This book explores how an eclectic range of narratives and images of the American South have been created and consumed—indeed, often created for consumption. The thirteen essays orient our attention to the ways in which ideas and stories about “the South” and “southernness” have social and material effects that register on various local, regional, national, and transnational scales. Like the two previously published volumes in this series, Creating Citizenship in the Nineteenth-Century South and The American South and the Atlantic World (both 2013), Creating and Consuming the American South br ... More

This book explores how an eclectic range of narratives and images of the American South have been created and consumed—indeed, often created for consumption. The thirteen essays orient our attention to the ways in which ideas and stories about “the South” and “southernness” have social and material effects that register on various local, regional, national, and transnational scales. Like the two previously published volumes in this series, Creating Citizenship in the Nineteenth-Century South and The American South and the Atlantic World (both 2013), Creating and Consuming the American South brings southern historians into dialogue with literary and cultural studies colleagues associated with the New Southern Studies. However, this collection also includes scholars who do not identify as “southernists,” and who approach the subject from a variety of other disciplinary perspectives, including American studies, performance studies, jazz studies, and queer studies. The book is organized into three parts. Part one showcases three wide-ranging conceptual essays by leading scholars in southern history and the New Southern Studies. Part two of the book features five innovative case studies of the South’s creation and consumption, from blues festivals and jazz venues to sites of sexuality and the creative economy of post-New Orleans. The five essays in Part three consider the transnational routes through which the South has been circulated, (re)created, and consumed, including Vietnamese immigration, William Faulkner’s State Department travels, and British cinematic and musical productions.