Guest Lecture Martyn Bone (University of Copenhagen)
This talk will recast Leigh Anne Duck’s recent proposal for a “southern studies without ‘the South’” by proposing a transnational American studies with “the South.” In doing so, I will assess texts by authors widely seen as major American (rather than southern) writers. Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby (1981), Peter Matthiessen’s Shadow Country (2008), and Laila Lalami’s The Moor’s Account (2014) benefit from being read in a way that does not fetishize the U.S. South as a distinctive “region,” yet which is sensitive to how these texts depict continuities between slavery, convict labor, and the exploitation of immigrant workers in the neoliberal era of “globalization.” However, these books also demand an American studies with “the South”: a critical praxis alert to the ways in which abusive labor relations should be understood as less exceptionally “southern” than identifiably American.
Martyn Bone is associate professor of American Literature and coordinator of the Center for Transnational American Studies at the University of Copenhagen. He is the author of The Postsouthern Sense of Place in Contemporary Fiction (Louisiana State UP, 2005) and Where the New World Is: Literature about the U.S. South at Global Scales (U of Georgia P, 2018); the editor of Perspectives on Barry Hannah (UP of Mississippi, 2007); and the co-editor of a three-volume mini-series, including Creating and Consuming the U.S. South (UP of Florida, 2015). His articles have appeared in American Literature, CR: New Centennial Review, Journal of American Studies, and other journals.
The event is free and open to the public.
This lecture is organized by the Department of American Studies.
Department of American Studies Graz
Institut für Amerikanistik
Attemsgasse 25/II
A-8010 Graz
Tel. +43/316/380-2465
amerikanistik(at)uni-graz.at