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Finding Purple America - The South and the Future of American Cultural Studies (Hardcover, New)
Loot Price: R3,573
Discovery Miles 35 730
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Finding Purple America - The South and the Future of American Cultural Studies (Hardcover, New)
Series: New Southern Series
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
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The new southern studies has had an uneasy relationship with both
American studies and the old southern studies. In "Finding Purple
America," Jon Smith, one of the founders of the new movement,
locates the source of that unease in the fundamentally antimodern
fantasies of both older fields.
The old southern studies tends to view modernity as a threat to a
mystic southern essence--a dangerous outside force taking the form
of everything from a "bulldozer revolution" to a "national project
of forgetting." Since the rise of the New Americanists, American
studies has also imagined itself to be in a permanent crisis mode,
seeking to affiliate the field and the national essence with youth
countercultures that sixties leftists once imagined to be "the
future." Such fantasies, Smith argues, have resulted in an old
southern studies that cannot understand places like Birmingham or
Atlanta (or cities at all) and an American studies that cannot
understand red states.
Most Americans live in neither a comforting, premodern Mayberry nor
an exciting, postmodern Los Angeles but rather in what
postcolonialists call "alternative modernities" and "hybrid
cultures" whose relationships to past and future, to stability and
change, are complex and ambivalent. Looking at how "the South" has
played in global metropolitan pop culture since the nineties and at
how southern popular and high culture alike have, in fact,
repeatedly embraced urban modernity, Smith masterfully weaves
together postcolonial theory, cultural studies, Lacanian
psychoanalysis, and, surprisingly, marketing theory to open up the
inconveniently in-between purple spaces and places that Americanist
and southernist fantasies about "who we are"have so long sought to
foreclose.
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