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.
JON SMITH is an associate professor of English at Simon Fraser University. He is coeditor of Look Away! The U.S. South in New World Studies and is coeditor with Riché Richardson of The New Southern Studies series.
Table of Contents
Preface ix
Introduction. What Does an American Studies Scholar Want? 1
Part I. Disrupting Everyone’s Enjoyment
One. Songs That Move Hipsters to Tears: Johnny Cash and the New Melancholy 29 Two. German Lessons: On Getting Over a Lost Supremacy 50 Three. Our Turn: On Gen X, Wearing Vintage, and Neko Case 65
Part II. Reconciliations with Modernity
Four. Two Ties and a Pistol: Faulkner, Metropolitan Fashion, and “the South” 89 Five. Flying without Wings: Race, Civic Branding, and Identity Politics in Two Twenty- first- century American Cities 106 Six. In the Garden 126
Notes 137 Works Cited 151 Index 165
What People are Saying About This
From the Publisher
"Finding Purple America: The South and the Future of American Cultural Studies is one of the boldest and most insightful academic books I have read in years. Surveying a rich range of cultural phenomena—country music, Faulkner’s fiction, hipster fashion, literary theory, and more—Jon Smith demonstrates why the allegedly most backward part of the country has much to teach today’s practitioners of cultural studies. I cannot recommend this book highly enough."—Harilaos Stecopoulos, author of Reconstructing the World: Southern Fictions and U.S. Imperialisms, 1898-1976
"How can purple seem elusive amid a range of reds and blues? Jon Smith locates the problem in scholarly desire—the quest for a better world that, paradoxically, obscures the one we inhabit. Ranging from witty provocations to nuanced psychoanalytic inquiry-and from Faulkner's fashion sense to Ruben Studdard's rebranding of Birmingham—Finding Purple America provides an incisive and even inspiring argument concerning the contemporary role of the humanities."—Leigh Anne Duck, author of The Nation's Region: Southern Modernism, Segregation, and U.S. Nationalism
"Provocative and provoking on every page, Finding Purple America is not calculated to please; yet even in a book committed to 'disrupting everyone's enjoyment,' Smith's dazzling pop-culture readings and witty prose remain accessible, compelling, and—dare I say it?—entertaining throughout."—Jennifer Greeson, author of Our South: Geographic Fantasy and the Rise of National Literature
