Look Away!: The U.S. South in New World Studies

Examines what happens to the paradigms of the American south if we understand the south hemispherically, to include Latin America and the Caribbean Presents work by respected scholars in comparative literature, American studies, and Latin American studies Look Away! considers the U.S. South in relation to Latin America and the Caribbean. Given that some of the major characteristics that mark the South as exceptional within the United States - including the legacies of a plantation economy, slave trade, and military defeat - are common to most of the Americas, Look Away! points to postcolonial studies as perhaps the best perspective from which to comprehend the U.S. South. At the same time it shows how, as part of the United States, the South - both centre and margin, victor and defeated, and empire and colony - complicates ideas of the postcolonial. The twenty-two essays in this comparative, interdisciplinary collection rethink southern U.S. identity, race, and the differences and commonalities between the cultural productions and imagined communities of the U.S. South and Latin America.