The South has never been a real space in the imaginations of authors from colonization-forward. From early works from the colonial era to the wave of Afrofuturist texts of the past several decades, the South has been a space of alternative realities, a site of speculation upon which authors projected imagined presents and futures. The “otherness” of the South has always lent the region a speculative bent in the United States and global imagination. This essay examines literature from the antebellum South itself, the supposedly geographically fixed monolith of plantation culture. Written by a majority white, proslavery authorship, southern imaginative writing before the Civil War always speculated on the “South” and shaped it as a cultural identity. To understand the endurance and widespread influence of the dominant versions of “South,” it is necessary to examine their literary origin point and not just the aftershocks and reverberations. Like writing about the South, writing from the South during the nineteenth century was always a speculative exercise, made especially evident when focusing on works by those invested in continuing an idea of “South” that lay the foundation for ideologies circulating long after the Emancipation Proclamation and the end of the Civil War.

This essay traces the histories of sexual, gender, and racial queerness in works from and about the South, and it insists that anything we might see as uniquely “southern” is still profoundly entangled with the literatures and cultures of the United States and beyond. While there are unequivocally southern works of queer literature, it is crucial to recognize that so many queer southerners are the authors, not the others of the wider queer canon, including works that would seem to have nothing to do with the South at all. But this essay does not stop at simply mapping the complex terrain of queer literature by White, Black, and Native American writers associated with the South. The second half turns to the “dirty south”—a term that is rooted especially in hip hop culture and is always already queer, even when texts do not claim queerness as their center. The dirty south has a long and rich cultural history that unearths complex relations among, bodies, pleasures, and the elements they divulge, making it a new source of aesthetic inspiration for reevaluating the multiracial, multigendered south(s) of the past and building a diverse and insurgent southern culture for the future.

The Conclusion highlights that there are common characteristics and trends that allow us to talk about ‘Mediterranean crime fiction’. Partially belonging to the family of European crime fiction, Mediterranean crime fiction is more exclusive, because it excludes northern and central European crime fiction. At the same time, it is more inclusive because it includes northern Africa and the Middle East. This book's approach considers southern European, northern African and eastern Mediterranean crime fiction as part of a common tradition, and more importantly gives each component equal significance. It avoids suppressing cultural diversity and contributes to a decentred crime fiction universe by creating a centreless map that does not point at specific countries or cities but at the liquid mass of the Mediterranean Sea. Finally, it shows how Mediterranean crime fiction contributes to the development of the crime genre at large with a concern for environmental issues, a complex discourse on identity and historical responsibilities, and a celebration of transculturality in a genre known for portraying conflict, violence and divisions.

In August 1952, students at Makerere University College, Kampala, went on strike. Chapter 1 connects the strike – and its leader Abu Mayanja – to the regional crises of 1952–1953: the Mau Mau uprising and the imposition of the Central African Federation. Education institutions and party politics came into unprecedented dialogue in this period, but this process was not directed from above by an older generation of nationalist leaders. Secondary school graduates, college students and newly qualified schoolteachers all encouraged this shift as they sought to define a global role for this regional cohort, thinking through regional comparisons, historical crossroads and notions of constitutional protest. Returning repeatedly to Makerere, this chapter focuses on correspondence around the strike, networks of schoolteachers, party-political student clubs, student publishing and anti-Federation newsletters. These examples demonstrate the importance of regional structures – and of how young people responded to these structures – as they set their sights on anticolonial work beyond the region.

This short conclusion pulls together the implications of tracing this cohort’s work and thought, through the conceptual framework of an anticolonial culture, for our understanding of the social and intellectual processes that accompanied legal-constitutional decolonisation. It focuses on the broader and less state-centric picture that emerges, on the importance of a regional framework to arrive at this ‘distributed’ history, and on the merits of microhistorical methods for revising heroic narratives of both national liberation and global solidarity projects. A new intellectual history of anticolonialism could thus make more room for social histories and collective labour.

In a flurry of activity that peaked in the late 1950s, a cohort of activists from the region encompassing present-day Malawi, Zambia, Uganda and mainland Tanzania participated in a global landscape of anticolonial activism. They travelled to hubs like Delhi, London, Cairo and Accra, navigating Cold War internationalisms as students, exiles and political representatives. They formed committees, manned offices, published pamphlets, launched newsletters and corresponded with international organisations. And yet, often, their committees collapsed, they struggled with stationery shortages, their pamphlet manuscripts were rejected, their newsletters were prevented from reaching readers and they were let down by organisations. The introduction asks how to understand this story against a historiographical backdrop that narrates global anticolonialism through the violent hotspots of international decolonisation. It proposes a microspatial perspective and the conceptual framework of an anticolonial culture, arguing that this regional cohort, by some measures marginal, can help us understand the limits of transnational activism in the unfolding of decolonisation.

