Rooting Memory, Rooting Place

the long version

An important contribution to the study of the American South, this timely and incisive book reads the region's contemporary literature and visual culture through the lens of cultural memory. Engaging a wealth of theory that seeks to deconstruct place, challenge rootedness, and question the stability of the South, the present book disrupts and interrupts dominant trends in Southern Studies today. An attention to cultural memory can help reveal how the past is insistently present, and how this textual remembrance can gesture towards very tangible regional roots. The book shows this concept through reading novels of slavery, the cultural output after Hurricane Katrina, gothic landscape photographs, and narratives of return.