The New Southern Studies

After decades of being both celebrated and dismissed as the exception within American exceptionalism, the South is emerging as central to debates in fields ranging from American Studies and African American Studies to cultural studies and postcolonial theory. Engaged with these debates from the outset, the new Southern Studies, as Houston A. Baker Jr. named the field, thus only secondarily reinvigorates the old. Rather, as its scholars look at the South afresh, their chief aim is a floor-to-ceiling rethinking of some of the central ideas of the last twenty years of critical theory: objecthood, identity, space, nation, region, abjection, the body, empire. The books in this interdisciplinary, methodologically rigorous, and iconoclastic series will, as a result, engage scholars and students in a wide variety of fields.

Jon Smith is an associate professor of English at Simon Fraser University. His chief scholarly interests involve the study of the U.S. South from global, cultural-studies, and postcolonial perspectives to interrogate both American exceptionalism in American Studies and careless divisions between global north and global south in postcolonial theory. Smith is the coeditor of Look Away! The U.S. South in New World Studies and several special journal issues on the South. His work has appeared in American Literature, American Literary History, and other scholarly publications. He is currently working on a study titled (tentatively} "Alabama and the Future of American Cultural Studies."

Riché Richardson, an associate professor of Africana studies at Cornell University, has ongoing interests in the role of the South in formations of identity in the African American context, transnational and diasporan perspectives in southern studies, and African American literature. The author of Black Masculinity and the U.S. South, she is currently working on a number of other book projects, including one on southern rap. Richardson has published essays in journals such as American Literature, the Mississippi Quarterly, and the Forum for Modern Language Studies.

Books in this series

American Cinema and the Southern Imaginary
Edited by Deborah Barker and Kathryn McKee

Black Masculinity and the U.S. South
From Uncle Tom to Gangsta
Riché Richardson

Disturbing Calculations
The Economics of Identity in Postcolonial Southern Literature, 1912–2002
Melanie R. Benson

Grounded Globalism
How the U.S. South Embraces the World
James L. Peacock

The Nation’s Region
Southern Modernism, Segregation, and U.S. Nationalism
Leigh Anne Duck

Series editors

Jon Smith
778-782-3124
jsa106@sfu.ca

Riché Richardson
607-255-4625
rdr83@cornell.edu

Download the series flyer

Series Advisory Board

Houston A. Baker Jr.
Vanderbilt University

Jennifer Greeson
University of Virginia

Trudier Harris
University of North Carolina,
Chapel Hill

Tara McPherson
University of Southern California

John T. Matthews
Boston University

Scott Romine
University of North Carolina,
Greensboro