Journal Article

Screening the Twenty-First-Century South

NUNN, ERICH

2016

Overview

Our understandings of early moments of southern literature and culture share some common frameworks. Representations (including self-representations) of the South in the nineteenth century, for example, revolve largely around plantation slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. Similarly, we might think about the twentieth-century South as defined by Jim Crow segregation, the out-migration of blacks and working-class whites, and the civil rights movement and its aftermath. What are the issues, then, that structure the twenty-first-century southern imaginary? To what extent does it make sense to talk about “the South” as a unified conceptual, ideological, or geographic place? What does it mean to read, watch, listen to, study, and teach southern literature and culture in the twenty-first century? What do we mean by the terms southern and literature ? What cultural forms and media are central to understanding twenty-first-century southern culture? What is the utility of the literary? How do southern literature and culture relate to the nation as a whole?

• Publisher: Modern Language Association of America,Cambridge University Press
• Subject: Adjust Your Maps: Manifestos from, for, and about United States Southern Studies / Families & family life / Reality programming / Television / Television programs