Series Editors: Jaime Harker and Michael P. Bibler
Radical Souths reclaims and reprints some of the most revolutionary works of southern literature from the twentieth century. The fight for racial, sexual, economic, and political justice in the South has always been a home-grown struggle led by southerners themselves, and southern writers have always turned to the power of literature to bring those ideals to life. The series makes key texts from this radical tradition available to a wider audience, giving these voices of antiracist, queer, feminist, and socialist protest renewed urgency and authority.
Since the 1990s, the stories we tell about the South and southern literature have changed dramatically. Literary critics have thoroughly challenged the myth of a monolithic South that is predominately conservative, white, and backward-lookingg. And the literary marketplace has seen an explosion of southern works by Black, brown, Asian, Latinx, Indigenous, immigrant, working-class, and LGBTQ+ writers. But the roots of this multifaceted, multicultural South run deep. Radical Souths fills the much-needed role of reprinting earlier works that not only highlighted the region’s cultural and historical complexity but also directly advocated for a more progressive South that would embrace and protect that diversity well into the future.
The voices in this series are the true rebels of the South: authors and characters pushing to reimagine and remake the region into a place where they can live freely, openly, and without apology. At a time when the South is still embroiled in battles over inequality, poverty, violence, votes, and censorship, we need these uncompromising literary voices. Whether you are a student, an activist, or just a fan of southern literature, the compelling stories told by these remarkable southern writers will keep you coming back to the books of Radical Souths again and again.
Series Editors
Jaime Harker is professor of English and director of the Sarah Isom Center for Women and Gender Studies at the University of Mississippi, where she teaches American literature, LGBTQ literature, and gender studies. She is the author or coeditor of several books, including The Lesbian South: Southern Feminists, the Women in Print Movement, and the Queer Literary Canon, Middlebrow Queer: Christopher Isherwood in America, and This Book Is an Action: Feminist Print Culture and Activist Aesthetics. She is also the founder of Violet Valley Bookstore, a queer feminist bookstore in Water Valley, Mississippi.
Michael P. Bibler is associate professor of English at Louisiana State University. He is the author of Cotton’s Queer Relations: Same-Sex Intimacy and the Literature of the Southern Plantation, 1936-1968 and coeditor of Just Below South: Intercultural Performance in the Caribbean and the U.S. South and the first-ever reprint of Arna Bontemps’s 1939 novel Drums at Dusk. He has also published essays on a wide variety of topics, including modern dance adaptations of William Faulkner, the ecopolitics of plantation museums, Hurricane Katrina, and the “tacky South.”
