Without denying the influence of transnational connections in US southern history or in the very contemporary texts he explores, Christopher Lloyd also recognizes the appeal of theoretical models that would “deterritorialize” the region, “deconstruct[ing]” monolithic ideas of what the South is in favor of “a pluralized – often fictionalized – location, forever in flux” (5). He worries, however, that such “postsouthern” analyses might disregard or obscure the region's “placedness, especially in relation to a located cultural memory” (1–2). In contrast, Lloyd seeks to articulate a South that both is, and is more than, a “cultural construct,” in which meanings are embedded in the region's “geographical and cultural terrain” as well as its representations (145). Often, his prose takes on an ethical charge, insisting that the goal of “Southern scholars” must be, at least in part, to pull “the thousands of discarded, throwaway bodies of the South … out of the ground” (159).

This emphasis on bodies and geography explicitly evokes Patricia Yaeger's Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women's Writing (2000) and Thadious Davis's Southscapes: Geographies of Race, Region, and Literature (2011), both very influential in southern literary studies; accordingly, aspects of Lloyd's textual analyses are unsurprising. He resists, for example, the postsouthern view that the Gothic provides a stereotypical trope through which a version of the region can be consumed, countering with the claim – also broadly prominent – that the genre provides a venue through which “contemporary Southerners … access particular cultural memories of violence and horror (88). But in turning to the photographs of Sally Mann – rarely examined in southern studies – he provides a formally insightful account of how this artist seeks to “root” history and culture in the interplay of earth, sky, camera, chemicals, and, sometimes, corpses.

The stakes of such “rootings” merit further consideration, however. In a chapter regarding literary journeys southward, Lloyd argues that Toni Morrison's Home (2012) implies an “ethical obligation to look at” those who have suffered racist abuse, while Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2006) urges us to attend to the father's “Southern memories” (127, 145). But where Lloyd demonstrates how Morrison depicts remembrance as a necessity in pursuing emotional and communal recovery, he focusses on proving the presence of southern landscapes in The Road’s postapocalyptic geography, which some critics map differently. Attending to McCarthy's representation of characters might disrupt this parallel, however, as the son – who lacks cultural memories – provides a model of kindness, whereas the father retains disturbingly patriarchal impulses. Here and elsewhere, Lloyd's determination to prove that regionalism remains relevant obstructs inquiry into its value.

Lloyd's study opens with a brief analogy between the terms “postracial” and “postsouthern,” and throughout, he evinces concern that the latter is insufficiently attentive to race.Footnote ¹ That insight – still under debate, but potentially crucial – does not imply, however, a countervailing corollary between interests in region and in racial justice. In a chapter on post-Katrina texts, most thoroughly Spike Lee's documentary When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (2006), Lloyd provides a formally and historically rich account of a “Southern biopolitics” (53) in which black lives are devalued, and this scholarship is useful. But his insistence that attending to the storm's “regionalism” constitutes “the most ethical response to Katrina” disregards the fact that critiques were focussing on governmental structures – local, state, and federal (55). Privileging an ambiguous ethics over palpably vital politics raises the question of regionalism's aims.

Tragically, Lloyd's argument is undercut by events that no doubt occurred after his manuscript had gone to press: after highly publicized police killings of unarmed African Americans and the poisoning of Flint, Michigan, it is ever more clear that governmental callousness toward black life is not restricted to the US South. This twenty-first century necessitates interrogating our spatial frames, in order to recognize precisely where and how a more just society can be imagined and pursued. In otherwise thoughtful readings, Lloyd depicts Edward P. Jones's The Known World and Valerie Martin's Property (both 2003) as expressing “Southern cultural memory” of slavery (43), but this formulation moves too easily between literary analysis and sociological generalization. At a time when both scholars and social movements insist on the role of slavery in shaping the nation, the significance of the region as a site of social critique and cohesion (as opposed to aesthetic production, which Lloyd argues effectively) cannot be taken for granted.