I have struggled for a while with how to teach a course on the American South, particularly in the years since the signing of Civil Rights Act. By starting in 1964, I don’t want to over-emphasize struggles for equality and legal personhood and the role that the policies wrapped up in the Civil Rights Movement had on the South, but it is still a convenient starting point to look at the change in the region.

Part of the struggle is I love this region—warts and all—and have seen in its vast and diverse geography and population, so much to celebrate and to appreciate. Still, the ghosts of slavery hover over so much of Southern daily life. We’ve reached a point when the South can confront those demons, not to bury them, but to fully reconcile these dark moments in its history as formative of a more promising future.

The course I offer then, intends to force us to live with the contradictions and challenges of the region. We will begin by questioning what the South means and where the South means. Put simply, we will ask, “Where is the South?” and we will inevitably discover the South is less of defined space—that is, previous notions of the South tied to the membership in the Confederate States of America are incomplete and not fully descriptive of what the South is today. So now, the argument is less about where the Mason-Dixon Line traverses (though as a former Kentuckian, that state's membership in the South still arouses intense debate) and speak instead about elements of daily life that tie this part of the country together, from mountains of Appalachia to the waterways of the Carolina Lowcountry.

We will spend our time often thinking about processes and histories that have forged a coherent Southern present. Beginning in the tumultuous 1960s, we begin to think about the South as part of a post-World War II United States and the discourses of race, membership, and inclusion that are at the heart of the Civil Rights Movement. Importantly as well, the Civil Rights Movement was a national movement to produce national change—new federal policies that would ensure equality at home, at work, and in the voting booth for Americans as a whole. This usefully figures the South in to the United States—and culminates with a Texan in the White House signing the Civil Rights Act into law. Still, the struggles to understand the South as at once unique and yet part of a larger United States is important to wrapping our heads around the tensions that are endemic to the South today.

The content of those early struggles—for voting rights, housing rights, labour rights—have been instrumental within the South at giving way to tolerant and just societies. We look then at the work of the Civil Rights Movement as a struggle for legal personhood—a fight long underway slavery imagined certain individuals as merely 3/5 a person—as figured here through decidedly Southern moves of community, spirituality, equity, and justice. So when we speak of southern foodways or the art and culture of the region, we are really speaking of ways of reconciling the past, modes of production and celebrating values of community, tradition, heritage, and economy. This isn’t meant as a distraction or abstraction to the story of the South within a 1960s America. Rather, we should see investigations in to the foodways, music, and geography of the region as useful interlocutors for bigger conversations of what the South means, both regionally and within an increasingly globalized U.S.