Competing theories of “place” have never stopped being a central concern in the study of the South. Thadious Davis's impressive new book is a valuable and timely contribution to this ongoing scholarly conversation. Davis has been a very influential figure in the development of the discourse within southern studies since the publication of Faulkner's “Negro”: Art and the Southern Context (1982). The seminal contribution of Southscapes to the discourse surrounding southern “place” emerges from his detailed and comprehensive application of spatial theory to African American southern authors through the twentieth century to the present day. The title of the book is a term coined by the author to denote “a geography of race and region” as Davis uses “Southscape” to “call attention to the South as a social, political, cultural, and economic construct but one with the geographic ‘fact of the land’” (2). Given that “the South” is a very difficult concept to pin down, this definition is better and more precise than most. To Davis, African American literary representations of southern spaces are inherently subversive since “any space occupied by people of African descent in America is contested” (185). This contested space is presented in terms of both the physical geography of Mississippi and Louisiana and the figurative space of “segregation [as the] social geography underpinning” the analysis of these authors (26). These contributions signal Davis's volume as an important intervention in southern studies.

Davis's analysis addresses not only the politicized space within the South but also the history of migration from the South, especially to Europe. Encompassing a rich array of historical periods and literary forms, Davis traces patterns of migration to Paris across the work of Richard Wright and on through to Shay Youngblood in order to highlight the continuity of theoretical approaches to space within southern writing. Youngblood is among a number of frequently overlooked southern authors who come to the fore in Southscapes; another is North Carolinian Randall Kenan, whose debut novel A Visitation of Spirits (1989) is compellingly paired with Ernest Gaines's corpus. Davis's balance of the critically privileged with the critically neglected constitutes a distinct strength in Southscapes, one which allows the author to lay the foundations for an alternative canon within southern literary studies.

Southscapes is at least as concerned with “the exclusions that segregate black writers” within the study of southern literature as with the political exclusion of African Americans in the South (311). In this respect, the study has mixed success. While the introduction of previously overlooked southern writers into the discourse and the reimaginings of canonical authors such as Wright are very welcome, Davis's strategy of decentring the tradition of white southern literature is sometimes less convincing than it could be. This is most evident in the final and most provocative chapter of Southscapes, “Alice Walker Matters.” Davis calls for a southern studies with Walker at its centre. Davis signals Walker as pivotal to the development of southern literature on the ground that, like Wright before her, she “initiates a discourse” of racialized space in the South (357). While the desire to mark a shift in the racial configuration of southern studies in theory is important and welcome, it poses some problems in practice.

Arguing that Walker should replace William Faulkner in conceptions of the literary South, Davis concludes that although Faulkner

Walker's innovative perceptions of the raced and engendered southern body are, to Davis, the best foundation for southern studies going forward. The conservative idea of Faulkner as the font of southern fiction has been destabilized since at least the 1980s – including Davis's own groundbreaking work on Go Down, Moses (1942) – however, study of the author continues to characterize southern literary studies as it develops into considerations of Faulkner's political complexity. Due to new critical vocabularies – provided by Leigh Anne Duck, John N. Duval and others – according to which Faulkner is understood as racially white and politically ambivalent, Walker's significance is not diminished by the persistence of Faulkner in the canon. In this regard, it is hard to imagine southern literary studies developing as it has without the important intellectual positions that have formed around the author's work through the twentieth century.

Davis's conversational writing style is perfectly pitched and makes a very lengthy book a pleasure to read. Southscapes expertly demonstrates how the South's “‘racial geography’ results from practices of power and of privilege inscribed in law and custom, but which historically and socially have mandated a one-dimensional narrative of U.S. space and black bodies within that configuration” (186) by recourse to a remodulated canon of African American southern writers and a parallel canon of important spatial theorists.