In this innovative approach to southern literary cultures, Thadious
Davis analyzes how black southern writers use their spatial location to
articulate the vexed connections between society and environment,
particularly under segregation and its legacies.
Basing her analysis on texts by Ernest Gaines, Richard Wright, Alice
Walker, Natasha Trethewey, Olympia Vernon, Brenda Marie Osbey, Sybil
Kein, and others, Davis reveals how these writers reconstitute racial
exclusion as creative black space, rather than a site of trauma and
resistance. Utilizing the social and political separation epitomized by
segregation to forge a spatial and racial vantage point, Davis argues,
allows these writers to imagine and represent their own subject matter
and aesthetic concerns.
Focusing particularly on Louisiana and Mississippi, Davis deploys new
geographical discourses of space to expand analyses of black writers'
relationship to the South and to consider the informing aspects of
spatial narratives on their literary production. She argues that African
American writers not only are central to the production of southern
literature and new southern studies, but also are crucial to
understanding the shift from modernism to postmodernism in southern
letters. A paradigm-shifting work, Southscapes restores African
American writers to their rightful place in the regional imagination,
while calling for a more inclusive conception of region.