ABSTRACT
In a 1990 essay, Cornel West identifies a key shift in US cultural politics since the 1960s, the era widely termed “postmodern,” arguing that the “new cultural politics of difference” is distinguished by its emphasis on particularity and diversity as part of a reaction against the universalizing bent of modern politics. The renewed interest in the regional specificity of the US South in recent years offers an instance of this kind of spatialized cultural politics of difference. Since the mid-1970s, US historians, sociologists, novelists, literary critics, and cultural commentators seem to have become obsessed with the South, reviving the enduring debate about what makes the region distinct from the rest of the nation. sserting that the South has special lessons to teach a nation caught up in a giddy pursuit of material progress, most of the contributors portray the region as a place of refuge from the alienating and fragmenting conditions of modern US life.
