This timely and incisive study reads contemporary literature and visual culture from the American South through the lens of cultural memory. Rooting texts in their regional locations, the book interrupts and questions the dominant trends in Southern Studies, providing a fresh and nuanced view of twenty-first-century texts.

Introduction: The Region and Beyond: From the South to the Postsouth 1. Memories of Slavery: Museums, Monuments, Novels 2. "There's a Life Here": Hurricane Katrina's Southern Biopolitics 3. What Remains? Sally Mann and the South's Gothic Memories 4. The Road Home: Southern Narratives of Return Conclusion: Beneath the Surface

"Rooting Memory, Rooting Place is a well-crafted work that makes important interventions into ongoing debates in Southern Studies about the extent to which the South can still be read and understood as a distinctive place in the contexts of twenty-first-century postmodernism and globalization." - Michael Bibler, Associate Professor of English, Louisiana State University, USA "This is an engaging, insightful, and compelling book that evidences an admirable commitment to the field of Southern Studies and related branches of American Studies and Memory Studies." - Anna Hartnell, Lecturer in Contemporary Literature, Birkbeck, University of London, UK