AMST 545 - The Making of a Region: Southern Literature and Culture

Fall 3 Donaldson.

The U.S. South has long functioned as a repository of national anxieties, failings, and backwardness, the “exception” to the American narrative of freedom, success, and progress by virtue of its defining features of slavery, segregation, economic exploitation, and endemic violence. This course will focus on the role of the region as the nation’s imaginative borderlands in the aftermath of the Civil War and emancipation, when definitions of regional and national identity were undergoing radical realignment along with reformulations of family, community, race, and racialization. Making use of narratives, nonfiction, film, history, and visual representations, we’ll examine the highly contested arena of Reconstruction, the rise of Jim Crow, contending narratives over memory and ownership of the past, visual and verbal critiques of segregation, Civil Rights battles, and postmodern reclamations and reconstructions of a region that continues to struggle with its long legacy of cultural abjection and marginalization.