American Cinema and the Southern Imaginary

Employing innovations in media studies, southern cultural studies, and approaches to the global South, this collection of essays examines aspects of the southern imaginary in American cinema and offers fresh insight into the evolving field of southern film studies.

Ranging from the silent era to the present and considering Hollywood movies, documentaries, and independent films, the contributors incorporate the latest scholarship in a range of disciplines. The volume is divided into three sections:"Rereading the Hollywood South" uses new critical perspectives to reassess classic Hollywood films;"Viewing the Civil Rights South"examines changing approaches to viewing race and class in the post-civil rights era; and "Crossing Borders" considers the influence of postmodernism, postcolonialism, and media studies on recent southern films.

"Placing the New Southern Studies in conversation with film studies, this book is simply the best edited collection available on film and the U.S. South.---Grace Hale. University of Virginia

"Besides adeptly taking on concepts and questions circulating in the field, American Cinema and the Southern Imaginary intervenes in new exciting ways, `rereading the South'(old, new, and postmodern) and insightfully interrogating the South on film, from Birth of a Nation to `Birmingham Sunday,' Slacker, and beyond."---Ed Guerrero New York University

"Edgy yet teachable, with essays by many of the best younger scholars in the field, Barker and McKee's landmark collection reminds us why `the South' remains central to the Hollywood---and indie---imaginary."---Jon Smith, coeditor of Look Away! The U.S. South in New World Studies

Deborah E. Barker is an associate professor of English at the University of Mississippi. She is the author of Aesthetics and Gender in American Literature: Portraits of the Woman Artist and coeditor of Shakespeare and Gender: A History.
Kathryn McKee is the McMullan Associate Professor of Southern Studies and English at the University of Mississippi. She has published in a range of journals, including American Literature, Legacy, Mississippi Quarterly, and Southern Literary Journal.