In recent years southern studies has done well to relocate the US South within transnational, hemispheric, and global frames. That is, in the wake of the “transnational turn” in American studies, southern studies seems to have been drawn into a wholesale reassessment of the region's place in the world. This is very much to the good. Such a willingness to reimagine both the geographies and the itineraries of southern culture has gone a long way to deprovincializing what was for decades a fairly insular set of critical conversations.

No longer content to define the region merely against a northern other – that is, to pit southern culture against American culture – the so-called “New Southern Studies” (NSS) constellates southern localities in relation to a number of non- or extra-national cultural configurations such as the global South, the native or indigenous South, and Greater Mexico. This has allowed, in turn, issues of empire, diaspora, immigration, cosmopolitanism, and cultural exchange to come to the fore.

Part and parcel of this relocation of southern studies is a newfound and refreshing willingness to question the exceptional quality of the US South, and, in doing so, to call into question the coherence of the very subject that “southernists” claim to study. Informed no doubt by recent efforts in American studies to put pressure on American exceptionalism, the work of Joseph Crespino, Matthew Lassiter, Jennifer Greeson, and Jon Smith (among others) has been particularly productive in this regard.Footnote ¹

Finally, much of this new, invigorating research is characterized by an eagerness to utilize an impossibly diverse set of the methodological tools – comparative cultural histories, postcolonial and globalization theories, even data modeling – as alternative ways of linking place, culture, and identity.

This is not to suggest that the NSS is some sort of panacea. Far from it. To take but one example, much of southern studies – both new and old – continues to privilege the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Such a presentist bias is particularly disappointing since so much of the early history of the US South would lend itself to the NSS treatment. Historians of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world have long noted, for instance, the global enmeshment of plantation and slave economies. And early American literary scholars have been describing for decades the complex interplay of indigenous cultures in the lower southern states.

Perhaps as a function of its institutional origins, the NSS has also elicited a good bit of suspicion from historians, some of whom have asked whether this “New Southern Studies” isn't just another name for “southern literary studies”? Would that the NSS marked either the resurgence of southern literary studies or, better, some vast English-department conspiracy. Alas, southern literary studies remains a small but productive subfield and English departments just don't have the sway that they did at the height of the culture wars.

Although many practitioners of the NSS have English-department affiliations, this is the least interesting thing they have in common. Much more telling is the fact that many of the leading lights of the NSS were not trained as southernists per se. Instead, many received their doctoral degrees in either interdisciplinary programs (e.g. American studies) or traditional national and historical periods (e.g. nineteenth-century American history). This has resulted, I think, in a willingness to question basic assumptions about the study of the US South. For instance, the NSS does not seem to take for granted that there is a coherent entity called “the US South.” Moreover, NSS scholars seem, for better or worse, less invested in decades-old historiographical debates over, for instance, southern nationalism.

This brings us to two related questions: who gets to study the US South? And what does it mean to identify as a southernist or southern studies specialist at this moment in time? Needless to say, these are quite timely questions, since faculty positions in southern history, southern literature, and southern studies seem increasingly scarce. Moreover, despite the broad promise of the NSS, doctoral programs specializing in the US South are few and far between – especially in the US.Footnote ²

In 1992 Paul A. Bové defined the “professional southernist” as “both a monumental historian and an antiquarian,” someone who offered “explanation and apology” for some of the South's most troubling histories and cultural traits. Lamenting the outsize influence of professional southernists like Lewis P. Simpson and Louis D. Rubin, Bové nonetheless admired their “massive productive institutionalization.”Footnote ³ A mere twenty years later, Simpson and Rubin are dead, and such institutionalization seems very much on the wane. So where does southern studies happen now if not in English or history departments? Where should it happen?

I hold that, given the rather bleak job market in both southern history and southern literary studies, interdisciplinarity is crucial to the future health of southern studies. Unfortunately, unlike American studies, southern studies remains frustratingly bound by disciplinary interests. I'll take an all-too-easy example. Readers who identify as historians, how many of you have attended “The Southern” – a meeting of the Southern Historical Association? A good many of you, I'm sure. Now, how many of you historians have attended SSSL – a meeting of the Society for the Study of Southern Literature? That few, huh? Well, I am confident that the numbers would be even worse if I had polled those readers who identify as southern literature scholars.

Put simply, southern historians and southern literary scholars just don't talk to one another enough. Indeed, there seems to be no small amount of disciplinary friction between the two groups, despite the fact that we share many of the same texts and ask many of the same research questions. Perhaps it is time for these two constituencies to come together and found an international and truly interdisciplinary southern studies association. There are a number of models for such an organization, especially the “Understanding the South, Understanding America” network, which drew together faculty from diverse institutional and disciplinary backgrounds and was coordinated among four partner institutions, the Universities of Manchester, Florida, Copenhagen, and Cambridge. On a smaller scale, southern studies programs and centres at places like the Universities of North Carolina, Mississippi, and South Carolina could provide leadership and lessons on how to study the South across, not along, disciplinary lines.

The stakes for such an organization would be high. There are a number of theoretical gaps that need filling in southern studies, and unidisciplinary approaches just won't do the job. To my mind, the most glaring of these gaps is our understanding of how regionalism works on the ground. As I've argued elsewhere, in recent years cultural critics have laboured to “think and feel beyond the nation”; to write, that is, postnational, transnational, hemispheric, and global cultural histories. Yet despite an immense amount of productive scholarship in these modes, we seem no closer to a full understanding of the often vexed relations between the region and the nation. If we hope to understand how global cultures function, we first need a clear sense of how local and regional cultures work – “now more than ever,” as the old advertisement says.Footnote ⁴

A renewed engagement with the problem of regionalism seems to me particularly urgent work for southern studies to take up – and not just because of its long-standing interest in a specific region's relationship with a national other. (One nineteenth-century example of this sort of engagement might be a study of the Gulf Coast as an international region with shared cultural and economic interests.Footnote ⁵) For all its novelty, the NSS engages a series of rather old-fashioned questions about place, belonging, and community. Any newness comes through our ability to grant senses of place, belonging, and community a broader context, to expand, that is, the angle of vision by which we view the US South. As a result, southern studies scholars seem particularly well situated to explain the persistence of regionalism in an increasingly interconnected world.

As a historian who studies the “hybrid” Irish southerner and is interested in the South in comparative ways, I support the global focus of the New Southern Studies (NSS). Indeed, for some historians it seems to be the only way to continue making the South relevant as an area of study.Footnote ¹ The call, then, from Jon Smith and Deborah Cohn to look at the South in a more hemispheric way outside the traditional national paradigm and through the theory of postcolonialism was, overall, well received. The Southern Intellectual History Circle, for example, dedicated its 2004 annual meeting to the idea of applying postcolonialism to southern history and invited Smith and Cohn to speak there. Smith's and Cohn's call to “Look Away!” was reviewed in a generally favourable fashion in the major historical journals.Footnote ²

As with their opening major publication, however, in which historians only completed a few of the essays, the NSS has remained chiefly the domain of literary scholars.Footnote ³ Yet historians of the South have been more theoretically aware than they have been given credit for and not as much part of the “nativist navel gazing that has kept mainstream southern studies methodologically so far behind American studies.”Footnote ⁴ Thus some in history took unkindly to the “newness” claims of these global southern studies. They perceived a slight against historians. The review of Look Away! in the Journal of Southern History, for example (completed jointly by a historian of the South and one of Mexico in the “hybrid” city of El Paso), complained of the “unwarranted” and “patronizing contention” from Smith and Cohn that “southern historians continue to ignore all interdisciplinary perspectives and even comparative histories.”Footnote ⁵ Other historians reacted similarly to the iconoclastic analysis of the historians of southern women by Tara McPherson in her Reconstructing Dixie. Still others objected to the overly jargonistic bent, random selection of cultural outputs, and occasionally impenetrable prose of post-“everything” literary/cultural studies.Footnote ⁶ Likewise, the grandiose claims that the NSS would transform southern race relations through the “alteration of white identity” or challenge the “neocolonial” relations between the United States and the rest of the Western Hemisphere wearied even historians sympathetic to the concept.Footnote ⁷

