Thinking about the approach and scholarship called the New Southern Studies takes me back to the first years in my position in southern studies and history at the University of Mississippi. When I started that job in 1988, I had a great deal to learn, especially about the recent and contemporary South. So I turned to the best scholarly books I could find, especially those by my fellow historians and also by social scientists, literary scholars, music scholars, and folklorists.

In reading those works, I frequently confronted a question I had not really considered in my training as a historian of an earlier period. Is there still a South?Footnote ¹

I recall teaching a graduate readings class in twentieth-century southern history, sometime around 1990, in which most of the books ended with that question in their own ways. Agriculture with large numbers of people working land that they owned or was owned by other people. Small-town and rural life. Low-wage, non-union labor. Politics that discouraged competition and challenges to the system. Governments with limited imaginations, agendas, and budgets. Racism, strict racial binaries, legal and uncodified segregation, numerous kinds of white claims or assumptions about privilege. Various forms of violence. Religion dominated by a few evangelical groups. Were these things continuing, declining, changing into something else?

The big books on southern literary and musical life I read and assigned did not always ask the same questions, but many of them revolved around issues of how recent writing and music related to genres people identified or accepted as crucial to southern literature and music. Instead of asking, “is there still a South?” some of those scholars asked if there was still a southern literature or were there still southern forms of music.

There were other end-of-the-South questions, some of them inspiring folklorists and other documentarians to go out studying individuals and groups and forms of expression, often with the language of studying things before they were gone.

And a third type of scholarship was the work of sociologist John Shelton Reed, whose numerous sociological essays, many of them involving questionnaires, maps, or other quantifiable evidence, asked about the relationships between southern self-identification and southern distinctiveness. Reed's scholarship emphasized the South in the ways the concept mattered to people, and it asked a wide range of good questions about how the concept South mattered, why, where, and to whom.Footnote ²

Along with the question “is there still a South?” came questions about whether to celebrate the changes, criticize them, or fret over them with mixed feelings. Was the only South worth studying the South the scholars hated, or loved, or had intense mixed feelings about? And, if we as scholars decided that no, there was not a South in some significant ways, did that mean we should stop studying what we studied?

Teaching many classes about the South, I found that my attempts to frame the question flopped. I thought I was helping clarify the questions; students found the question less interesting than the other topics we had discussed in class. Let's study people, their faces and papers and exam answers seemed to respond, let's not ask straightforward yes-or-no questions. There was a troubling side to this response, because I was asking questions that did not seem relevant to them. But there was also a positive side, in that studying the South was exciting and meaningful as long as we asked exciting, meaningful questions.

Part of what seemed gone for good from the landscape of southern studies were concepts like a southern Sense of History, Sense of Tradition, Sense of Tragedy, Sense of Family. We study the body and physical senses more, but it's not a time to offer central themes or to come up with new Senses. Also gone is the search for essences – a few facts, habits, beliefs that one can say are essential to the American South. In 1941, W. J. Cash offered a list of ten virtues and twelve vices in the penultimate paragraph of The Mind of the South,Footnote ³ and it is hard to imagine a scholar today trying to sum up the South in one paragraph, even one with twenty-two points, or with features one can identify as virtues or vices. Today is not a great time to be drawing such grand conclusions. Is there still a South does not seem a question that leads to useful research and analysis.

The emergence of the scholarship known as the New Southern Studies offers one set of ways to get beyond some questions that were not working. The answer to the question “is there still a South?” assumed or at least seemed to assume some essential set of somethings – demographics, historical moments, ideas, problems, questions, or something else that either continued or had ended.

The New Southern Studies calls for scholarship that challenges those questions with questions that work on multiple perspectives at multiple levels. It asked for scholarship to challenge, decenter, and reshape, and then to challenge again. Part of the goal was not just to include more people in southern studies – inclusiveness had been a recurring, if challenging, goal for decades –but to make sure the questions are meaningful for all the people under study. Some of those apparently essential concepts, that led to the question whether or not they continued, came from the perspective of white residents of the South, often white men with some degree of power and wealth and some claims to authority. So challenging the questions was a way to challenge the assumptions and concerns behind them.

