The New Southern Studies is currently revolutionizing the study of the American South by unsettling its histories, blurring once-accepted borders, excavating forgotten stories, foregrounding cultural encounters, and situating a region once designated as anti-modern within the currents of modernity, postmodernity, and globalization. Multicultural observances of Jamestown’s 400th anniversary and the bicentennial of the closing of the slave trade indicate just two new directions explored by the New Southern Studies, and in recognition of these two overlapping commemorations and of the field’s new avenues, the program committee for the 2008 biennial meeting of the Society for the Study of Southern Literature has chosen as its conference theme “Southern Roots and Routes: Origins, Migrations, Transformations,” to be held April 18-20, 2008, at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia.

We’ve borrowed the theme from the contact zone perspectives developed by Mary Louise Pratt and in particular James Clifford, the latter of whom takes issue with traditional concepts of culture by juxtaposing dwelling and travel, stasis and displacement, separation and reciprocity. In this day of ongoing debates on slave reparations, contested memories and commemorations, and shifting cultural identities, then, it seems highly appropriate to hold a conference foregrounding diasporas and homelands, foundings and migrations, at the College of William and Mary, which originally included an Indian school, relied upon slave labor, trained generations of Colonial, Revolutionary, and Early National leaders, participated in the slavery/anti-slavery debate, and housed Union troops during the Civil War.

Program committee members Eric Anderson, Suzanne Jones, and Susan Donaldson welcome both session proposals and individual paper abstracts addressing the theme of roots and routes, settlement and travel, tradition and transformation. Please send two-page session proposals and/or one-page individual paper abstracts as MS Word attachments by December 15, 2007, to Susan Donaldson's email address at the College of William and Mary (svdona@wm.edu). Names, institutions, and email addresses should be included at the beginning of all submissions.

Among the topics session and individual paper proposals may want to address are the following:

Native American writers and rethinking place
Representing and contesting slavery
Colonial encounters on the Eastern seaboard
Caribbean connections
Traveling and artistic identity
Literary communities in the twentieth-century South
Contested representations of Native American antecedents
Blues, bluegrass music, and southern migrations
Contemporary Asian American writing in the South
Film and the new multicultural South
Early African American writing and reclaiming history
Cultural traumas and contested histories
Photography and reform
Tourism and tourist sites
Families, kith, and kin
Indian Removal and its aftermath
Maroon communities and cultures
New ethnic literatures
Teaching the roots and routes of New Southern Studies
Remaking Native American identities and communities
Civil Rights histories and novels
Reclaiming Appalachia
Evangelicalism, Pentecostalism, and writing
Borderlands in the South
Sun Belt cities and urban life
Writing against the slave trade
Novels of migration
Evangelicalism and the mass media