Nevertheless, the NSS has been useful to the study of southern history. McPherson's criticisms should keep historians aware of their use of and display of sources. Postcolonial theory too can have some application.Footnote ⁸ As someone working on the Confederacy, I welcome the latest volume in the New Southern Studies series by Coleman Hutchison on Confederate literature and his “situating” of it in the “broader history of global nineteenth-century culture and ideas.” He takes Confederate national literature seriously by moving beyond its aesthetic worth, or lack thereof, to make a valuable contribution to the lively debate on the issue of Confederate nationalism revived by historians such as Sarah Ann Rubin and Aaron Sheehan-Dean.Footnote ⁹ I think, then, that the NSS, even if some find the term a little irritating, will fit comfortably, when useful, in southern history. Those who practice it will in general find, as one theoretically sophisticated historian put it in a review of Reconstructing Dixie, “an appreciative audience within the ranks of southern specialists because they are less tradition-bound than McPherson would have us believe.”Footnote ¹⁰

One hopes, however, that the transnational focus will not make us lose sight of the importance of the local. The South may disappear as a living concept but it has not done so yet and still needs explaining. The recent election of Tim Scott from Charleston, SC on the Republican ticket to the House of Representatives, and his appointment as the first black Republican senator from the South since Reconstruction, as well as Jim Webb's election in Virginia to the United States Senate as a Democrat, highlight that the South can still be a surprising place despite efforts to “Reconstruct Dixie” or dismiss it simply as a part of Red state “Jesusland.” Postcolonial studies must have something to contribute to the understanding of an African American southerner like Scott, from a poor background, who became the hero of the Tea Party and turned political punditry on its head by winning the Republican nomination for the First District of South Carolina in 2010 (beating Strom Thurmond's son to the nomination by thirty points in a runoff), and then being nominated by Indian American, and fellow Tea Party favourite, Governor Nikki Haley, to the United States Senate in 2012.Footnote ¹¹ In Jim Webb's case, I failed to find a single review, essay, or article analysing his Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America under the American Studies category on J-Stor (although John Shelton Reed did review it in the Weekly Standard). There are 166 reviews of it on Amazon.com.Footnote ¹² Is Webb ignored because his work, which is a strident defence of poor southern whites, but in parts attacks Radical Reconstruction and defends the Reconstruction Klan, does not fit the vision of new voices in the post-racial South? Or is it because his 2006 election to the Senate on a platform of strident criticism of George W. Bush makes many reluctant to critique mine enemy's enemy? Scholars of the NSS could examine the rhetoric and publications of those easily dismissed as “Rednecks” or “Uncle Toms” with the same sharp lens (but not “lenticular” ones!) that they turned on, for example, the practitioners of southern women's history.

Traditional southern studies may dismiss too quickly those who do not fit current literary or political taste. David Moltke-Hansen, for example, in discussing William Gilmore Simms's place in American and southern literary studies, worries that important works which help us understand the southern past may be discarded from widespread study, because both stylistically and politically they are antiquated, even offensive . “It will continue to be hard,” he believes, “to urge presentation of points of view many find deeply objectionable and morally reprehensible,” despite the fact “that this means editing our perspectives, voices, and populations fundamental to the shaping of those years.”Footnote ¹³ It would be a shame to leave the future study of “objectionable” southerners just to historians. As Hutchison puts it in his book, “No matter how unsavoury the story, I think it important that it be told,” because “the reactionary voices of Confederate literature – in all their complexity – have a great deal to teach literary studies.”Footnote ¹⁴ New Southern Studies has forced southern literary studies away from the traditional canon to look at other sources offering alternative views of the South, but can it help us look in the most uncomfortable places rather than just the progressive ones?

These uncomfortable places need to be examined with the research skills of a historian, the textual skills of a literary scholar, and the sensitivity of an anthropologist. It needs an integration of the local and the international to be truly comprehensive and, perhaps, useful too. The recent analyses of Northern Ireland are instructive because well-worn historical categories of Catholic/Protestant, Nationalist/Unionist, dominant since the 1920s are no longer enough to understand contemporary situations and culture. Here local contexts have to be considered when trying to interpret regional culture(s). International comparisons with post-Cold War Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and South Africa provided useful lessons, but ultimately it was the understanding of local circumstances that helped reconciliatory concepts such as “parity of esteem” develop among the different traditions in the region.Footnote ¹⁵ One would hope, then, that the NSS would, as Thomas Wolfe put it, “Look Homeward” as well as “Look Away” and incorporate into the usual interpretive paradigms of race, gender, and class concepts such as localism, theology, and personal experiences to get a more nuanced and accurate understanding of the American South. Close study, then, of what people actually say they believe, without attempting to force the evidence to fit neatly into rigid all-encompassing theoretical frameworks, that also takes account of local circumstances while making international comparisons, will move us beyond stereotypical views of the South. Studies of these kinds will help us understand the rhetorical and cultural contexts that create the Jim Webbs and Tim Scotts of the twenty-first-century South.

In recent years, moves to situate the South within a transnational, global context have pushed the boundaries of southern studies through the sustained application of wider theories and paradigms. The field now commonly utilizes postcolonial and postmodern theories and intersects with Caribbean and Latin American studies as it probes the past, the present, and the future of southern culture. Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic had a profound influence on the transnational turn in southern studies, as is evident in texts such as Helen Taylor's Circling Dixie, her illuminating reading of southern culture and its multifaceted journeys across the Atlantic.Footnote ¹ In addition, the application of the key concepts of theorists such as Homi Bhabha and Slavoj Žižek has opened up new approaches to the South, highlighting the region's heterogeneity.Footnote ² While W. J. Cash wrote in 1941 of The Mind of the South, southern studies now demands that scholars engage with the South's many minds and with the many thinkers, writers, travellers, entrepreneurs, and politicians who have imaginatively constructed and reconstructed the region.

Transnational considerations, the cornerstone of the New Southern Studies (NSS), are central to the debunking of southern exceptionalism. Publications including the essays in Suzanne Jones and Sharon Monteith's South to a New Place: Region, Literature, Culture and Jon Smith and Deborah Cohn's Look Away! The US South in New World Studies have paved the way for fresh interrogations of the South, setting a strong precedent for future scholarship and opening up constructive deliberations about teaching southern literature, history and culture.Footnote ³

On the surface, the NSS appears to be dominated by literary studies, with Smith and Cohn's Look Away! and Jones and Monteith's South to a New Place including only one overtly historical essay between them. Indeed, when thinking about this burgeoning field, we commonly turn to literary scholars such as Michael Kreyling, Scott Romine, Leigh Anne Duck and Martyn Bone. However, while many of the significant inroads into the NSS have had a literary bent, those works often depend on historical and cultural debates. Historical accounts of the urbanization of the South, and revisionist histories of key events, including the Civil War, all inform literary debates. The global South is also a prominent topic for historians, as exemplified in James C. Cobb's Globalization and the American South and Harry L. Watson, Carrie R. Matthews and James L. Peacock's edited collection The American South in a Global World, both publications with a strong emphasis on immigration patterns and the history of migrant workers.Footnote ⁴ As new southern studies advances, edited collections may need to include a balance between literary and historical discussions to forefront what is, in actuality, the heavily interdisciplinary nature of southern studies, as championed in John Lowe's Bridging Southern Cultures: An Interdisciplinary Approach and in Jessica Adams, Michael Bibler and Cécile Accilien's Just below South.Footnote ⁵

Discussing the South, just like discussing any region, demands an interdisciplinary approach that encompasses literature, history, religion, economics, politics, race, gender and culture. Southern studies has produced numerous interdisciplinary works that attest to the artificial nature of boundaries that would keep the disciplines apart. Charles Reagan Wilson's Judgment and Grace in Dixie: Southern Faiths from Faulkner to Elvis is just one example of the interdisciplinary approaches that enhance debates about the South.Footnote ⁶ While Wilson's work does not necessarily fall within the remit of “new” southern studies, his interdisciplinary approach epitomizes the multifarious quality of much of the work undertaken in this field. In that work, Wilson employs the photography of Tom Rankin and Susan B. Lee, a common turn amongst southernists since so much of the region's modern history has been captured through a photographic lens. Historians and literary scholars of the Civil War, the Depression and the civil rights movement often utilize visual and cultural theory throughout their arguments, with prominent examples of this interdisciplinary blending in the shape of historian Stuart Kidd's exploration of the fraught nature of FSA photography in his Farm Security Administration Photography, the Rural South, and the Dynamics of Image-Making, 1935–1943, and in Katherine Henninger's Ordering the Façade that aligns photography and southern women's writing to create a thought-provoking discussion of the camera's involvement in the creation of southern narratives.Footnote ⁷ In an increasingly multimedia-orientated world the field's interdisciplinarity is more pertinent than ever, and we can expect to see continued engagement with the ways in which the South is commodified and presented to a global audience.

