The University of North Carolina Press

280 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 17 illus., 2 maps, appends., notes, bibl., index

Cloth

ISBN  978-0-8078-3091-8

Published: March 2007

Paper

ISBN  978-0-8078-5794-6

Published: March 2007

Critical Regionalism

Connecting Politics and Culture in the American Landscape

By Douglas Reichert Powell

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The idea of "region" in America has often served to isolate places from each other, observes Douglas Reichert Powell. Whether in the nostalgic celebration of folk cultures or the urbane distaste for "hicks," certain regions of the country are identified as static, insular, and culturally disconnected from everywhere else. In Critical Regionalism, Reichert Powell explores this trend and offers alternatives to it.

Reichert Powell proposes using more nuanced strategies that identify distinctive aspects of particular geographically marginal communities without turning them into peculiar "hick towns." He enacts a new methodology of critical regionalism in order to link local concerns and debates to larger patterns of history, politics, and culture. To illustrate his method, in each chapter of the book Reichert Powell juxtaposes widely known texts from American literature and film with texts from and about his own Appalachian hometown of Johnson City, Tennessee. He carries the idea further in a call for a critical regionalist pedagogy that uses the classroom as a place for academic writers to build new connections with their surroundings, and to teach others to do so as well.

About the Author

Douglas Reichert Powell teaches writing, American literature, and cultural studies in the department of English at Columbia College Chicago.

Reviews

"Offers useful and accessible interpretive tools and a powerful interpretative lens with which to ponder region and culture."
--Journal of American Studies

"An important book."
--Journal of Appalachian Studiesl

"Important to Iowans and anybody else who lives away from centers of national power."
--The Annals of Iowa

"Necessarily suggestive, open-ended, and tentative. . . . Envisions new and utopian possibilities for thought and social action while acknowledging the formidable tactical and theoretical obstacles to such changes."
--CHOICE

"[Reichert Powell's] endeavor to uncover a critical regionalist literary aesthetic leads from an examination of the film Pulp Fiction (1994) to literary critiques of John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath (1939). . . . Raises important questions for any scholarly understanding of the South as region."
--Journal of Southern History

Reichert Powell proposes a plan to improve the futures of geographically, culturally, and economically marginal communities in the United States by reconfiguring the ways in which they imagine themselves and the ways other, more powerful places imagine them as well. His analysis invites reading and contemplation from a wide range of disciplines--from literature, film, and media studies to pedagogy to regional studies--and specialists from one field will have their eyes opened by the way he sheds useful light on other fields, demonstrating perhaps unforeseen connections among different areas of study.--Kent C. Ryden, University of Southern Maine