Where the New World Is
Literature about the U.S. South at Global Scales
Title Details
Pages: 306
Illustrations: 6 b&w images
Trim size: 6.000in x 9.000in
Formats
Paperback
Pub Date: 05/01/2020
ISBN: 9-780-8203-5787-4
List Price: $34.95
Hardcover
Pub Date: 01/15/2018
ISBN: 9-780-8203-5186-5
List Price: $67.95
Web PDF
Pub Date: 01/15/2018
ISBN: 9-780-8203-5185-8
List Price: $67.95
Series
Where the New World Is
Literature about the U.S. South at Global Scales
How the humanities can help us understand globalization and immigration—the paramount realities in the twenty-first-century U.S. South
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- Description
- Reviews
- Awards
Where the New World Is assesses how fiction published since 1980 has resituated the U.S. South globally and how earlier twentieth-century writing already had done so in ways traditional southern literary studies tended to ignore. Martyn Bone argues that this body of fiction has, over the course of some eighty years, challenged received readings and understandings of the U.S. South as a fixed place largely untouched by immigration (or even internal migration) and economic globalization.
The writers discussed by Bone emphasize how migration and labor have reconfigured the region’s relation to the nation and a range of transnational scales: hemispheric (Jamaica, the Bahamas, Haiti), transatlantic/Black Atlantic (Denmark, England, Mauritania), and transpacific/global southern (Australia, China, Vietnam). Writers under consideration include Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, John Oliver Killens, Russell Banks, Erna Brodber, Cynthia Shearer, Ha Jin, Monique Truong, Lan Cao, Toni Morrison, Peter Matthiessen, Dave Eggers, and Laila Lalami.
The book also seeks to resituate southern studies by drawing on theories of “scale” that originated in human geography. In this way, Bone also offers a new paradigm in which the U.S. South is thoroughly engaged with a range of other scales from the local to the global, making both literature about the region and southern studies itself truly transnational in scope.
—Harilaos Stecopoulos, author of Reconstructing the World: Southern Fictions and U.S. Imperialisms, 1898–1976
—Matthew Pratt Guterl, author of Seeing Race in Modern America
—Anne Stefani, Journal of Southern History
—Amy Clukey, ALH Online Review
Runner-up
C. Hugh Holman Award, Society for the Study of Southern Literature