Houston A. Baker

Preface: Violence, the Body and “The South”

An animated telephone call between the North and the South was the origin of the present special issue. We had just agreed to serve as visiting coeditors of American Literature and visiting faculty members in the Duke University English department for the 1998–1999 academic year. This telephone conversation commenced as a planning session for the joint work we hoped to undertake for the journal. But the talk veered almost from the outset to ‘‘The South,’’ as we discovered the intersection of our personal histories in Kentucky and of our professional interests in matters Southern. The intersecting geographies of our telephone conversation were emblematic, we felt, of the nuanced inseparability of North and South in any fruitful model of American cultural studies we could imagine for a new millennium. As one of us quipped during the call, ‘‘Every time a shocking act of racist violence occurs in New York, Illinois, or Pennsylvania, you can bet another movie on Mississippi will appear within six months.’’ From this observation came our idea for a course entitled ‘‘Mississippi,’’ whose subject would be the national formation of the United States and the dynamics of race, region, and citizenship entailed by, as it were, a putatively split and decidedly Manichean geography. We recalled Malcolm X’s pithy summation of U.S. regionalism as a possible epigraph for the course syllabus: Mississippi, Malcolm declared, is anywhere in the United States south of the Canadian border. Slowly the idea took hold that we needed to collaborate on a project that would contribute to a new Southern studies, an emerging collective already producing a robust body of work in current Ameri-

Afro-American literary study in the 1990s

Subject classification:- Black Studies; Literature and Literary Criticism: American and Canadian