Synopses & Reviews
In this innovative approach to southern literary cultures, Thadious Davis analyzes how black southern writers use their spatial location to articulate the vexed connections between society and environment, particularly under segregation and its legacies.
Basing her analysis on texts by Ernest Gaines, Richard Wright, Alice Walker, Natasha Trethewey, Olympia Vernon, Brenda Marie Osbey, Sybil Kein, and others, Davis reveals how these writers reconstitute racial exclusion as creative black space, rather than a site of trauma and resistance. Utilizing the social and political separation epitomized by segregation to forge a spatial and racial vantage point, Davis argues, allows these writers to imagine and represent their own subject matter and aesthetic concerns.
Focusing particularly on Louisiana and Mississippi, Davis deploys new geographical discourses of space to expand analyses of black writers' relationship to the South and to consider the informing aspects of spatial narratives on their literary production. She argues that African American writers not only are central to the production of southern literature and new southern studies, but also are crucial to understanding the shift from modernism to postmodernism in southern letters. A paradigm-shifting work, Southscapes restores African American writers to their rightful place in the regional imagination, while calling for a more inclusive conception of region.
Review
"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
Review
"[A] complex and engaging work."--###Tennessee Libraries#
Review
"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
Synopsis
In this provocative approach to southern literary cultures, Thadious Davis analyzes how black southern writers use their spatial location to articulate the vexed connections between society and environment, particularly under segregation and its legacies. Basing her analysis on texts by Ernest Gaines, Richard Wright, Alice Walker, Natasha Trethewey, Olympia Vernon, Brenda Marie Osbey, and others, Davis reveals how these writers reconstitute racial exclusion as creative black space, rather than a site of trauma and resistance.
About the Author
Thadious M. Davis is Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought and professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania.