South

To use the keyword “South” is to invoke, above all else, the importance of place and history. “South” is an imagined location, an inherently unstable unit of space, and yet most people in the United States feel they know exactly where it is: just below the Mason-Dixon Line and just above the Gulf of Mexico. One needs only a compass and an atlas to find it. But the term “South” defies such directional certainty; it has multiple meanings, competing positions, and different personalities. “South,” of course, is not the same thing or place or concept as “the South” or “Souths” or even “southern.” Much American studies scholarship seeks to understand the purpose and meaning of this much-anticipated place—envisioning “South” and its variants, wherever and whenever they are invoked, as situational ideals, as political statements, as self-referential terms, and as frustratingly mobile, sometimes overlapping spots on a map. Each “South” is the creation of a particular historical moment, though the idea of it lingers on powerfully, sometimes clashing and sometimes harmoniously blending with newer meanings of the term.