This book examines the ways in which the histories of racial violence,
from slavery onwards, are manifest in representations of the body in
twenty-first-century culture set in the US South. Christopher Lloyd
focuses on corporeality in literature and film to detail the workings of
cultural memory in the present. Drawing on the fields of Southern
Studies, Memory Studies and Black Studies, the book also engages
psychoanalysis, Animal Studies and posthumanism to revitalize questions
of the racialized body. Lloyd traces corporeal legacies in the US South
through novels by Jesmyn Ward, Kathryn Stockett and others, alongside
film and television such as Beasts of the Southern Wild and The
Walking Dead. In all, the book explores the ways in which bodies in
contemporary southern culture bear the traces of racial regulation and
injury.