This point about interdisciplinarity brings to mind one of the strongest factors of the NSS – its willingness to embrace what Scott Romine refers to as a “proliferation of microSouths” that reflects a region that “is mobilized in an increasingly diverse range of cultural projects.”Footnote ⁸ Recognizing the region's micronarratives destabilizes the South's grand narratives and simultaneously expands the idea of who and what constitutes the South. I regard this as a significant flexible approach to the South since throughout my research on West Virginian author Jayne Anne Phillips I experienced resistance amongst some southernists to accept West Virginia's southern credentials, a refusal or hesitation not found amongst NSS scholars. This points to a tension between more traditional southernists and NSS scholars. More traditional southernists seem to fear that the wider cultural considerations of the NSS corrupt a topographically stable idea of the South. Even if a unique, distinct South ever existed, the impact of globalization and the pressures of capital demand that boundaries be read as permeable and unstable, that place be read not as a closed entity with fixed borders but as a shifty, slippery concept that continually evades the brackets imposed upon it. Indeed, in concentrating on what constitutes southernness, a key aspect of the NSS has been the exploration of a “post-South,” with Martyn Bone's The Postsouthern Sense of Place in Contemporary Fiction a leading publication in this area. Exploring the dynamics of a “post-South,” or the impact of global capital on the region, has further troubled the idea of southern distinctiveness.Footnote ⁹

Questioning the effects of global capitalism on the contemporary South joins an important wider debate about southern economic and political changes since World War II. Historical studies such as Timothy Minchin and John Salmond's After the Dream: Black and White Southerners since 1965 and literary studies including Melanie Benson's Disturbing Calculations: The Economics of Identity in Postcolonial Southern Literature, 1912–2002, are central to the critical reevaluation of the impacts of the civil rights movement, Johnson's War on Poverty, and the so called sun-belt South.Footnote ¹⁰ The failures of social, economic and political changes to advance the lives of the South's poor came into stark realization during Hurricane Katrina, as images of the devastated Gulf Coast and the national failure to help New Orleans's poor citizens both during the storm and throughout its aftermath were streamed to a global audience. As a result, southern poverty and its links to global economies remain a fruitful area for consideration.

Ultimately, the significance of the NSS is in little doubt: the fervent appetite for transnational, global studies of the South is unstinting, as evidenced by the University of Georgia Press's New Southern Studies series and the University Press of Florida's conspicuously multidisciplinary new mini-series Understanding the South, the special editions of journals devoted to the subject, and the research grants generated by such projects.Footnote ¹¹ This is an exciting and dynamic period of southern studies, in which scholars are vigorously pushing boundaries and opening up new paths for the future of the field.

When first asked to participate in this forum on the current state of the field of southern studies I thought the wisest thing to do would be to draw attention to the transnational turn in the study of the South as signified by the terms the “global South” or the “hemispheric South.” In the past fifteen years, scholars have published exciting work arguing that the US South was not an exceptional region with its own distinctive culture and history but instead a region that must be situated in a transnational context, linking the familiar analytical categories of region and nation with the world. I was fortunate to participate in some of the earliest gatherings dedicated to this paradigmatic change, including the Postcolonial Theory, the US South, and New World Studies conference sponsored by the American Literature Association/Society for the Study of Southern Literature (2002) and the follow up The US South in Global Contexts symposium held at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi (2004). The organizers and participants at these gatherings demonstrated an interest in bringing postcolonial theory to bear on southern studies, as well as rethinking southern culture and literature in relation to the Caribbean and Latin America.Footnote ¹ In their writings, these academics of the “global South” (the majority of whom are literary scholars) nod explicitly to the master of irony C. Vann Woodward, who observed sixty years ago that “from a broader point of view it is not the South but America that is unique among the peoples of the world.”Footnote ²

Indeed, in 2001, Houston A. Baker Jr. and Dana D. Nelson coined the phrase “the new Southern studies” in the journal American Literature, to describe a field they envisioned as appreciative of “intellectual, multiparticipant, and revisionary complexity” and one that “welcomes the complication of old borders and terrains, [and] wishes to construct and survey a new scholarly map of ‘The South.’”Footnote ³ The recent focus on the “global South” was simply one avenue of inquiry in the broader effort to redefine and move beyond the old southern studies’ fixation on the question of distinctiveness.

Yet only a few years after Houston and Baker's piece, key figures in the New Southern Studies (NSS) declared that the field was no longer “new,” while others have suggested that it may be a problematic academic undertaking on its own. As early as 2008 Leigh Ann Duck called for a “Southern studies without ‘The South.’”Footnote ⁴ In 2013 Jon Smith announced that “‘the South’ is, for me, a meaningless term, naming nothing but fantasies: either a great, 100-million-resident void at the heart of American studies, or a ridiculously strained attempt at identity politics at the heart of old southern studies.”Footnote ⁵ It might seem that the NSS, with its interest in dispelling notions of southern exceptionalism, was on a drive to put itself out of business. For if the South isn't distinctive, why should southern studies as a distinctive discipline continue to exist? In the 2013 newsletter for the Society for the Study of Southern Literature, Leigh Ann Duck, Jon Smith, and Deborah Cohn reflect on the NSS (always speaking in the past tense), and imagine what its future might look like. Duck acknowledges that the NSS has important “institutional recognition” and is now used to delineate essays, panels at conferences, and book proposals and series; she is not willing to call it obsolete, only to state that paradoxically it is an established field but also one continually expanding and wrestling with even newer foci. Cohn and Smith advocate a broad interdisciplinarity and view the NSS as overlapping with such fields as American studies, global southern studies, and critical race studies, although Smith is convinced that “the hemispheric turn is done.”Footnote ⁶ What seems to be at stake now is managing a scholarly movement that exists but does not necessarily want to use “the South” as a specific denotation because it is perceived to be inescapably burdened by the baggage of identity, memory, and distinctiveness.

I would argue that the burden the New Southern Studies still carries, in fact, is its persistence as a default referent for southern literature. The NSS scholars might have fulfilled their mission to render the question of distinctiveness archaic, but they have not fulfilled their commitment to interdisciplinarity. For example, the University of Georgia Press and the University of North Carolina Press developed two new series, The New Southern Studies in 2006 and New Directions in Southern Studies in 2007. The series with Georgia is described by editors Jon Smith and Riché Richardson as “interdisciplinary, methodologically rigorous, and iconoclastic.”Footnote ⁷ Charles Reagan Wilson, a history professor and former director of the Center of the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi, edits the North Carolina series, which “seeks works on … the cultural dimensions of such areas as literature, music, art, folklife, documentary studies, race relations, gender, religion, ethnicity, the environment, language, and social class.”Footnote ⁸ In the list of publications affiliated with the NSS project, historians are poorly represented. Out of twenty-two books only one is written by a self-identified historian and sixteen are written by scholars with a literature background. Although Charles Reagan Wilson is a historian, and the lone historical tome appears in his series, he has stated elsewhere that his goal in reshaping the NSS is to address more broadly the absence of religion and matters of spirituality.Footnote ⁹ It is ironic that the NSS, with its proclaimed commitment to interdisciplinarity, has very few historians affiliated with it, particularly since the field was propelled in part by scholars of the global South who consistently highlight the historian C. Vann Woodward's assertion that the South was a region that shared commonalities with other countries and cultures.Footnote ¹⁰

In addition, almost all of the valuable scholarly conversations on the NSS occur in venues sponsored by the Society for the Study of Southern Literature or in journals such as the Southern Literary Journal, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America (PMLA), American Literary History, and American Literature. In these settings, scholars of the NSS often substitute reflexively the phrases “New Southern Studies” and “southern literature” for each other. Historians appear to have little to no interest in the NSS, neither participating in these discussions nor sponsoring their own. The Journal of Southern History, the Journal of American History, and many of the premier state historical journals are absolutely silent on the topic.

