Southscapes

“For any explorer of American literature and culture, Southscapes is a literary cartography that maps the social spaces black poets and writers in the United States South have constructed over the last fifty years.” — Journal of American Culture

“Elegantly combining cultural geography, postmodern theory, literary history, and a vast archive of African American activism, Davis’s method reminds readers that the peculiar generative power of the South lies in the contradictory local narratives about it, narratives that interrupt one another at every point.” — American Literature

“[A] complex and engaging work.” — Tennessee Libraries

“Davis’s impressive new book is a valuable and timely contribution to this ongoing scholarly conversation.” — Journal of American Studies

“Literary scholars will find the readings in Southscapes rich and detailed and there is ample treatment of new southern talent here.” — Southern Literary Journal

“Opens up ways to not only view the South as a physical place, but it also allows for ways to view the Global South. . . . The breadth of this work is extraordinary.” — Louisiana History

“Thadious Davis’s Southscapes will be hailed as a paradigm shift in both southern and African American studies. Her call for a more inclusive conception of the South could not be timelier. Employing a sophisticated critical arsenal drawn from spatial and geographic scholarship, Davis maps a new terrain for the study of both canonical and newly prominent writers, especially poets. Southscapes will lead to previously unsuspected approaches to southern culture and to a sense of excitement about the new horizons of perception Davis so brilliantly reveals.” — John W. Lowe, Louisiana State University, editor of Bridging Southern Cultures: An Interdisciplinary Approach

“Bold, brilliant, and beautifully written, Thadious Davis’s Southscapes is a monumental accomplishment. Within these pages, Davis, one of our most insightful and important literary scholars, is historian and theorist, critic and poet. She engages contemporary cultural geography, the new southern studies, and African American literary studies to produce a work that will transform our thinking about all three. Along the way, she insists that we reconsider the South as the place from which African Americans have asserted their claims as citizens and as subjects, and that we situate black southern writers at the very center of all analyses of southern writing and culture, both in its local and global contexts. In so doing, she makes clear the long-standing and ongoing lacunae in scholarship about the region. An original and magnificent contribution, Southscapes is sure to define the way we think about the South and southern writing for years to come.” — Farah Jasmine Griffin, professor of English and comparative literature and African-American studies, Columbia University

“In this expansive book, Thadious Davis reminds us that politics, culture, and history grow literally from the ground up. This is starkly apparent in the world of the South, dependent as it has been on the placement — both geographical and existential — of bodies by that most physical of markers, race.” — Henry Louis Gates Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, Harvard University

“How fitting that a book fundamentally about space is itself so roomy and expansive. While finely attending to the intimate particulars of a complex and irreducible region, Southscapes ranges over a vast stretch of territory, within and far beyond Mississippi and Louisiana. This truly elegant book should be read by all who would understand the persistence of race in ordering and delimiting space, 'place,' and social practice. Southscapes redraws the map of the 'new' southern studies, extending its reach in infinite directions.” — Deborah McDowell, Alice Griffin Professor of English, University of Virginia