Lisa Hinrichsen - Böcker

Employing recent theories of memory from multiple areas of study, Possessing the Past illuminates the tangled relationships among trauma, fantasy, and the public sphere, and their impact on the ""South"" in imagination and in reality. Focusing on the roles that narrative and fantasy play in creating a sense of regional distinctiveness, Lisa Hinrichsen brings a wealth of critical scholarship to her consideration of memory and southern literature. Hinrichsen's nuanced readings of a diverse group of southern authors, including William Faulkner, Roberto Fernández, Erna Brodber, Monique Truong, and Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin, offer new ways of conceptualizing memory, place, and history. She unravels southern literature's critical confrontation with the region's history through complex systems of remembrance and erasure, and she traces how fantasy mediates trauma and adjudicates identity. Expansive in its psychoanalytical approach, her work explores issues of law, testimony, and social justice; the role of nostalgic fantasies of gentility at midcentury; the relationship between white empathy and social fantasy; the resemblance of regional patterns of disavowal to national ideologies of forgetting in Vietnam-era fiction; and the impact of contemporary multicultural literature on memory and community. Possessing the Past broadens the theoretical framework used to conceptualize memory and trauma, while grounding traumatic testimony in the specifics of time and place amply offered by southern literature. It provides new readings of an array of southern writers and deepens our understanding of the continuing importance of history, memory, and fantasy in the literature of the U.S. South.

Rather than a media history of the region or a history of southern media, Remediating Region: New Media and the U.S. South formulates a critical methodology for studying the continuous reinventions of regional space across media platforms. This innovative collection demonstrates that structures of media undergird American regionalism through the representation of a given geography's peoples, places, and ideologies. It also outlines how the region answers back to the national media by circulating ever-shifting ideas of place via new platforms that allow for self-representation outside previously sanctioned media forms.Remediating Region recognizes that all media was once new media. In examining how changes in information and media modify concepts of region, it both articulates the virtual realities of the twenty-first-century U.S. South and historicizes the impact of "new" media on a region that has long been mediated. Eleven essays examine media moments ranging from the nineteenth century to the present day, among them Frederick Douglass's utilization of early photography, video game representations of a late capitalist landscape, rural queer communities' engagement with social media platforms, and contemporary technologies focused on revitalizing Indigenous cultural practices.Interdisciplinary in scope and execution, Remediating Region argues that on an increasingly networked planet, concerns over the mediated region continue to inform how audiences and participants understand their entrée into a global world through local space.

Rather than a media history of the region or a history of southern media, Remediating Region: New Media and the U.S. South formulates a critical methodology for studying the continuous reinventions of regional space across media platforms. This innovative collection demonstrates that structures of media undergird American regionalism through the representation of a given geography's peoples, places, and ideologies. It also outlines how the region answers back to the national media by circulating ever-shifting ideas of place via new platforms that allow for self-representation outside previously sanctioned media forms.Remediating Region recognizes that all media was once new media. In examining how changes in information and media modify concepts of region, it both articulates the virtual realities of the twenty-first-century U.S. South and historicizes the impact of "new" media on a region that has long been mediated. Eleven essays examine media moments ranging from the nineteenth century to the present day, among them Frederick Douglass's utilization of early photography, video game representations of a late capitalist landscape, rural queer communities' engagement with social media platforms, and contemporary technologies focused on revitalizing Indigenous cultural practices.Interdisciplinary in scope and execution, Remediating Region argues that on an increasingly networked planet, concerns over the mediated region continue to inform how audiences and participants understand their entrée into a global world through local space.

Grounded in critical theory, southern studies, archival methodologies, and anticolonial thought, Record, Document, Archive illuminates how the U.S. South is made knowable through the acts, objects, and systems that produce records, documents, and archives. Rather than treating "the South" as a fixed geography or predetermined object of study, this innovative, forward-thinking collection reframes region as an ontological and epistemological project shaped by—and resistant to—Eurocentric regimes of documentality. Bringing together activists, archivists, and scholars across disciplines, the essays in Record, Document, Archive trace the extent to which documentality has governed life and death in the U.S. South, from Indigenous Removal, enslavement, and Jim Crow to contemporary regimes of immigration enforcement, border policing, and the legal erasure of queer and undocumented lives. "Record" emphasizes embodied, affective, and more-than-human acts of marking experience. "Document" interrogates the pedagogical, legal, and evidentiary force of documentation, highlighting counter-hegemonic methods that unsettle dominant southern narratives. "Archive" addresses curation, access, and governance, advancing liberatory memory work that confronts archival violence and privilege while imagining new possibilities for justice-oriented futures. By attending to the anticipatory acts that precede narrative and law, Record, Document, Archive opens pathways toward "southern elsewheres"—modes of knowing, remembering, and belonging that resist rigid epistemologies and orient scholarship toward liberation.