Look Away!

"Look Away!" considers the U.S. South in relation to Latin America and the Caribbean. Given that some of the major characteristics that mark the South as exceptional within the United States - including the legacies of a plantation economy, slave trade, and military defeat - are common to most of the Americas, Look Away! points to postcolonial studies as perhaps the best perspective from which to comprehend the U.S. South. At the same time it shows how, as part of the United States, the South - both centre and margin, victor and defeated, and empire and colony - complicates ideas of the postcolonial. The twenty-two essays in this comparative, interdisciplinary collection rethink southern U.S. identity, race, and the differences and commonalities between the cultural productions and imagined communities of the U.S. South and Latin America. "Look Away!" presents work by respected scholars in comparative literature, American studies, and Latin American studies. The contributors analyze how writers - including the Martinican Edouard Glissant, Cuban-American Gustavo Perez Firmat, and Trinidad-born, British V. S. Naipaul - have engaged with the southern United States. They explore William Faulkner's role in Latin American thought and consider his work in relation to that of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Jorge Luis Borges. Many essays re-examine major topics in southern U.S. culture - such as race, slavery, slave resistance, and the legacies of the past - through the lens of postcolonial theory and postmodern geography. Others discuss the South in relation to the U.S.-Mexico border. Throughout the volume, the contributors consistently re-conceptualize U.S. southern culture in a way that acknowledges its postcolonial status without diminishing its distinctiveness. The contributors are: Jesse Aleman; Bob Brinkmeyer; Debra Cohen; Deborah N. Cohn; Michael Dash; Leigh Anne Duck; Wendy Faris; Earl Fitz; George Handley; Steve Hunsaker; Kirsten Silva Gruesz; Dane Johnson; Richard King; Jane Landers; John T. Matthews; Stephanie Merrim; Helen Oakley; Vincent Perez; John-Michael Rivera; Scott Romine; Jon Smith; Ilan Stavans; Philip Weinstein; and Lois Parkinson Zamora.