To me, as a historian who teaches southern studies classes, recognizing that challenge is the first step in understanding what the New Southern Studies scholarship has accomplished. It is a scholarship that demands that we question our own questions and starting points. All good scholarship should respond to that demand, but the New Southern Studies group has done it with particular energy, with its critiques of scholarship that revolves around either nostalgia or American exceptionalism and assumptions of progress. I suspect that ultimately the New Southern Studies will make its major contributions through its scholarship rather than its critiques or manifestos about past and current scholarship. Some of the criticisms by figures in the movement are pretty harsh, and plenty of the students and working scholars have read some of the critiques, apparently intended to be glib and pithy, as being something closer to smug and unwelcoming.

I suspect that the most lasting impact of this scholarship will be its examples of how best to incorporate hemispheric and global perspectives in studying cultural topics. The global perspective has become essential, not just an interesting option, because it should be impossible to study the South without including the people, ideas, and products moving through the region. We live as part of a world of global connections; let's study all of them, with all of their implications. The global perspective includes all of the people, all of their histories, all of their influences, and that can mean new work for scholars. It takes immigration seriously; takes seriously that people travel by choice and by force, that they read, watch, learn from, and have influence on things that have no borders or whose borders are points of conflict.

Taking a global perspective means studying people for whom the concept of southern identity may or may not be important. Let's take two very large groups – recent Hispanic immigrants and members of the Southern Baptist Convention. Many of the former are new to the American South, and they are drawn to the US by hopes of higher wages and new opportunities. Their connections to the American South and their identities as southerners may be in formation, though of course historical connections mean regional questions are not brand new issues for them. The Southern Baptist Convention has organizational roots in antebellum sectional divisions over slavery and has the word “Southern” in its name. But it has long sent missionaries throughout the world, has influence far beyond the US and its regions, and in fact has recently been discussing a name change to Great Commission Baptist Church. In both cases, regional issues matter, but they're going in multiple, global directions, all of which deserve study, and issues of regional identity need not rank at the top of how those issues are studied.

And taking a global perspective means getting away from questions about whether there is still a South or about always starting and concluding southern studies discussions with American regional comparisons. I should admit that studying the South in global perspective was not something I was doing well in 1988, and the New Southern Studies perspective has encouraged some better teaching.

A third strength is that the New Southern Studies has brought contemporary cultural studies and cultural criticism more into focus as part of southern studies. That means studying images, media, and ideas as part of broader sets of politics, with multiple and complex meanings and multiple aesthetic histories and forms of technology. It means taking seriously tourism, with its complicated issues of expectations, demands, and local responses, and taking film, television, and online communication seriously, without starting with older questions whether or not certain forms of expression originated in the South or whether or not they are accurate representations of some truth.

I worry about two things with respect to the New Southern Studies. I draw some of those worries from students and some from my own work as a historian. Some graduate and upper-level undergraduates respond well to New Southern Studies scholarship, some don't. Few, to use a religious metaphor, seem to convert to it, and many seem to think, as I do, that it offers a set of tools that go along with many other tools. I suspect my biggest concern is that the New Southern Studies does not seem to offer anything particularly useful to the large number of students who come to the field for two pretty conventional reasons. Some hope to understand the American South better so they can fix problems. Some hope to pursue greater understanding through the listening and watching essential to documentary film, still photography, audio recording, and oral history.

As a historian, it disturbs me sometimes that some of the scholars in the New Southern Studies react so consistently against the Vanderbilt Agrarians. It was the yawning and eye-rolling of students in southern studies graduate classes, not the work of scholarly critics, that first demonstrated to me the general irrelevance of I'll Take My Stand,Footnote ⁴ a work that now seems to exist among scholars only for people to condemn. I think those battles are over, and the people fighting them seem pretty similar to reenactors setting up battles they're going to win. But far more important, it troubles me because concentrating on the Agrarians leaves out so many other forms of writing that we might use as inspiration for, or at least for thinking about, questions and assumptions and starting points for our work studying the South.

