Bridging Southern Cultures

These essays by some of the South's leading historians, anthropologists, literary critics, musicologists, and folklorists provide a multicultural, interdisciplinary panorama of past and contemporary southern society. Using the best of current scholarship, Bridging Southern Cultures demonstrates the new energies revitalizing southern studies. By spanning the chasms of race, gender, class, academic disciplines, art forms, and "high" and popular culture, this exciting collection reaches aspects of southern heritage that previous approaches have obscured for too long. Virtually every dimension of southern identity receives attention here, including African American archaeology; Depression-era post office murals; the South's midlife crisis; and art, alienation, and alcohol in Faulkner, among many other subjects. Contributors are William Andrews, Thadious Davis, Ywone Edwards-Ingram, Sue Bridwell Beckham, Richard Mewgraw, Joyce Marie Jackson, Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Daniel C. Littlefield, Henry Shapiro, Charles Reagan Wilson, John Shelton Reed, and John Lowe.
Showcasing the thought of preeminent southern intellectuals, Bridging Southern Cultures is a heady mix of observations that draw new lines of connection between eras, groups, races, and subregions. It is a timely assessment of the state of southern studies as it enters a new century.