Perhaps it isn't helpful to censure the forerunners of the NSS, because in doing so, as a historian, I am contributing to a caricatured version of what Barbara Ladd once described as “the traditionally close but always testy relationship between southern historians (still reasonably convinced of the authority of historical evidence and the functional transparency of language) and literary and cultural critics (convinced of neither and usually delighted by the potential uncertainty and refiguration).”Footnote ¹¹ My interest is less in laying blame and more in trying to explain where the discipline of history fits into the future of the NSS. It is true that the discipline of history has undergone a revolutionary shift in the past few decades, shaken by the waves of literary theory, cultural studies, queer studies, critical race theory, and American and inter-American studies. Not all historians of the South are open to this influence and some tend to be leery of theory and so-called “jargon.” Those historians whose work more closely aligns with southern studies might self-identify as cultural historians, but in some quarters of the historical profession cultural historians’ work is viewed with suspicion because of their choice of sources and methodologies.Footnote ¹² Likewise, some literary scholars and cultural theorists may view the task of historians as mundane, unimaginative, and beholden to raw empiricism because the discipline of history is saddled historically with the perennial idea of objectivity.Footnote ¹³ This is not to say that there are no literary scholars who are well read in history and incorporate historical context into their work or that there are no historians who engage with literary scholarship. Only that all too often references to interdisciplinarity in the new field of southern studies reflect aspiration or cursoriness rather than reality.

How can we rectify this? There are many fruitful ways in which literary scholars and historians of all persuasions can actively engage with one another. While cultural history has been an integral piece of southern studies, it is essential that historians in all fields be included as well as offer to participate in the NSS dialogue. In broadening the net of historian participants beyond cultural history, the NSS can remain committed to Tara MacPherson's important scholarly entreaty not to “boutique” the South, “focusing on the unique or colorful elements of the region – such as culinary habits or speech peculiarities or southern hospitality – without contextualizing these elements in relation to one another or to wider cultures.”Footnote ¹⁴ Another option is to practice interdisciplinarity through pedagogy.Footnote ¹⁵ Finally, Brian Ward, Martyn Bone, and William Link have organized several international interdisciplinary conferences committed to bringing together historians and literary scholars (including some associated with the NSS) which have resulted in lively edited collections.Footnote ¹⁶

But it seems unlikely that the newest field of southern studies will reveal a true interdisciplinarity if historians and literary scholars cannot agree that there is something known or understood as “the South.” Just because we realize that the South is not now, or never was, distinctive doesn't mean that the discourse about its distinctiveness didn't shape national policies and people's lives inside and outside the South. I am not advocating that southern historians (and not all historians who study the South are willing to identify themselves as such) reinvigorate what I would call old southern history – that is, identify material southern distinctiveness, tracing the assault of southern identity over time, explaining the consumption of southernness, and recycling the never-ending debate over change versus continuity. And if some historians of the South continue to dismiss any scholarship outside these areas as “postmodern” (always loaded for historians with negative connotations and associated with the discipline of literature) then we have no place to go.Footnote ¹⁷ I remain optimistic, however, that we can create a generative academic dialogue with one another as we all presumably share the belief that the South has always been socially constructed and that this constructedness has historical meaning in real people's lives.

In the past few years historical scholarship on the concept of southern exceptionalism has blossomed. This could be a point of future collaboration in the NSS between historians and literary scholars. In my own work, The Problem South, I historicize the early twentieth-century idea of the “southern problem” in a global context during the rise of American imperialism and the consolidation of the regulatory state. My book shows that by abandoning the North–South binary framework that has long dominated the field of southern history it becomes clear that US southern distinctiveness (backwardness) was part of a commonplace discourse about distinctive southern areas in a transnational world. In short, not even the discourse of southern distinctiveness is itself really distinctive. Yet the concept still influenced the development of Progressivism. In The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism, Matthew Lassiter and Joseph Crespino tackle this subject in the post-World War II era. Their introductory chapter, titled “The End of Southern History,” argues that the mythology of an exceptional South “has persistently distorted our understanding of American history,” feeding the legend of American exceptionalism.Footnote ¹⁸ They explain how the rise of modern conservatism and the subsequent political realignment of the United States was not the product of a backward racist white South responding to the civil rights movement and a progressive nation, but rather reflected a national pattern of racism in all areas of the country.

Given the title of their introduction, some might misread Lassiter and Crespino to mean that southern history is retrograde, if not extinct. However, their point is just the opposite. As they write,

In short, the title of the introduction is a provocative reference to what I call the old southern history.

Thus the New Southern Studies can be a field in which historicity matters more than historiography. The discipline of history belongs in the NSS. There can still be a new southern studies with “a South.” It is a manufactured South characterized by abrupt sudden change and fragmentation. It is a systemic, dynamic idea that has implications for lived experience, nationally and internationally.

“You got a job where?!” My family and friends still have not recovered from the shock of receiving the news that I was planning to move to southern Mississippi. It's been six years and some still ask, rather timidly, “so how is it?” Footnote ¹ Their questions never quite address the real issue, racism as branded by the state of Mississippi – Medgar, Emmett, and countless others who were slaughtered in the darkest of Mississippi nights … echoes of fright and flight, Hattiesburg's own martyr Vernon Dahmer.Footnote ² “The scent of magnolia sweet and fresh” reminds them of a time when hate crimes were upheld by law and black folks were open targets for practice.Footnote ³ So (exhale) I live among the dead while striving to breathe new life into the state through my work in African American literature and southern cultural studies. Recovery is crucial for the growth and vitality of southern studies. What I try to salvage from forgotten archives – authors/texts preoccupied by “the Negro problem” – is a pungent salve for healing the wounds of which I speak. Looking back into the South's Jim Crow boyhood at the symbiotic creation of laws and literature, stigmatized bodies, and the gospel of white supremacy is an interdisciplinary method I developed not solely from academic training but from youthful curiosity. The reality of growing up poor and black in rural Alabama among Confederate homes and monuments still well preserved (and revered) at the end of the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries placed me in a conspicuous quandary. How to explain my queer fascination with Confederate culture and slavery, desires to tour antebellum homes, places where my mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother laboured tirelessly? How is my postmodern southernness defined both by and against that which I saw memorialized? With few people left to bear witness – as learned from their own grandparents – the psychological, historical, and literary recovery would begin with an understanding that my academic life in the present South is a necessary contradiction for investigating past and present constructs of a region.

Drawing from New Historicist, postcolonialist, cultural studies and comparative methods of globalization theories, I see this type of recovery taking shape in our current shift towards “new” ways of thinking about southern spaces beyond American borders, turning within to identify indigenous cultures, and allowing for the modern influx of many others. Among those volumes that have mapped southern studies over the last decade, we have reset our compasses according to The American South in a Global World, edited by James L. Peacock, Harry L. Watson, and Carrie R. Matthews; Look Away!, edited by Jon Smith and Deborah Cohn; Just below South, edited by Jessica Adams, Michael P. Bibler, and Cécile Accilien; and South to a New Place, edited by Suzanne W. Jones and Sharon Monteith.Footnote ⁴ Field-defining treatises by Michael Kreyling, John Lowe, and Kathryn McKee and Annette Trefzer have also helped to resituate the South of the past in a global present.Footnote ⁵ They all issued the same call for interdisciplinarity, collaboration among scholars working in divergent fields within southern and American studies.

