Race and the Multiple Souths in the Long Nineteenth Century

Approaching the US South as an imagined community with various meanings in different geographical areas and historical periods, FES 17 special issue explores the racialized and gendered representations that emerge from a multiplicity of literary works by American writers of African descent during the long nineteenth century. The focus on the long nineteenth century aims to foreground narratives, interpretive traditions, and theorizations that have tended to result in stereotyped and often derogatory definitions of the South. Written by scholars based on both sides of the Atlantic, the essays grapple with American Souths, European Souths, and speculative Souths, questioning the familiar contrastive North v. South binary and problematizing the long-standing sectional hierarchies that have influenced the interpretation and canonization of African American literature in ways that are still operative in the twenty-first century.