Reflect – renew – refresh

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Imperfectly imperial : northern travel writers in a postbellum American south, 1865-1880

Between the years 1865 and 1880, more travelers than in any period outside the Civil War streamed to an American South to write of the region. Through these writings, a literate Northern readership learned of a postwar South, a newly re-annexed territory of the United States. In this thesis, I argue that contextualizing these travel accounts and the region of the South itself as complicit with broader discourses of Western imperialism is a productive way to examine both the history and the places of Southern Reconstruction. Additionally, I contend that the tensions written through these travel narratives around the very ways travelers scripted Southern scenes are themselves constitutive elements of a Southern identity and history. Moving through discussions of three particular themes found throughout these postbellum travel accounts - discourses of civilization, descriptions and representations of 'nature' and landscape, and encounters with rural white poverty, this thesis examines the ways Northern travelers grappled with the South's 'double placement' within an imperial framework. Simultaneously an occupied imperial territory of the United States and part of the United States itself, a postbellum South was paradoxically situated in reference to both 'the North' and 'the nation' at large, a tension found throughout these travel writings. Through these discussions, this thesis endeavors to provide a critical engagement with textual representations of a postwar South, representations typically treated in a very superficial and quite straightforward manner. Arguing for a very different treatment of these texts, I attempt to show that situating them within an imperial framing provides a new look at old stories about Southern occupation and Reconstruction in the midnineteenth century.Arts, Faculty ofGeography, Department ofGraduat

New Pasts: Historicizing Immigration, Race, and Place in the South

Stan Schnier, Women hold Mexican and American flags at the final Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride event, Flushing Meadows Corona Park, New York, New York, October 4, 2003. In the last two decades, immigrants, especially those from Latin America, have transformed key aspects of the US South. As recent Latino immigrants seek to make sense of their experiences in the South, they call into question how southern histories are mobilized to define and interpret the present, how southern pasts are rendered accessible and meaningful, and how new groups gain or lose legitimacy as “southern.” Through an analysis of three vignettes drawn from ongoing research on Latino migration to the South, this essay illustrates the entanglements of southern past, present, and future with the narratives of growing immigrant populations. Greater exchange between southern studies and studies of immigration, we suggest, can complicate the black-white racial binary through which “the South” has been represented and stabilized as a coherent and distinctive place. As Latino men and women create new mappings in and of the South, studies of Latino experiences help transform and enliven southern studies

The US South in Global Contexts

Amid current attempts at resituating Southern Studies in new geographical, theoretical and pedagogical contexts, the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi hosted a symposium that brought together a diverse group of scholars to discuss "The US South in Global Contexts." This interdisciplinary conference engaged, not only the changing outlines of geography and the trends of demography, but current discussions of identity, transnationalism, and regionality. Southern Spaces presents short excerpts from the keynote addresses of the conference, as well as samplings of the roundtable talks given by several of the scholars in attendance. Symposium participants plan to publish the proceedings of this event. For further information, contact the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at [email protected]