Plenary Paper Discussant Commentary 2

Abstract

A treatise that begins with the statement I am not a fan of country music, but I am a radio flipper, certainly gets my attention. Like the author, I am also not a big fan of country music (except for Dolly and Reba, who doesn’t love them)? Music reviews aside, Winders’ invocation of how country music lyrics illustrate competing nodes of diffusion that work to question geographical imaginations of southern ‘authenticity’ is truly fascinating. When it comes to the material and social changes in the southern landscape over the years, I have some firsthand experience. While attending graduate school at Florida State in Tallahassee, then getting my first teaching job at Georgia Southern University in Statesboro, I would occasionally take long drives into the rural countryside, stopping along the way to stroll through the many small towns that dot the landscape. At least to this non-southerner, southern rural culture initially appeared permanently fixed in both time and space. In subsequent years, however, I began to notice some changes in these cultural nodes of rural southern life. The Baptist churches in these small towns, still very much iconographic symbols of AfricanAmerican and white vernacular southern culture, began sharing religious space with a Catholic church, built to accommodate the large numbers of Hispanic migrant laborers who work the farm fields. Signs that advertised we speak Spanish began appearing in the windows of the mom and pop stores along Main Street. Mexican restaurants suddenly appeared where the local country diners once stood. So in a rural context, I most certainly agree with Winders’ thesis of the changing nature of material, social and cultural spaces in the south. I was pleased to see Winders incorporate Doreen Massey and David Harvey’s theoretical lens of time-space compression into her narrative on ‘re-placing’ southern geographies. This is a fitting juxtaposition, where global capitalism has shrunk both space and time, and where old attachments to place and identity (in this case southern place and identity), are thrown into a maelstrom of multiple meanings. Her discussion of southern urban/rural dualities and those liminal spaces in between are particularly relevant here, as she correctly calls into question the false assertion of a ‘southern culture’. There are many different place-specific contingencies that give rise to the south’s geographical imagination, particularly when placed against a backdrop of racialized constructions of identity. Extending the discussion further, Winders’ invokes the extra-scalar implications of competing southern identities from the scale of the body, and the implications of otherness that goes along with bodily attributions, such as the ‘in