LSU Press Remediating Region: New Media and the U.S. South (Southern Literary Studies)

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. About the Author Gina Caison, associate professor of English at Georgia State University, is the author of Red States: Indigeneity, Settler Colonialism, and Southern Studies. She hosted and produced the podcast About South from 2016 to 2019. Stephanie Rountree is assistant professor of English at the University of North Georgia. She is the coeditor, with Gina Caison and Lisa Hinrichsen, of Small-Screen Souths: Region, Identity, and the Cultural Politics of Television. Lisa Hinrichsen, associate professor of English at the University of Arkansas, is the author of Possessing the Past: Trauma, Imagination, and Memory in Post-Plantation Southern Literature.