Abstract
Nahem Yousaf’s chapter analyses how immigrant writers and characters disturb, extend and change the Southern Gothic in a poetics of relation that conserves some of the most potent images but fuses them with gothic elements grounded in other places. He argues that the most effective and intriguing of writers imagine more than a geographical extension of supposedly ‘Southern’ exceptionalism, whether of place or image; they intervene in the tropes themselves, in the cultural parochialism of the term ‘Southern Gothic’, and in the idea of distinctively Southern literature. Through close readings of novels and stories by Flannery O’Connor, Gina Nahai, T.C. Boyle, Augusta Trobaugh, Susan Choi and Steven Sherrill, Yousaf explores what gothic preoccupations mean in transnational fictions located at the shifting and ambiguous edges of ‘Southern’ fiction.
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Further Reading
Anolik, R. B., & Douglas L. H., (Eds.) (2004). The Gothic other: Racial and social constructions in the literary imagination. Jefferson: McFarland. On the demonizing of the ethnic, racial and religious ‘Other’ in various contexts, including the writing of Frederick Douglass.
Bone, M. (2004). The transnational turn in the south. In Clara Juncker and Russell Duncan (Eds.), Transnational Americas (pp. 217–235). Copenhagen: Museum Tuscalanum. Introduction to ‘the transnational’ in the South with readings of Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer and Fink’s The Mayans of Morgantown.
Cartwright, K. (2002). Reading Africa into American literature: Epics, fables and gothic tales. University Press of Kentucky. Enquiry into Senegambian literature and as comparative with African American literature, with Part 3 on the shadow of the Gothic in the slave South.
Kim, D. Y. (2009). Bled in letter by letter: Translation, postmemory and the Korean War in Susan Choi’s The Foreign Student. American Literary History, 21, 550–589. A case for the importance of the Korean War as a watershed moment in which national and transnational histories of race converge, paying attention to Choi’s historiographical context.
McIntyre, R. C. (2005). Promoting the Gothic South. Southern Cultures, 11(2), 33–61. Traces how travellers and tourists conceived of the region as gothic and images promoted in memoir and Southern literature.
Yousaf, N. (2007). A Southern Sheriff’s revenge: Bertrand Tavernier’s Coup de Torchon. In W. Zacharasiewicz & R. Gray (Eds.), Transatlantic exchanges: The American South in Europe; Europe in the US South (pp. 221–238). Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences. Examines a gothic motif, the corrupt southern sheriff, as cross-cultural and trans-generic and explores its relocation in French colonial Senegal.
Yousaf, N. (2013). Immigrant writers: Transnational stories of a “Worlded” South. In Sharon Monteith (Ed.), The Cambridge companion to the literature of the American South (pp. 204–219). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Argues that stereotypes about the insularity of Southern literature are untenable in myriad examples of fiction and poetry that project the regional model outwards: Monique Truong’s Bitter in the Mouth and works by Firmat, Villatoro, Cao, Shearer and Grisham.
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Yousaf, N. (2016). New Immigrants and the Southern Gothic. In: Castillo Street, S., Crow, C. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of the Southern Gothic. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-47774-3_10
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