Swamp Souths

Literary and Cultural Ecologies

Kirstin L. Squint, Eric Gary Anderson, Taylor Hagood, Anthony Wilson, Kirstin L. Squint, Eric Gary Anderson, Taylor Hagood, Anthony Wilson, Scott Romine

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9780807173510
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism & Nature
• Index: Literature

Swamp Souths: Literary and Cultural Ecologies expands the geographical scope of scholarship about southern swamps. Although the physical environments that form its central subjects are scattered throughout the southeastern United States—the Atchafalaya, the Okefenokee, the Mississippi River delta, the Everglades, and the Great Dismal Swamp—this evocative collection challenges fixed notions of place and foregrounds the ways in which ecosystems shape cultures and creations on both local and global scales. Across seventeen scholarly essays, along with a critical introduction and afterword, Swamp Souths introduces new frameworks for thinking about swamps in the South and beyond, with an emphasis on subjects including Indigenous studies, ecocriticism, intersectional feminism, and the tropical sublime. The volume analyzes canonical writers such as William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, and Eudora Welty, but it also investigates contemporary literary works by Randall Kenan and Karen Russell, the films Beasts of the Southern Wild and My Louisiana Love, and music ranging from swamp rock and zydeco to Beyoncé's visual album Lemonade. Navigating a complex assemblage of places and ecosystems, the contributors argue with passion and critical rigor for considering anew the literary and cultural work that swamps do. This dynamic collection of scholarship proves that swampy approaches to southern spaces possess increased relevance in an era of climate change and political crisis.

INDEX

Page numbers in italics denote maps.

Abingdon Virginian, 184

abject and abjection: George Washington Cable and, 132–133, 137n13; definition of, 154; haunting and unhauntings, 157–158; Julia Kristeva on, 128–129, 136n5; Henry Clay Lewis’s themes of, 127–130, 131, 132–133, 136, 136nn5–6; as redistributive force, 157, 162nn10–11; Southern Gothic as marked by, 159. See also abject history

abject history: definition of, 154; and Du Bois’s The Quest of the Silver Fleece, 155–158, 160–161, 161–162nn2,6,8; and the future, 154–155, 158; and Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, 158–161; immersion in the abject, 158–161, 162nn13–15; and pulling-in of the excluded, 160–161, 162n13; suspended agency as fulcrum of change, 155; and syntax, 155, 161n5; and unwitting phenomenology, 154; and visceral graphism, 161n3

abolition and abolitionists: and ambivalence about the value of wilderness, 195–198; degeneration of southern environments as precipitating, 199; perceived as threat to the social order, 193, 194, 199; and the swamp as pejorative, 178–179; and the swamp as staging grounds for revolution, 179

absent presence, and Beasts, 18–19

Acadian French: Houma people as most conservative speakers of, 23, 24, 32; as marker of cultural authenticity, 35

Acadians. See Cajuns

actants, 3–4, 6, 8, 230, 240

Adams, Jessica, 95

Africa, and transnational ecology of oppression/resistance, 210, 211

African Americans: agency of black women, 13, 16–21; deaths in 1935 Labor Day hurricane, as unrecorded, 172; homophobia and patriarchal practices of, Randall Kenan and, 205; perception of savagery applied to, 33; police killings of, 89–90; “porch tradition” of interactive storytelling, 204; suppression of experience of (in Welty’s Delta Wedding), 141–142; trope of the black man framed for the white man’s sins, 106; US Colored Troops, 181, 183, 184, 186. See also black bodies; black Creole music; black Creole people; black freedom; Creoles as post-Contact Afro-Indigenous peoples; maroons; slavery

African Americans, as characters, in Welty’s Delta Wedding, 141–142, 145–146, 148, 149n3

African diaspora, and Creoles, 85

Africanism, 172–173n1–2

African Queen, The (film), 234

Afro-modernism, 109

agency: alterity of (actants), 3–4, 6, 8, 230, 240; of black women, 13, 16–21; of quicksand, 232; of slaves, in Kenan’s “Let the Dead Bury the Dead,” 207, 210; suspended, as fulcrum of change, 155; of swamps, 229–230; women and lack of, in Bell’s Swamp Water, 74

Alexander, George W., The Virginia Cavalier, 182, 186, 187n24

Alibar, Lucy, Juicy and Delicious (play), 13, 15, 19–21

Allan, Johnnie, 39; “South to Louisiana,” 37

Allewaert, Monique, 1, 28, 75n4, 122

alligators: and Archer, 234–235, 240; and Beasts of the Southern Wild, 18, 21; in Faulkner’s If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem, 237, 238–239; morass and, 230, 235; and Jerry Reed’s “Amos Moses,” 232–233; and Karen Russell’s Swamplandia!, 1, 164, 165, 167–168; as symbol, 233, 234–235

American Horror Story, 58n3

American Revolution, and swamps as refuge, 179, 180, 183, 186

Americas: as the south to Europe’s north, 113. See also Enlightenment theory of American degeneracy

Amos and Andy, 234

Anderson, Eric Gary, 173n4

Andrews, Dana, 74

Angel Heart (film), 42

animals: diminuti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Mapping Swamp Souths
• I. TERREBONNE-ATCHAFALAYA BASIN
• II. OKEFENOKEE
• III. MISSISSIPPI RIVER DELTA
• IV. EVERGLADES
• V. GREAT DISMAL
• VI. BEYOND SWAMP SOUTHS
• Afterword
• Works Cited
• Contributors
• Index