The Other Matter of the South

In a recent book i suggested that what haunts the field of southern studies is not the proverbial specter so much as an insistent materiality that troubles and illuminates the spaces, communities, and minds of the southern United States. I made a case for human materiality, in its diverse manifestations and histories, as an important methodological tool in the study of the cultural logics, illogics, and resistances that have shaped and sometimes stymied life in what Leigh Anne Duck calls “the nation's region” (Watson 9-27). Here I want to make a briefer but complementary case for the centrality of other materialities in scholarship on that region. To access them effectively, southern studies will need to forge closer, more creative ties with the field of environmental studies and with the habit of mind that Timothy Morton calls “the ecological thought.”