What these developments show us most critically is how to (re)read texts as they are/were created in a particular time and place especially when southernness is/was under construction. So it may be more than mere coincidence that just as we are looking away – with the “transnational turn” in southern studies – we are also confronted with the motive to look deeper within among the crevices of a re-membered South. Consequently, when asked to identify any “gaps” that remain to be filled in the “New” Southern Studies (NSS), my foremost concern is returning to the nineteenth-century South, traveling back to familiar locations with innovative praxis. My primary analysis of the race problem is localized, in southern environments that evoke African Americans’ experiences of being visibly marked and legally defined as inferior, even as we are inspired to read them in a global vortex theoretically. There is much more terrain to explore in literary studies about the race problem, however, if we consider new perspectives on southern nationalism and American imperialism throughout the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁶ Plantation economies across the Gulf of Mexico offer empirical data to understand slave rebellion, caste hierarchies, and shifting geopolitical boundaries in the southern US comparatively. I am indebted to historians who identify “foreign” solutions to southern problems (e.g. Confederates’ colonizing schemes in the Caribbean or, later, international conferences on the “Negro problem” hosted by southern institutions).Footnote ⁷ These studies inform especially African American writers’ southern consciousness, producing layered narratives about “race,” conflict, and citizenship in the nineteenth century.

Take, for instance, Frank J. Webb's mapping of southern geographies using George Winston's travels in The Garies and Their Friends (1857). Though not a southern author, Webb depicts a mulatto ex-slave, who passes as a white southern gentleman, and becomes an expatriate rather than live under the restrictions of black freedom in the antebellum era. As he was writing the novel, Webb also traveled extensively to Britain (following his first wife's career) and later to Jamaica. His first venture to Rio de Janeiro was postponed in 1855 when he and Mary Webb were barred from sailing; the ship's captain thought the black couple's plans were plotted by abolitionists.Footnote ⁸ (This incident anticipates Homer Plessy's challenge to Louisiana's segregation statutes by the end of the century.) Webb's Brazilian episode seems to have inspired him to send Winston further south to test race relations there anyway.Footnote ⁹

This minor characterization best illustrates how to read narratives of place and identity via the NSS, traveling between the local and the global in the nineteenth century. George Winston's southernness is rooted in the experience of slavery, racial prejudice, and discriminatory laws and social customs not just because he is a mulatto bred in the southern US. His regional identity takes shape in response to and it is altered by racial encounters and cross-cultural associations with a place and people. He traverses permeable North–South boundaries just as the author imagines them and as we acknowledge them today. Interdisciplinary inquiry yields another curiosity: Winston appears as a cultural geographer of the type that Natalie J. Ring finds touring the South in relation to other “exotic” locales, comparing “southern topography and culture,” who “saw no inconsistency” in American imperial designs and domestic affairs of racial conflict.Footnote ¹⁰ Winston essentially is an outsider in the text, an errant member of imagined communities among Louisiana Creoles, free black northerners, and American expatriates in South America. Nineteenth-century historians might locate Winston among populations of free people of color in the colonial Caribbean at the height of southern expansionists’ campaigns (especially in Cuba); like them, Winston is still marked “southern” while in search of freedom and equality in the US and even more so when he travels further south to find a color-blind society.

A case of mistaken identity in the novel illustrates Winston's amalgamated southernness when he is targeted by members of the Vigilance Committee of the Underground Railroad, black bellhops who aid the escape of slaves traveling with their white masters in the North:

While Winston may bear the mark of a (white) southern gentleman in his appearance, his civil behaviour confounds the conmen. They soon learn that catering to his every need in pretence of servility does not impress the guest registered from New Orleans. Winston professes, “I am not one of that kind,” and reprimands the sycophants for their trite minstrel performance.Footnote ¹² I cite this comical incident because the joke is on readers, not just the waiters. Winston does not proclaim his blackness in solidarity with the Vigilance Committee, nor does he disavow his southern heritage. As a historical actor, crossing the color line and moving between slave and free populations, Winston's southernness is best understood in terms of cultural expansion, migration, and creolization in foreign and domestic settings.

George Winston slips in and out of the narrative, interweaving amalgamated spaces – his native Georgia plantation, cosmopolitan New Orleans and Philadelphia, an exotic sojourn in South America – all while remaining conscious of racial problems in the US, defying segregation laws, and challenging us to read his southernness. In this scenario, a body marked by slavery that can travel without detection is not just another racial passing narrative in The Garies and Their Friends; instead, it suggests the kind of cross-cultural pollination that springs forth in the NSS. For a richer analysis of Winston's travels, literary scholars again could turn to historical accounts about the annexation movement for Cuba leading up to the Civil War.Footnote ¹³ Webb transposes the narrative of southern capitalists’ ventures in the 1850s in his depiction of Winston's migration as an expedition of freedom and equality, all while reminding readers of the farther reaches of a possible slavery empire. Ultimately, Winston appears as a southern nationalist and a pan-Africanist in his ability to sustain a cultural identity embedded in a global history of slavery. (We can chart his travels from the Deep South – slave markets and plantations in Savannah and New Orleans – to abolitionists’ headquarters in Philadelphia, to South America, were slavery existed in most countries until the end of the nineteenth century.) Winston's agency and individualism make him an exceptional figure in the novel. He does not remain an exile in South America because he returns in the end to attend the wedding of Charlie Ellis and Emily Garie.Footnote ¹⁴ The string of pearls he brings as a gift unites Webb's plot, allowing for the black expatriate's prosperity and freedom beyond the US and the celebrated return “home.” That most read Winston's experiences as a subplot – to former plantation owner Clarence Garie's tragic life in the city – demonstrates how once marginalized figures must still appear central to southern studies now that we can think about regions more broadly conceived.Footnote ¹⁵

Returning to my own southernness, I'm reminded of how the past compounds the present in my hometown of Gainesville, Alabama.Footnote ¹⁶ Local news coverage of the return of an antebellum bank to its original site did not stir much interest among black residents back home as it did among historical preservationists (read Confederate romancers) in 2006–7. My mama just announced to me one day that “we gettin’ uh bank.” For what? I presumed?! Being in her late seventies then, she offhandedly related that she'd only heard about the bank when she was a child but never remembered it ever being open for business. Beyond that, the Greek revival, white building held no cultural significance to her even as it was renovated at a location near the memorial site of Nathan Bedford Forrest's surrender. I sighed. Not to my surprise, Gainesville's (and the American South's) exalted past – as we imagine and (re)construct it – always returns to remind us of who we think we are and who we are not. Now, are there no greater incentives to continue doing what we must?

Upon being asked to reflect on “new directions in southern studies,” my mind wanders in three directions: sideways, backwards, and toward sex. These wanderings lead me to two observations about the field, and a suggestion for further research.

First, my mind wanders sideways toward my colleagues in history departments. Most American historians are either indifferent about or indignant toward literary criticism, cultural theory, and American studies. The indignation has two basic iterations: “I don't like jargon” and “I just don't care.” Sometimes they are merely being lazy, and sometimes they may be onto something. But the important question of interdisciplinary work remains: what do we have to teach each other?

I am a historian who reads literary criticism; here is my take on how I benefit from it. Cleanth Brooks taught me how to read poetry when I was a teenager, F. O. Matthiessen taught me how to construct an argument, Fred Hobson made me want to become a historian, and the assortment of critics who may or may not be a part of the New Southern Studies (NSS) continually challenge me to be careful and deliberate when I talk about cultural texts.Footnote ¹ When I was conceptualizing and writing my biography of William Alexander Percy, books like Look Away!, South to a New Place, Inventing Southern Literature, The Narrative Forms of Southern Community, Queering the Color Line, and Lovers and Beloveds, among others, shaped my thinking.Footnote ² (It was the historian Hayden White who almost derailed the project – my first draft was so self-conscious about its modes of employment that it had no plot, no narrative, no character, no anything, really.Footnote ³) When I teach students how to close-read evidence in my history classes, I often have the formalist techniques of the New Critics implicitly embedded in my instructions.

