Toward "A New Southern Studies"

Abstract

The life histories of academic fields of study are punctuated by revolutions. The field of southern literary studies has been in the process of such a change over the past several years. Anthologies for classroom use reflect this change by trying to capture commercial value as textbooks of the "new." The South in Perspective (Prentice Hall, 2001), edited by Edward Francisco, Robert Vaughan, and Linda Francisco, is one such anthology; it strives to ride the new wave by redistributing historical periods and shaking up thematic categories. Not all of its revisions are successful. Literary critical activity is another index of change. As the study of literature in general moves from centering on the text to grazing on the context, or the cultural conditions under which texts are produced and in which they have and express meaning, so the study of southern literature (long a bastion of formalist and text-centered criticism) has been shaken up by turns fueled by gender studies, studies in globalization and "new geography," new historicism, and culture studies. Houston A. Baker, Jr. and Dana D. Nelson have edited a special issue of American Literature (June 2001; 73:2) subtitled "Violence, the Body, and 'The South,'" which contains several essays calling for and demonstrating new approaches to familiar texts and unfamiliar texts in the frame of southern studies. Sometimes, however, in the drive to be new old wine is funneled into new bottles. A certain critical parallax sometimes obscures the fact that what "old" critics have written is often close to, if not identical to, what the "new" have expressed in the new vocabularies. Still, there are examples of new departures on familiar routes. Houston A. Baker's Turning South Again: Re-thinking Modernism/Re-reading Booker T. (Duke University Press, 2001) re-reads Up from Slavery in the context of Baker's own life as an African American scholar coming of age in the latter half of the twentieth century, and in the harsh current context of social crisis for young African American males who, Baker charges, are ill-served and led by a cadre of conservative African American intellectuals--as the people were by Booker T. Washington in the latter nineteenth century.