Reconstructing Southern Rhetoric ed. by Christina L. Moss and Brandon Inabinet

Abstract

Reviewed by: Reconstructing Southern Rhetoric ed. by Christina L. Moss and Brandon Inabinet Matthew Teutsch Reconstructing Southern Rhetoric. Edited by Christina L. Moss and Brandon Inabinet. Race, Rhetoric, and Media Series. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2021. Pp. viii, 316. Paper, $30.00, ISBN 978-1-4968-3615-1; cloth, $99.00, ISBN 978-1-4968-3614-4.) Christina L. Moss and Brandon Inabinet’s Reconstructing Southern Rhetoric has three key components that “[lay] bare the site of the trauma, the resistance, and the healing as symbolic action” through various examinations of space, place, oratory, cultural consumption, and more (p. 8). The three sections of Reconstructing Southern Rhetoric carry the reader through a communicative process, moving from the disruption of nostalgia, to the “decenter[ing] of martyrs” and the creation of “new archetypal identities,” to finding space for interventions (p. 11). The result, the editors write, is “a conversation rooted in a potential for symbolic action and active healing from cycles of aggression and victimization” by critically engaging with the South and positioning its symbols and construction within the global context (p. 11). Overall, Reconstructing Southern Rhetoric provides a wide and engaging series of essays by scholars who define themselves as “insiders” or “outsiders” to the region based on various things such as where they grew up, their gender identity, their race, their political leanings, and more. Having contributors define themselves in this manner strengthens the collection because it provides “evidence [of] the complexity of what it means to be an insider/outsider in the South” and how that complexity challenges the monolithic and hegemonic representations of the South that the essays reconstruct (p. 5). Many of the contributors did not grow up in the South, and for that reason they define themselves as “outsiders”; however, others grew up in the South and still define themselves as having an “‘insider-outsider’ status” because they “occupy a liminal space,” as Cassidy D. Ellis puts it, “that’s ‘southernish’” (p. 162). These positionings bring with them perspectives and paths that one must navigate when pursuing the work of reconstruction. Carolyn Walcott, “a Black, Caribbean-born, female scholar situated in the South,” examines how the National Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta could be “an important place for connecting Caribbean and African American memory of slavery” and “civil rights struggles,” but she argues it falls short in that attempt (pp. 254, 255). Dave Tell, “a white man from Kansas,” explores how working with the Emmett Till Memorial Commission of Tallahatchie County, Mississippi, showed him “that giving back to the community and writing as an outsider are not always competing goals” (p. 49). The contributors, through defining their own positionality to the South as a region that exists metonymically as a symbolic site of trauma and the nation’s sins—and, I would add, global sins—highlight the ways that a region polices itself and the ways that a region never exists as a monolithic space. Regions [End Page 195] change, morph, and reconstruct themselves responding to various stimuli. The contributors highlight this reconstruction throughout their essays, from the queering of the South in Cassidy D. Ellis and Michael L. Forst’s “Songs of the South: Embodying the Crossroads of Southern Narrative Inheritances,” to the confrontation of cultural southern nostalgia and African American and Latinx erasure in Julia M. Medhurst’s “Styles and Spaces of Whiteness in HGTV’s Fixer Upper,” to the reclamation and reparation of space in Megan Fitzmaurice’s “What Lies Beneath: Recovering an African Burial Ground and Black Nationalism’s Cultural Influence in the Capital of the Confederacy.” Reconstructing Southern Rhetoric builds on the previous scholarship of Tara McPherson, Douglas Reichert Powell, and others. However, the editors note that more work needs to occur. While Jason Edward Black’s essay details John Marshall’s rhetoric used to define the southeastern tribes, work needs to be done on the Vietnamese, Filipino, and other Asian communities in Louisiana and the region, on Latinx communities, and on the intersections of Black masculinity, Black queerness, and Native heritage in the region. Reconstructing Southern Rhetoric cannot encompass all the work that needs to take place, but, as the editors put it, “the volume...