As scholars expand our understanding of the US South as both a diverse region and a constructed idea of region, some have argued that continuing to focus on questions of southern identity can limit scholarship by leaving too many old assumptions about the region in place. Some have even suggested doing away with “southern” altogether and subsuming southern studies within larger fields such as American or transnational studies, environmental studies, and so on. But, as these two books by Patricia G. Davis and Tison Pugh demonstrate, southern identity remains a deeply tenacious and contested matter that cannot be set aside so easily, not just in scholarship but also in the social, political, and creative lives of those not historically granted access to that identity, particularly southern African Americans and southern queers. The label “southerner” has traditionally been reserved for white southerners who are also, by implication, religious, conservative, and heterosexual....
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Laying Claim: African American Cultural Memory and Southern Identity
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June 1, 2020
Book Review|
June 01 2020
Laying Claim: African American Cultural Memory and Southern Identity
Precious Perversions: Humor, Homosexuality, and the Southern Literary Canon
Laying Claim: African American Cultural Memory and Southern Identity
. By Davis, Patricia G.. Tuscaloosa
: Univ. of Alabama Press
. 2016
. xiv, 216 pp. Cloth, $34.95; e-book, $34.95.Precious Perversions: Humor, Homosexuality, and the Southern Literary Canon
. By Pugh, Tison. Baton Rouge
: Louisiana State Univ. Press
. 2016
. xii, 218 pp. Cloth, $38.00; e-book, $38.00.
Michael P. Bibler
Michael P. Bibler
Michael P. Bibler is the Robert Penn Warren Associate Professor at Louisiana State University. He is author of Cotton’s Queer Relations: Same-Sex Identity and the Literature of the Southern Plantation, 1936–1968 (2009) and has published in numerous books and journals.
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American Literature (2020) 92 (2): 382–384.
Citation
Michael P. Bibler; Laying Claim: African American Cultural Memory and Southern Identity
Precious Perversions: Humor, Homosexuality, and the Southern Literary Canon. American Literature 1 June 2020; 92 (2): 382–384. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-8267840
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