Perhaps I have more affinity for literary criticism because my intellectual interests are literary and cultural, and because many people who have written about William Alexander Percy are critics. But I think not, and would make a case that all southern historians would benefit from reading literary criticism. Historians and literary critics have a great deal to say to each other about the things that matter to us: place, region, gender, community, and race, for example. A southern historian writing a local study should read Scott Romine on community; one writing about urban history should read Martyn Bone on place; one writing about southern nationalism should read The Nation's Region; one writing about gender and sexuality might start with Siobhan Somerville (even though her book may not register for some readers as falling in the field of “southern studies”) and Michael Bibler.Footnote ⁴ One experiment would be to read Pippa Holloway's Sexuality and Social Control in Virginia and Gary Richards's Lovers and Beloveds: Sexual Otherness in Southern Fiction alongside one another. The intellectual payoff each hopes for is similar – to explain the delineation, representation, and regulation of sexuality and sexual deviance. They have different source bases and different methodologies, but the big questions overlap. State legislators and literary critics, it turns out, have a lot in common!Footnote ⁵ This points to what should be obvious: on some level, the tasks of the intellectual or cultural historian and the literary critic are the same. They both explain the meaning and significance of ideas and texts by placing them in context. But historians of all stripes can read criticism for its methodological sophistication, its careful reading of textual evidence, and its attention to the structures of cultural logic. At the very least, doing so will (to paraphrase William McNeill) make us leery of the weedy little path that leads down to the antiquarian's gazebo.

Second, my mind wanders backwards in time. The NSS's emphasis on newness makes me worry about what we may be losing in the bargain. I think walking into an English department with my copies of Errand into the Wilderness and Understanding Poetry would be more or less tantamount to walking into a Tea Party debate in Omaha with a tattoo of Che Guevara on my neck.Footnote ⁶ This, I think, has an understandable political basis: critics are duly skeptical of Perry Miller's portrayal of American exceptionalism and the New Critics’ writing of queerness and black women (among others) out of the canon. I agree with this criticism. But now we can reread books like these from a whole new vantage: we can read them simultaneously as primary and secondary texts; we can acknowledge our debt to them even as we are critical of some of the cultural work they have done. At base, what I'm saying is that the field should be marked by an expansive, intellectually generous sensibility. A rigorous, careful sensibility, but also one that has a sense of humility that at least matches its sense of inventiveness.

Another, related, quibble – and this is really a thought about American studies more broadly – has to do with anxiety. As I see it, the field's move toward transnational, multicultural, and hemispheric work over the past thirty years or so has been grounded in a political orientation: a skepticism of nationalism; a desire for a more inclusive definition of “what counts” as object of study; a mistrust of American economic, cultural, and military imperialism; a continued desire for racial and economic justice in the United States; and an awareness of scholarship's implicit collaboration in the creation and maintenance of various inequalities. Self-reflection on the relationship between scholarship and politics has brought about these good shifts toward inclusiveness, and much good scholarship. But it has also produced “state-of-the-field” essays (like this one) at the rate of about one a week. There seems to be an underlying anxiety of situatedness – a nervousness about what American studies, or southern studies, is, and what it should be doing. Far be it from me to suggest we stop being self-critical, but at some point I lose interest in the constant barometer watching. There are texts to explain, stories to tell.

Finally, my mind wanders toward sex. Using the broadest notion of “queer” as that which is different from the norm, most sex throughout southern history has been queer. The intensely regulated norm was an ideal of white, reproductive, monogamous, heterosexual sex within the context of marriage. The reality was that interracial sex, homosex, pre-marital sex, rape, extramarital sex, and commercial sex took place every day in the South. The significance of this is neither prurient nor merely of interest to the social historian. Sexuality is ideology; it is always producing (and being produced by) understandings of race, class, religion, nationalism, gender, and the body. Especially in a culture as ideologically rigid as the American South, all of this transgression needs explaining. Recent scholarship by E. Patrick Johnson, Joshua D. Rothman, Danielle L. McGuire, Hannah Rosen, Crystal Feimster, and myself, among others, has begun to explore the many different iterations of sexual ideology in the South.Footnote ⁷ But my feeling is that this is just a beginning. Historians alone are ill-equipped to do this work, by and large, because of problems with evidence. The traditional methodology of the historian (reading evidence) needs to be paired with the theoretical and conceptual tools that teach scholars how to listen to the silences and evocations of the archive. There can be no empirical histories of sexuality; these will always and necessarily be endeavors informed by theories developed across disciplines. “History,” as Don Doyle has written, “is too important to leave exclusively to historians.”Footnote ⁸

After more than a decade the “New” Southern Studies (NSS) is hardly new anymore. As Leigh Anne Duck has observed, however, it remains very much a “discipline still in the making” within which there are possibilities for “multiple forms of newness.”Footnote ¹ In this forum, as within the discourse surrounding the NSS more generally, this protracted gestation period is reflected in the slipperiness of the terminology applied: does the NSS constitute a “field,” “method,” “discipline,” “subdiscipline,” or “approach”? Can we isolate its key tenets, goals, and methods? Should the geographic focus of its efforts properly be described as the US South (which might exclude southern locales in colonial North America); the American South (which might be deemed unconscionably proprietorial by those working on Latin America); or the global North American South (which is an ugly phrase that risks excluding anyone whose work lacks an explicit comparative or transnational dimension)?

Depending on one's perspective this definitional indeterminacy reflects either the dynamic flexibility of an emergent intellectual “project” (“who, today, would even want a solid – a univocal – new southern studies?” asks Jon SmithFootnote ²) or a lack of analytical precision and common purpose that undermines any claims the NSS might have to being a particularly useful or significant, let alone coherent and institutionally viable, intellectual move. Acutely aware of, and perennially anxious about, these identity dilemmas, NSS proponents, as Benjamin Wise notes, spend a lot of time discussing the “state of the field,” offering new southern studies-flavoured ruminations on Henry Nash Smith's old question “Can American Studies Develop a Method?”Footnote ³ Yet, if Smith's query remains stubbornly vexing for both the NSS and American studies, the contributions to this forum from partisans, fellow travellers, and cautious but intrigued outsiders alike at least allow us to take stock of where among southernists and Americanists the influence of the NSS has been most keenly felt, and where it has so far failed to make much impression.

It is readily apparent from the comments that, for all the invocations of interdisciplinarity, attitudes towards the NSS, like most studies of the US South, still fall along quite traditional disciplinary lines – especially when historians and literary scholars encounter one another. This is not to deny the eclecticism of recent southern studies, regardless of whether the work falls, by intent, appropriation or misunderstanding, within the scope of the NSS. There have been important contributions to our understanding of the region from anthropologists such as James Peacock and sociologists such as Wanda Rushing; from scholars in performance studies such as Kathleen Gough; and those working out of queer and gender studies traditions such as Gary Richards and Riché Richardson.Footnote ⁴ There have also been valuable interventions from the direction of film and media studies by the likes of Allison Graham and Tara McPherson and the contributors to American Cinema and the Southern Imaginary, edited by Deborah Barker and Kathryn McKee. Smart considerations of southern visual and musical cultures by a wide range of scholars such as Katherine Henninger and Helen Taylor, among many others, have also seasoned the disciplinary gumbo that is contemporary southern studies.Footnote ⁵ One could expand this list of the disciplines and subdisciplines which intersect with and inform the NSS almost indefinitely – although there remains a virtual wasteland where serious interdisciplinary study of southern religion and faiths should be. Still, the fact remains that literary scholars have been at the forefront of the NSS project; by and large, southern historians have kept their distance and been rather sceptical whenever they have engaged with the NSS; meanwhile, political scientists, sociologists, and geographers of the South are virtually invisible on this particular intellectual landscape.

