Year: 2014
Type: article
Abstract: In the past ten to fifteen years, critical understandings of regions and, concomitantly, regionalist approaches to literature and culture have undergone considerable changes.Studies such as Laurie Ricou's The Arbutus/Madrone Files (2002) or Claudia Sadowski-Smith's Border Fictions (2008), for instance, have focused on spaces and cultures that cross and crystallize around North American national borders, thereby questioning traditional, which is to say national, delineations of region.Even earlier, writers such as Gloria Anzaldúa (1987) redrew the boundaries of established concepts of region and nation, thus showing that what used to be seen as the fringes of North American literary and cultural studies could become the new center.In other areas, too, regional boundaries have come under critical scrutiny: for example, recent scholarship on both the U.S.-American West and the U.S.-American South has tended to highlight the complexity, fluidity, and mobility of these spaces.In the preface to a special issue of American Literature on "Violence, the Body and 'The South'" (2001), Houston A. Baker Jr. and Dana D. Nelson coin the term "new Southern studies" (231) and call for a "complication of old borders and terrains [as well as] wishes to construct and survey a new scholarly map of 'The South'" (243).Numerous critics, including Martyn Bone, James L. Peacock, Scott Romine, and Michael Kreyling, have since taken up Baker's and Nelson's challenge, generally interrogating and deterritorializing the idea or myth of the U.S. South.As for the West, Susan Kollin, in Postwestern Cultures (2007), invites critics to work "against a narrowly conceived regionalism, one that restricts western cultures of the past and present to some predetermined entity with static borders and Introduction: Transnational Approaches to North American Regionalism
DOI: 10.4000/ejas.10402
Authors: Florian Freitag, Kirsten A. Sandrock
Institutions: Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, University of Göttingen
Language: English
Subfield: History
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W71194202