Imagining Southern Spaces: Hemispheric and transatlantic Souths in antebellum US writing

Abstract

Identifying the antebellum era in the United States as a transitional setting, Imagining Southern Spaces investigates spatialization processes about the South during a time when intensifying debates over the abolition of slavery led to a heightened period of (re)spatialization in the region. Taking the question of abolition as a major factor that shaped how different actors responded to these processes, this book studies spatial imaginations in a selection of abolinist and proslavery literature of the era. Through this diversity of imaginations, the book points to a multitude of Souths in various economic, political, and cultural entaglements in the American Hemisphere and the Circumatlantic. Thus, it challenges monolithic and provincial representations of the South as a provincial region distinct from the rest of the country.

Biographical Notes

Deniz Bozkurt-Pekar

Currently, Deniz Bozkurt-Pekar is developing a project on literary entanglements between Turkey and East Central Europe since 1929 with a focus on world literature and translation. Her research interests include literary entanglements, world literature, translation, spatial imaginations, globalization, 19th-century Transatlantic entanglements, the antebellum US South. She is also copy-editing an edited volume, as a freelancer.