Perhaps historians’ reservations about the NSS are not surprising. They are professionally interested in evaluating the causes, nature and extent of changes that take place over time and can usually be relied upon to arch an eyebrow whenever they see the word “new” attached to any phenomenon or analytical model. David Gleeson and Benjamin Wise, for example, query whether the NSS is actually “new” at all and ask what is really at stake with its sometimes strident claims to innovation. Definitions are important here, but even allowing for the diversity of scholars loosely aligned with the NSS, there is some consensus among sympathizers that certain shared imperatives underpin its claims to novelty. Coleman Hutchison links the “relocation of southern studies” to a “newfound and refreshing willingness to question the exceptional quality of the US South,” a move which Sarah Robertson connects to the field's abiding “transnational considerations.” But if claims of innovation are based on efforts to, in the words of Kathryn McKee and Annette Trefzer, “unmoor the South from its national harbor” and place the region in broader global or hemispheric contexts that undermine old notions of southern and American exceptionalism, how new is that agenda, and how new was it even a decade or so ago?Footnote ⁶

Of course, questioning the appropriateness of the nomenclature in this way might be just another example of the unimaginative literalism among historians that sometimes frustrates colleagues in literary and cultural studies. Nevertheless, southern historians can point to a venerable tradition of comparative work and transnational study that has long pursued similar aims – although, as Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie has argued in the context of emancipation studies, there remains an undercurrent of neo-exceptionalism in many comparative histories of the US South.Footnote ⁷ David Gleeson usefully reminds us that there was a good deal of initial enthusiasm among southern historians for the global and comparative thrust of the NSS and its interest in postcolonial theory, not because historians saw these approaches as particularly new, but because they recognized and supported similarly productive methodological moves already taking place within their own discipline. Perhaps the underlying point here is simply that claims of analytical novelty always tend to sound shrill.

Far less jarring and far more useful in this context is Sharon Monteith's observation that the passionate advocacy of transnationalism among a new wave of scholars of southern studies should not be taken

Thus it may be more accurate to think of the NSS as exemplifying and extending, rather than pioneering, a broader transnational turn in American studies.Footnote ⁹ In this formulation, the main achievement of the NSS has been to bring to the study of the US South an interest in transnationalism, postcolonialism and other forms of analysis that have been increasingly influential across the arts, humanities and social sciences, but which had previously struggled to make much impact within southern studies, perhaps especially within southern literary studies.

Claims that the NSS offers something new and valuable to southern and American studies have also been founded on its sustained interrogation of symbolic, imagined or performed Souths. Indeed, Richard King has contended that the NSS has become “primarily an exploration of the way the South has been thought about; that is, it concerns the forms of southern consciousness and consciousness of the South as they have appeared historically.” Consequently, answers to perennial questions about the existence, location, nature and durability of putatively “southern” literatures, identities and cultures tend to focus “not on the South itself but [on] ‘images’ of or ‘representations of’ or ‘conceptualizations of’ the South. There's no South there, only ‘the South.’”Footnote ¹⁰ Using literary, musical and visual cultures, scholars associated with the NSS have done much to illuminate the imaginative and imagined dimensions of southern life and identity, explicating how ideas about and representations of the South and of “southern-ness” have been created, disseminated and consumed within the region and far beyond. As Michael Bibler has observed, this is an area where literary and cultural studies scholars often feel that southern historians have been delinquent, struggling “to think beyond … the most literal circulation of bodies and words within the material record,” and failing to examine the “symbolic economies” that “traveled alongside and often influenced … material changes and relations in the South.”Footnote ¹¹

Yet even here, southern historians might balk at the suggestion that they have ever been so preoccupied with what Natalie Ring calls “raw empiricism,” that they have been collectively indifferent to the importance of “created” or “performed” Souths. They have long been fascinated by the relationships between changing and contested notions of southern identity and social and material reality. Themes of race and gender have always loomed large in southern historiography, and, given that essentialist understandings of those categories of identity are untenable, southern historians have been preoccupied with how various kinds of identity and belonging have been constructed within, across and sometimes in contradistinction to powerful notions of “southern-ness” – a concept which Edward Ayers usefully described in 1996, using language that would not be out of place in the NSS, as “a fiction of a geographically bounded and coherent set of attitudes to be set off against a mythical non-South.”Footnote ¹²

That said, one can detect in David Gleeson's comments echoes of a frequent complaint from historians that NSS scholars are so preoccupied with delineating the performed, or imagined, or fictive South that they pay too little attention to the material conditions and historical circumstances from which a succession of overlapping southern imaginaries and identities have emerged. Even Jon Smith has recently questioned whether the once-productive emphasis within the NSS on the creation and consumption of symbolic and discursive Souths has left a hole where the “real” historical and contemporary South and its inhabitants should be. For Smith, this is at heart a political, perhaps even a moral, imperative: the most useful explorations of symbolic or virtual Souths must be rooted in the material and social relations of the region – themselves intricately connected to myriad global and hemispheric as well as national and local forces – because these southern imaginaries are born of a southern “world of real bodies” where deep economic, racial, gender, class and educational inequalities and injustices, and major environmental issues, need to be addressed.Footnote ¹³ By striking this unabashedly historicist note, Smith actually echoes the avowed intentions of legions of southern historians and social scientists who remain largely indifferent to, or work productively outside, the NSS, but who also hope to elucidate the complex, mutually constitutive relationships between the symbolic and the material South, often within the contexts of wider national or transnational histories.

A related concern among historians is that NSS scholars (like literary, cultural, media, feminist and queer studies scholars more generally, according to the stereotype), can sometimes be too cavalier in generalizing about the South, or about aspects of the region, from close readings of a single text or of a narrow range of texts, or from the works of individual, often quite obscure, artists and singular historic figures. Richard King is not alone in bemoaning a “tendency to ride roughshod over authorial intention and to overread texts.”Footnote ¹⁴ Historians are trained to agonize over the typicality or otherwise of their case studies, to forever wonder about the legitimacy of extrapolating from specifics to generalities in ways which they do not always feel are replicated by their colleagues in literary and cultural studies.

While there may be something to the charge that literary and cultural studies scholars occasionally claim too much on the grounds of too little evidence, historians, economists and political scientists are hardly immune to that interpretive vice. More importantly, this kind of accusation can quickly degenerate into caricature, with historians smugly contrasting their supposed analytical rigour, deep immersion in archival sources, and concern for context with the whimsical, overdetermined readings of randomly selected, highly idiosyncratic texts undertaken by literary and cultural studies scholars. This mythology certainly does a grave disservice to sophisticated scholars associated with the NSS who do demonstrate a firm grasp of the empirical detail; respect for the nature and limits of sources; and a feel for the social, political and economic contexts that historians like to privilege, even as they move into areas of cultural representation and consumption, performance practices, affect and emotion where historians are often less comfortable or adept. At its best, this work brilliantly exposes crude distinctions between southern expressive cultures and the economic, political, social and historical structures that those cultures have simultaneously expressed and helped to create.Footnote ¹⁵

As the comments by Sherita Johnson and Sarah Robertson, in particular, make clear, there is a strong impulse towards interdisciplinarity among the new wave of southern literary scholars who are aligned with or sympathetic to the NSS. They set much store by the need to deploy diverse methodologies to study an equally diverse region, or at least recognize the potential value of juxtaposing works on similar themes from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. Logically, southern historians ought to share this view, although, judging from bibliographies and footnotes, it is probably fair to generalize that southernists from literary backgrounds tend to read a good deal more history than their counterparts in history read in southern literary and cultural studies. This is not to suggest that the writing of southern history has been immune to the lure of interdisciplinarity. It has benefited from critical insights gleaned from anthropology, musicology, sociology, economics, visual-culture studies, film studies, memory studies, political science, literary studies, philosophy, queer studies, sexuality studies, gender studies, psychology, postcolonial studies and countless other disciplines. Indeed, historians continue to explore the South from temporal, evidentiary, interpretive and geographical vantage points every bit as disparate as those deployed by their colleagues in the NSS or in southern literary and cultural studies.

