What the New Southern Studies Does Now

For fifteen years, the New Southern Studies (NSS) has been doing battle on two very different fronts. To Americanists, we have tried to talk about what Houston Baker and Dana Nelson, in the essay that named the movement, called "the national formation of the United States and the dynamics of race, region, and citizenship entailed by, as it were, a putatively split and decidedly Manichean geography"; to southernists, we have talked about the need to get beyond what the same pair of writers called "our familiar notions of Good (or desperately bad) Old Southern White Men telling stories on the porch, protecting white women, and being friends to the Negro". Although in both struggles we keep bumping up against putatively objective scholars' unacknowledged and deeply self-serving fantasies about who "we" are (whether as "Americans" or "southerners", "radical" Americanists or Atticus Finch-y liberal white southernists), the former arguments - as Baker and Nelson's diction suggests - have tended to be more abstract, theoretical, ambitious, interesting, and smart; the latter, in contrast, have always felt like a rearguard action. Copyright © Cambridge University Press and British Association for American Studies 2015.