Recently, I had a baffling exchange with my undergrads. I was teaching a course on southernness and southern literature, at a southern university, and I asked the nineteen students in front of me how many considered themselves to be “southern.” Only one.
Then I asked how many grew up in a place that is technically part of the South. Fifteen tentative hands. How could this be? I asked.
What was the distinction these young people were making? The problem, they said, was the of claiming southernness. It seemed impossibly intertwined with white supremacy, traditional gender roles, and a demand to return to an antiquated society, one they did not want to rise again. That seemed more than fair, I said, but if they weren’t southern, what were they? After all, most had never lived outside of Virginia.
No one could quite say for sure. They were not southern, but they weren’t anything else either. A beautiful new memoir , published April 28 by Georgia native Summer Brenner, explores this predicament, one which many southern authors find themselves in today.
Once hailed as producing much of the best of American literature, by the end of the twentieth century, southern voice had largely fallen out of fashion. A notion seems to have arisen that the South—as globalization and big tech increasingly penetrate all aspects of our lives—is too backward, too isolated, and too tainted to speak to the zeitgeist. In , Brenner, who is nearly eighty now, pushes back against this narrative.
