Ex-Centric Souths: (Re)Imagining Southern Centers and Peripheries

By AAVV

"Ex-Centric Souths: (Re)Imagining Southern Centers and Peripheries" adds a voice in ongoing attempts to chart new routes and to decenter the South in many ways in the hope of exploring Southern identity and multiple Souths. The articles collected in this volume bring to the forefront the translocal and transnational connections and relationships between the South and the circum-Caribbean region; they address the changing nature of Southernness, and especially its sense of place, and finally they investigate the potential of various texts to narrate and revisit regional concerns. Some contributions hold up to view topics ignored and marginalized, while other decontextualize themes and issues central to Southern studies by telling alternative histories.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Publicacions de la Universitat de València
• Release date: Feb 4, 2020
• ISBN: 9788491345633

Book preview

PART I

TRANSNATIONAL SOUTH: THE CARIBBEAN CONNECTION

Imagining the South Through the Caribbean:

Spatial Narratives of Liberty

in the Novels of Holcombe and Livermore

Deniz Bozkurt-Pekar

Leipzig University, Germany

The notion that the US South, especially its most southern and coastal regions, including Florida, Louisiana, and Texas, function as a cultural extension of the Caribbean is no longer an innovative position in academia. Not only scholars of American and Southern Studies, like Vera Kutzinski (in cultural terms, the southernmost parts of the United States are really rimlands of the Caribbean (Kutzinski 61)) and John Wharton Lowe (the U.S. South ... is in many ways the northern rim of the Caribbean), acknowledge a socio-geographical and cultural link between the South and the Caribbean. Other fields including sociology, history, and political science also contribute to this established notion. As Lowe notes, Immanuel Wallerstein, too, in his seminal work on the historical developments of modern global capitalism identifies an "‘extended Caribbean’ and maps an area reaching from Brazil to Maryland, recognizing the transnational spread of the plantation economy that gripped the New World from its inception well into the twentieth