English Faculty Edit and Contribute to New Book Analyzing Television and the U.S. South

LSU Press

Small-Screen Souths: Region, Identity, and the Cultural Politics of Television, edited by Lisa Hinrichsen, associate professor in the Department of English in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences, Gina Caison of Georgia State University, and Stephanie Rountree of Auburn University, will be released in November from Louisiana State University Press. 

As the first collection broadly dedicated to the relationship between television and the U.S. South, Small-Screen Souths addresses the growing interest in how mass culture represents the region and influences popular perceptions of it. In 16 essays divided into three thematic sections, scholars of Southern culture analyze representations of the South in a variety of television shows spanning the history of the medium, from classic network programs such as The Andy Griffith Show and Designing Women to some of today's popular franchises like Duck Dynasty and The Walking Dead.

The first section, "Politics and Identity in the Televisual South," focuses on how television constructs understandings of race, gender, sexuality and class, often adapting to changing configurations of community and identity. The next section, "Caricatures, Commodities, and Catharsis in the Rural South," examines the tension between depictions of southern rural communities and assumptions about abject whiteness, particularly conceptions of poverty and profitized culture. The concluding section, "(Dis)Locating the South," considers the influence of postcolonialism, globalization and cosmopolitanism in understanding television featuring the region.

Throughout, the essays investigate the profuse, often contradictory ways that the U.S. South has been represented on television, seeking to expand and pluralize myopic perspectives of the region.

The collection also includes an essay co-written by Casey Kayser, assistant professor in the Department of English on The Real Housewives of Atlanta and the New South.

Hinrichsen, who is also the author of Possessing the Past: Trauma, Imagination, and Memory in Post-Plantation Southern Literature (LSU Press, 2015), will be speaking about the collection at the Louisiana Book Festival on October 28.