Integrating the Discipline of History into the New Southern Studies

In this conversation I explain how the development of the fifteen-year-old field called the new southern studies (NSS) has largely become a default term for southern literature despite the field's call for interdisciplinarity.  I look at why and how historians have played a limited role and discuss several benefits and obstacles for increased participation by historians.  Scholarship on the Global South constitutes one avenue of inquiry in this field and offers a framework for possible interdisciplinary dialogue particularly since many of these literary scholars cite C. Vann Woodward who observed sixty years ago that "from a broader point of view it is not the South but America that is unique among the peoples of the world."

            Yet key figures in the NSS are now calling for a "southern studies without 'The South'" and view "the South" as a meaningless term saddled with the baggage of such hackneyed concepts like identity, memory, and distinctiveness. Some argue the hemispheric turn is done.  Is interdisciplinarity a pipe dream if historians and literary scholars cannot agree that there is some entity known or understood as "the South?" I maintain that work by cultural and intellectual historians can solve this dilemma.  Even if we all agree that the South is not now, or never was distinctive it doesn't mean that the discourse about its distinctiveness didn't shape national policies and people's lives.  I'm not calling for more work that "boutiques" the South, focusing on its peculiar habits and characteristics.  Rather the new southern studies should be a field in which historicity matters. We might ask: how and why was southern exceptionalism created and what purpose did it serve?