If we start by saying we are not the Agrarians, we might assume that we're starting into a brand new world of intellectual possibility, putting behind us nagging nostalgia. But if we start with long traditions of activist or at least leftist scholarship, we might see deeper and more complicated connections to past work. We can do good scholarship today by thinking about, for example, the possibility of the have-nots to address the haves in the work of V. O. Key,Footnote ⁵ the possibilities of various reform traditions brought to light by Carter G. Woodson,Footnote ⁶ the possibilities of biracial political compromise and/or biracial Populist efforts in C. Vann Woodward,Footnote ⁷ the possibilities of educated and mutually interested development of social capital in the work of Howard Odum,Footnote ⁸ the possibilities of an inspired and reformist Christianity in the work of Samuel S. Hill Jr.,Footnote ⁹ and the possibility that increasing authority outside the political system can lead to increasing involvement and power within that system in the work of Anne Firor Scott.Footnote ¹⁰ The idea that more and better scholarly knowledge about the South will let us identify and fix the problems of the South goes back to W. E. B. Du Bois in Atlanta,Footnote ¹¹ to Howard Odum and Charles S. Johnson and their colleagues and students in Chapel Hill and Nashville,Footnote ¹² and much inspired scholarship from other locations within and distant from the American South. We've heard stories of people in the civil rights movement carrying books by Woodward and, more oddly, W. J. Cash; I've seen far more recent reformers who refer directly to works by John Dittmer, Charles Payne, and now Michelle Alexander.Footnote ¹³

There is not an activist tradition among people who study the South; there are multiple activist traditions. Students wanting to change the South by understanding it better should know those various traditions, while also reading New Southern Studies scholarship that will help locate where they choose to critique, revise, or fit into them. Within the works of the New Southern Studies, it is clear that the writing itself is politically inspired. Challenging past questions and assumptions, exploring through multiple perspectives, and taking seriously global interconnectedness all have political meanings. But people who look to join scholarship to real-life problems may not find the New Southern Studies uniquely helpful, compared, for example, to people who work in the traditions of Du Bois and Woodward, Key and Hill, Odum and Scott.

Turning to documentary work, documentarians tend to be a reflective group, always wondering about the relationships between themselves and their subjects and often wondering if they are controlling the action or asking the wrong questions or manipulating something through their presence and technology. Many wonder if they might be romanticizing, exoticizing, essentializing, or othering, and some wonder about the influence of past documentarians in their heads or in the minds of their subjects as they do their work. They critique and welcome critiques of their products and methods, and they do documentary work anyway. Do the New Southern Studies scholars, with their calls to question the questions and to examine multiple perspectives, have much to offer documentarians, most of whom seem ready to question their perspectives already?

What if we started our advanced southern studies classes with two old documentary works, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, by James Agee and Walker Evans, and Mothers of the South, by Margaret Jarman Hagood?Footnote ¹⁴ The ever-questioning James Agee might seem closest to the New Southern Studies, with his multiple approaches to his topic. Agee wondered if he and Evans were being too intrusive, if it was possible really to understand the people they were studying, and if he really knew what it meant to understand. He wondered about his own politics and aesthetics, condemning the systems that created poverty while doing his best to empathize with the experience of his subjects. And, like some of the New Southern Studies work, he seemed always to be starting over. Hagood began her book hoping to understand over two hundred farming women by listening to them, and she concluded with love and respect and also a clear conclusion that most of them wanted and even more of them could benefit from better access to birth control. It was, in short, documentary work with a policy conclusion. Both books were passionate about cutting through stereotypes, knowing their subjects, and finding something real about them – the material world for Agee and Evans and the words of the women for Hagood.

In the idiosyncrasy and self-questioning of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men; the potential usefulness of Mothers of the South; and the passion, empathy, and importance of imagery in both, the two volumes raise an interesting question: what might a New Southern Studies approach to documentary work look like? I suspect that people are starting such work, but I do not know that the New Southern Studies has had a strong documentary component or has had much to say to documentary-makers. Such work should do a better job of recognizing multiplicity than Hagood and Agee and Evans, and it should bring in more movements and do a better job of documenting the effects and experiences of global connections. It would almost certainly go beyond the study of rural white people. But would it have the empathy and excitement and the aesthetic elements of both books and the potential for real-world use of Hagood's work? I'm not sure, I tend to doubt it, and I think that's an ongoing challenge.