Violence, the Body and the South

Violence, the Body, and The South is a boldly innovative contribution to a new Southern Studies, which provides a model of collaborative, intergenerational, interracial, interdisciplinary scholarship. This issue challenges the traditional division of the United States between North and South, revealing that the complexities of violence and pleasure, representation and illusion, innocence and guilt, gender and race exist in infinitely inflected combinations in the Americas, not simply in the South.This collection presents first-rate examples of gender, critical race, genre, and material culture studies. Topics range from epistemological and authorial rebellions marking Frederick Douglass's Narrative and Charles Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition to the twentieth-century labors of writers such as Francisco Goldman and Helena Maria Viramontes, who work to make visible the complexities of North and South with respect to subordinated Latino/a bodies. William Faulkner is revisited in an essay on the internalization of race in Light in August. Guess Who's Coming to Dinner and In the Heat of the Night are analyzed in a framework of homopolitical desire. Genre and regional studies combine in an energetic essay resituating Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl with respect to Northern fiction.