Southscapes: Geographies of Race, Region and Literature. Thadious M.Davis. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011.

Abstract

Southscapes: Geographies of Race, Region and Literature Thadious M. Davis. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011.Inventive in its terms and specific in its conditions, Thadious Davis's Southscapes is a rethinking of (21). Intertwining discourses of geography, United States history, critical race theory, and literary criticism, Davis coins term southscape which calls attention to South as a social, political, cultural, and economic construct but one with 'fact of land' (2). She re-evaluates South under segregation and positions African American literary production as driving force of southern literature. For any explorer of American literature and culture, Southscapes is a literary cartography that maps social spaces black poets and writers in Unites States South have constructed over last fifty years.Following Homi Bhabha (The Location of Culture, 1994) and bell hooks (Belonging: A Culture of Place, 2009), Davis extends and particularizes current scholarship on race and place by elucidating the spatial aesthetics and spatial economies that emerge out of segregation in Mississippi and Louisiana (4). She argues that signposts of segregation in Deep South region are-both literally and metaphoricallyre-appropriated by African American writers who use spatial language of exclusion to produce inversely a rhetoric of empowerment and regional inclusion. Southscapes multifaceted literary survey is devoted to recognizable works of Richard Wright, Ernest Gaines, and Alice Walker as well as lesser known works of Olympia Vernon, Sterling Plumpp, Etheridge Knight, Endesha Ida Mae Holland, Shay Youngblood, and Randall Kenan. Davis's expert knowledge of Southern literature also allows for a dense, intertexual idiom that spans from William Faulkner to Harryette Mullen, to countless others.These authors' aesthetic sensitivity to demarcation of spaces spurs Davis into a reconfiguring of passage from modernism to postmodernism in South. She suggests that post-civil rights era is a transitional period in which the emergence of visible black artists, intellectuals, theorists, and philosophers to articulate changing state of African American life and to deconstruct controlling paradigms of power enabled iteration of postmodern blackness, as in cultural analysis of bell hooks and Cornell West (12). Although an underlying thread (11) of Southscapes, this re-configuration or paradigm shift is highlighted in both John W. …