Finding Purple America The South and the Future of American Cultural Studies 2nd Edition by Jon Smith ISBN 0820345261 9780820345260

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ISBN 10: 0820345261
ISBN 13: 9780820345260
Author: Jon Smith

 The new southern studies has had an uneasy relationship with both American studies and the old southern studies. In Finding Purple America, Jon Smith, one of the founders of the new movement, locates the source of that unease in the fundamentally antimodern fantasies of both older fields.

The old southern studies tends to view modernity as a threat to a mystic southern essence―a dangerous outside force taking the form of everything from a “bulldozer revolution” to a “national project of forgetting.” Since the rise of the New Americanists, American studies has also imagined itself to be in a permanent crisis mode, seeking to affiliate the field and the national essence with youth countercultures that sixties leftists once imagined to be “the future.” Such fantasies, Smith argues, have resulted in an old southern studies that cannot understand places like Birmingham or Atlanta (or cities at all) and an American studies that cannot understand red states.

Most Americans live in neither a comforting, premodern Mayberry nor an exciting, postmodern Los Angeles but rather in what postcolonialists call “alternative modernities” and “hybrid cultures” whose relationships to past and future, to stability and change, are complex and ambivalent. Looking at how “the South” has played in global metropolitan pop culture since the nineties and at how southern popular and high culture alike have, in fact, repeatedly embraced urban modernity, Smith masterfully weaves together postcolonial theory, cultural studies, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and, surprisingly, marketing theory to open up the inconveniently in-between purple spaces and places that Americanist and southernist fantasies about “who we are”have so long sought to foreclose.

Finding Purple America The South and the Future of American Cultural Studies 2nd Edition Table of contents:

1. Chapter 1: The South as a Cultural Crossroads

   • The historical significance of the South in American culture
   • Key cultural, social, and political movements that originated in the region
   • Southern identity: diversity and contradictions

2. Chapter 2: Race, Region, and Resistance

   • The legacy of race relations in the South
   • The role of resistance movements, from Civil Rights to contemporary activism
   • Exploring race through the lens of Southern cultural expression

3. Chapter 3: The Rural-Urban Divide

   • The changing landscape of Southern communities
   • The urbanization of the South and its impact on cultural identity
   • Tensions between rural traditions and urban modernity

4. Chapter 4: Music, Literature, and Regional Culture

   • The South as the birthplace of American music (blues, country, rock, etc.)
   • Southern literature and its reflection of cultural complexities
   • The global influence of Southern cultural productions

5. Chapter 5: Politics and Power: The South’s Shifting Influence

   • The political landscape of the South: from Jim Crow to the present
   • The rise of Southern conservatism and the changing political tides
   • The emergence of new Southern voices in politics

6. Chapter 6: Gender, Sexuality, and Southern Identity

   • The intersection of gender, sexuality, and Southern culture
   • The role of women and LGBTQ+ communities in reshaping Southern identity
   • The evolving cultural norms in the region

7. Chapter 7: The Global South: Expanding the Boundaries of Cultural Studies

   • How the South connects to global conversations on culture, identity, and migration
   • Southern cultural exports and their international impact
   • The Southern diaspora and its influence abroad

8. Chapter 8: The Future of Southern Studies

   • Emerging themes and scholars in Southern cultural studies
   • The relevance of the South in the future of American studies
   • A call for new approaches to understanding Southern identity in a globalized world

9. Conclusion: Beyond the Red and Blue

   • Reconceiving “Purple America” as a space of cultural negotiation
   • The South’s role in defining the future of American culture
   • Moving beyond traditional binaries in cultural studies

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