 cloth; $24.95 paper.

Abstract

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.) of a Sprit is a compilation of essays published between 1993 and 2007. In it, Wilson's subject includes a 1993 foray into southern historical memory, which foreshadowed much of the recent scholarship on the topic, an assessment of the sources of southern musical creativity, and insight into the evolution of his scholarly interests over his career. Readers who thread their way through these essays will recognize two consistent themes: the search for a approach to the American one that both anticipates and compliments the so-called new southern studies, and an insistence that any understanding of the South must take into account spirit and spirituality. Because Wilson moves back and forth across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and from literature and the visual arts to music and theology effortlessly and without pause, it is a fool's errand to attempt to neatly summarize the essays. But by focusing on three essays I may be able to give a hint of their richness.Wilson devotes several essays to the role of invented tradition and myth in the South. His interest in the topic has been evident since his highly regarded Baptized in Blood: Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980). Almost all subsequent scholars of southern memory have followed in his footsteps by concentrating on the deeply conservative uses of myth and memory in the region. Indeed, in no other region of the United States has the reactionary use of memory been more fully charted. In The Myth of the Biracial South, Wilson complicates this understanding by reminding us that myths need not be exclusively conservative. During the 1970s, Wilson contends, black and white southerners agreed that the region had undergone an abrupt and profound moral transformation that would make possible a biracial future unique in the nation. Wilson acknowledges that the myth was wishful thinking. But he also points out the myriad ways that the myth energized black and white politicians, artists, and activists to undertake initiatives that had previously been unthinkable in the South. myth provided a mythic present for unprecedented experiments in biracialism. In the absence of the myth, Wilson wonders, what sources of optimism would have sustained champions of biracialism. Although more than a decade has passed since its first publication, this essay remains useful for understanding why George Allen's off-the-cuff bigotry on the campaign trail in 2006 was so costly or why, even during a era of heated wars, the most ambitious commemorative project in present-day North Carolina is a memorial to African American freedom.Several of Wilson's essays address the relationship of religion to cultural expression, another one of Wilson's abiding interests. In Flashes of the Spirit, he offers a respectful riposte to H. L. Mencken's 1917 withering attack on southern cultural primitivism. From the vantage of Mencken's desk in Baltimore, most of the South was rife with snake-handling religious zealotry, lynch mob barbarism, and unspeakable cultural ignorance. root cause of the region's cultural depravity, Mencken insisted, was southern religion, which suffocated creativity and curiosity alike. Wilson deftly turns Mencken's critique on its head by pointing out that the same South lampooned by Mencken was at that very moment nurturing the culture that would become synonymous with American culture during the twentieth century. In addition to the canonical Southern Renaissance in literature, Wilson points to a litany of seminal musical genres (jazz, blues, country, gospel) and visual art (especially folk art) as examples of creativity overlooked by Mencken. …