As Michael Kreyling notes in this thoughtful and engaging book, the topics of memory and history are familiar terrain in southern literary and cultural studies. But The South that Wasn't There is not an old-fashioned traipse along well-worn paths. His focus is what he calls the “Moebius strip of memory-and-history” (2), where personal articulations of memory flow, sometimes seamlessly but more frequently not, into narrative accounts of collective history, and then back again. Thus he is especially interested in cultural texts, primarily literature, in which “the rivalry between history and memory is crucial, in which the practice of memory reveals the stresses wrought upon it by the various living, present interests it is expected or drafted to serve” (9). In six chapters, he discusses a variety of twentieth- and twenty-first-century texts that splice memory and history together along this Moebius strip for a range of complex purposes: to express the felt presence of history in the lives of people in the present, to build alternate versions of history by deploying selective memories of the past, to reveal or imaginatively re-create what conventional histories omit, or to resist and/or control the postmodern marketplace of cultural memories as commodities. Altogether, he seeks to complicate notions of the postmodern and “postsouthern” by showing how “simulation never quite jettisons the real thing, and vice versa” (177).

Any summary of Kreyling's arguments can only oversimplify them, so bear with me. His chapter on Toni Morrison's Beloved explains how Morrison “enacts collective memory rather than describing or analyzing it,” yet is also more “conflicted” about the possibilities of doing so than other critics have acknowledged, “leaving the question of representation ultimately unanswered” and creating “power through irresolution” (28). In a rather scathing reassessment of Robert Penn Warren's changing attitudes on race and civil rights, Kreyling shows how Warren's confessions of racial guilt and penance mask a problematic reluctance to surrender the cultural entitlements tied to his white, male identity. His chapter on memories of the Vietnam War explores the ways that notions of southern honor were often “recruited” to “treat the cultural wounds inflicted by that war,” both in the South and in the nation at large (78). His discussion of the controversies surrounding the publication of Alice Randall's The Wind Done Gone in the early 2000s asks important questions about who has the right to “own” cultural memories in a world of postmodern capitalism. And the concluding chapter shows how postsouthern disarticulations of history and place make the South “an infinitely repeatable cultural narrative … [and] a memory that has outlived its historical placed-ness” (192), yet with very real effects that nevertheless shape the “felt identit[ies]” of people on the ground (187).

I am particularly fond of Kreyling's chapter on the uses of Haiti in the works of William Faulkner and Madison Smartt Bell. Here he warns about the dangers of writers and scholars in the US using “phantom” cultural memories of a Caribbean they do not actually know in order to make claims about the “global South,” claims which might all too easily become new colonizing intrusions into the region(s) for whom these scholars purport to speak (121).

Since his publication of Inventing Southern Literature in 1998, Kreyling has been both praised and criticized by scholars invested in what has now become known as “the new southern studies.” If there are any lingering doubts about his honest and active engagement with the works emerging out of this reinvigoration of the field, The South that Wasn't There should put those doubts to rest. Moreover, his nuanced explorations of the permeable boundaries between southern, national, and transnational/global spaces reconfirm the South's relevance for American studies as it is more broadly conceived. Unfortunately, too many americanists based in the United States continue to treat the South as marginal because it is regional (I find this generally not to be the case for scholars working in the UK and Europe). But Kreyling reminds us that race, slavery, civil rights, war, and the cultural reproduction of mythic pasts are simultaneously both regional and national concerns, and he pushes this analysis farther by showing how collective “American” memories are inextricably tied to the literal and symbolic histories of the South. These are important points that a great many scholars would do well to remember.