Despite this tradition of inter- and multidisciplinary southern history, however, the sense that the NSS is really at heart a literary and cultural studies project remains strong, perpetuated by the heavy bias towards literature and culture in many edited volumes and book series showcasing the NSS and by the disciplinary affiliations of the majority of participants at flagship NSS conferences where historians and social scientists are invariably a somewhat embattled minority. The tension between the NSS's interdisciplinary intentions and its inability to attract many recruits from beyond literary and cultural studies is apparent within the newsletter of the Society for the Study of Southern Literature (SSSL), a bastion of NSS scholarship. Introducing a 2013 “state-of-the-field” issue, editor David A. Davis offered a clear indication of the NSS's core appeal, commending it principally for bringing “dynamism to southern literary criticism” while “expanding [the South] both as an entity with global resonance and as an ideological space situated primarily in imaginative constructions.” Meanwhile, SSSL president Eric Gary Anderson gamely reiterated the NSS's interdisciplinary ambitions to appeal beyond southern literary circles. In a gracious call for papers to be presented at the organization's 2014 conference, Anderson announced “a capacious, inclusive theme – ‘Other Souths: Approaches, Alliances, Antagonisms’ – which (we hope) will work as a kind of interdisciplinary GPS for southern studies.”Footnote ¹⁶ Anderson's parenthetical phrase speaks volumes.

No wonder, then, that Ring comments on the irony that, despite a debt to historians such as C. Vann Woodward, who long ago questioned the grounds for thinking of the South as exceptional and opened up the region to comparative study, the NSS seems to have both defaulted on its “commitment to interdisciplinarity” and left most historians behind. But whose fault is this, and does it really matter to the quality of work produced either within the NSS or within more traditional strands of southern historical and literary studies, or for that matter southern media, political or religious studies?

In an attempt to explain this estrangement, several commentators note predictable complaints from historians that the NSS is so larded with jargon, so wrapped up in arcane and faddish theoretical constructs, as to be virtually impenetrable to all but a cohort of cognoscenti and therefore of limited value to a broader constituency of southernists. There are a few things worth saying on this matter. First, the NSS has no monopoly on unnecessarily convoluted academic prose which strives for a profundity based not on pioneering research or analytical acuity, but on a gift for neologisms and the “verbification” of perfectly good nouns. It is one of the truisms of modern humanities that so much of the work dedicated to giving a voice to the powerless and forgotten, and to exposing the discourses and power structures which account for their marginalization and oppression, has been written in a language so technically forbidding that only a specialist elite embedded within academia will ever read – and hopefully understand – it. The second point, however, is that complex social, economic, political and cultural themes sometimes require similarly complex theories to explicate them; this, in turn, can necessitate recourse to a highly specialized language. Moreover, as Wise insists, it may be worth southern historians making the effort to grapple with “difficult” language and unfamiliar ideas for interpretive frameworks that will enhance their own work. Failure to engage with the NSS and its heterogeneous theoretical underpinnings denies historians potentially useful insights into how they might go about answering their research questions and, perhaps more crucially, how they might find new questions to ask.

Clearly we should not expect all southern historians to rise to this challenge. As Ring observes, the NSS emerged at a time when history was being “shaken by the waves of literary theory, cultural studies, queer studies, critical race theory, and American and inter-American studies.” The NSS suffered amid widespread antipathy towards, or incomprehension of, a vast array of new theoretical developments that was by no means restricted to historians of the South. Similar resistance has also been apparent among southern literary scholars and literature departments, where the NSS has hardly been universally embraced. Instead, as Sarah Robertson suggests, some traditionalists “seem to fear that the wider cultural considerations of the NSS corrupt a topographically stable idea of the South” upon which their discipline, their departments and their careers have rested quite comfortably. According to Jon Smith, some of those traditionalists, older baby boomers and younger scholars alike, have even tried to accommodate new modes of southern studies to older paradigms, “hedging their bets, writing positive reviews of books from both orientations” – an act of intellectual treachery guaranteed to infuriate the most bullish of NSS advocates for whom it is “logically impossible for new southern studies to be subsumed by the mainstream discourse, as it flatly argues that that discourse is a fantasy.”Footnote ¹⁷ This sort of doctrinal correctness, where passionate advocacy of a particular perspective slips into a defensive kind of dogmatism, does not leave too much room for dialogue within, let alone across, disciplines; it shuts down, rather than opens up, possibilities for useful discussion and debate about the existence, nature and meanings of “the South” beyond a circle of true believers.

So where does this all leave the NSS, southern studies, and the American studies community after a decade or more of scholarship and reflection? At a fundamental level, it is hard to quibble with the proposition that within southern studies, as within American studies, there can never really be too much interaction across disciplinary lines. After all, scholars of many stripes are engaged in a common quest to define and understand – or occasionally to disavow the very existence of – the South in a variety of temporal, geographic (regional, imperial, national, hemispheric, global) and thematic contexts. This shared project, as Sherita Johnson and Sarah Robertson insist, and as Eric Gary Anderson might “hope,” cries out for research, reading and talking across disciplinary divisions. This does not obviate the value of more traditional, unidisciplinary approaches to aspects of the South. We can still learn much about the region and its hemispheric and global relationships from scholars whose work sits largely or exclusively within a single discipline. And yet, ultimately, our collective efforts to explain and understand the contours of the various Souths that have been proclaimed, imputed and performed in art and culture; rooted in the environment; etched in maps; codified in laws; shaped and reshaped by migrations and economic forces; and fashioned by ideological and political struggles stretching across centuries, oceans and continents can only be enhanced by entertaining a similar variety of approaches to the region.

In conclusion, there seems to me to be much wisdom in Coleman Hutchison's mature assessment that the NSS actually “engages a series of rather old-fashioned questions about place, belonging, and community,” and that any claims to novelty really come from its “ability to grant senses of place, belonging, and community a broader context, to expand, that is, the angle of vision by which we view the US South.” The challenge for those working in southern and American studies is always to expand that angle of vision further, to simultaneously see and explain ever more things, without losing focus. From the commentaries in this forum, two thoughts come to mind as to how this might be done. The first involves the call from Gleeson, Hutchison and Johnson for a temporal shift. The NSS initially anchored itself in modern topics, in part as a reflection of its overarching politics and concern to engage with contemporary debates about regional and national identities and issues of social and economic justice in an increasingly globalized world. In future, however, more attention might be paid to the nineteenth-century South and even to the nascent South of the eighteenth century and the early republic. Recent work by Hutchison, Johnson, Jennifer Rae Greeson and Christopher Hanlon suggests that this shift is already under way and poised for further growth.Footnote ¹⁸

The second thought is to reaffirm the value of local studies of the South without rejecting the importance of transnational perspectives: a juggling act which is as important for American studies as it is for southern studies. Some of the most valuable NSS scholarship has situated the region effectively within global and, especially, hemispheric and Atlantic frameworks. In particular, the work of Deborah Cohn, George Handley and the contributors to the collections Look Away! The US South in New World Studies, Just below South and The American South and the Atlantic World – by no means all of whom would self-identify as being part of, or even sympathetic to, the NSS project – have made us more sensitive to the South's manifold links with the Caribbean, South America, and African and European locations around the Atlantic rim.Footnote ¹⁹ However, when faced with the daunting challenge of tracing global or hemispheric or circumatlantic connections, with all that requires in terms of language facilities and mastery of multiple histories and cultural traditions, local “granular” studies, or what Sarah Robertson refers to as “micronarratives” of the region, can be particularly fruitful. Close attention to distinct themes, individuals, groups and places, or to particular modes of religious and artistic expression, can actually allow us to explore how much larger regional, national, hemispheric and global forces have flowed in and out of the South.Footnote ²⁰ In this way we can challenge reductive grand narratives of the region and see more clearly how specific groups and individuals, ecologies and places, cultures and economies have been simultaneously co-architects and products of southern, national and international histories. Along the way, we can also hope to do justice to the experiences, dreams, illusions and contested identities of real human beings, living in real places, at particular times, rescuing them from the excessive abstraction of those grand theories which can, in so many other ways, help us to understand them better.