The introductory chapter of this study parses the identity of the medieval North of England as a region desired for its role in defense at the Anglo-Scottish border and for the devotional culture cultivated, which significantly impacted the rest of England, and derided as a region defensive of its own autonomy, in frequent rebellion and, furthermore, a seat for lingering Catholicism in the wake of religious reform. For these reasons, this chapter claims, the North is necessary for understanding the larger negotiations of English identity and the English nation ongoing in the Middle Ages. The regionalism evident in the North of England and its literature both contests and, in a convoluted sense, enables an emergent English nationalism. If the English North–South divide is conceived by critics as a post-industrial phenomenon, then this chapter argues that the rift, and the discourse that makes it, grows out of these contests between region and nation in the Middle Ages.

The fourth chapter discusses the question of why now – why did customary law become the subject of vigorous written output at this particular thirteenth-century moment? The answer lies in the politics of customary law or, more specifically, the changes in both society and legal culture that created new zones of competition between secular and ecclesiastical courts. Competition between the temporal and spiritual jurisdictions was, of course, not new. The investiture controversy that began in the eleventh century, based in the conflict over the right of appointment of church officials, showed this to be a key issue of the high medieval period. The nature of competition manifested in the coutumiers was a little different. The coutumiers aimed to theorize, regularize, and professionalize the secular courts in the face of ecclesiastical courts, which had already gone through the same process and offered a competing forum at a time when boundaries were still being defined.

The Confederate nation was always an exercise in imagination. Southern nationalists, including Confederates and antebellum authors, viewed literature as integral to the project of nation-building. Just as the Confederacy would build its own world around the socio-economic system that defined the region—slavery—early southern nationalist and later Confederate novels speculated about a separate reality that fed into proslavery southerners’ understandings of themselves and their culture. This chapter explores the role of southern nationalist fiction in creating and sustaining an idea of the Confederacy from the antebellum period through the Civil War, using the example of novels and short fiction by authors such as Nathaniel Beverly Tucker, Augusta Jane Evans, and Richard Malcolm Johnston.

Economic hardship, exacerbated by the Civil War, revealed deep divisions between rich and poor, North and South, and dampened enlistment enthusiasm.

This chapter presents the institutions of central and local government. The balance of powers in favour of the executive within the Fifth Republic Constitution formalises realities of power. The traditional centralised French state with its local representatives controls many important public services. Developments over the past forty years have given more power to regions and large cities. These have provided a counterbalance to centralisation in economic development. The growth of Independent Administrative Authorities reflects developments in other developed countries. Nearly fifty years of the ombudsman function (now constitutionalised as the Défenseur(e) des droits) provides alternative redress to the administrative courts. The chapter concludes with an overview of the sources of French administrative law. The law is no longer primarily drawn from the case law of the Conseil d’Etat, but the Constitution, the enactment of codes, and the importance of EU law and the European Convention have diversified sources of law. Case law remains more important than in private law and legal scholarship is enriched by the participation of leading members of the Conseil d’Etat as authors.

Other sections of this book concern matters relating to the overall design of the Tour. By contrast, Chapter 11 provides a case study concerned with a specific locality, namely the Bristol region – again this section has never been given detailed attention before. Defoe had a solid working knowledge of the place, still third in size (behind Norwich) and second in overall importance to London among English cities. In particular, he had a firm grasp of the ways in which Bristol contributed to the national economy. He understood the way in which overseas and domestic trade operated, and explains the commercial ties to hinterland in Wales, the Midlands and the South West, maintained by road and river. Consideration is given to the author’s links with the Bristol mercantile community, seeking to dispel the uncorroborated story of his dealings with the castaway Alexander Selkirk, but suggesting a possible link with leading figures in the city who were in business with the iron founder Abraham Darby I.

This chapter takes the popularity of J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy (2016) as an opportunity to witness the power of tropes that politically and culturally juxtapose urban and regional concerns, and to explore critical regionalist alternatives to rhetorics of disconnection. It examines assumptions about regions that underly Vance’s “hillbilly” and the ethno-national difference between urban and regional spaces. Vance’s Appalachia had unfortunate resonance in a turbulent political season, spawning a subgenre “Trump Country” essays. A critical regionalist uses these characterizations as an occasion to affirm alternative versions of region. Moving quickly and collaboratively, a network of artists and scholars responded in diverse works, landmarked by What You Are Getting Wrong about Appalachia (2018), the documentary film hillbilly (2018), and the multigenre collection Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy (2019). These works and the conversations they generated across media create a multivocal portrait of a place that must be understood from a perspective that does not see city and region as antithetical but maps interconnections of urban and rural spaces.

This introduction achieves three goals. First, the essay offers readers a brief account of the differences between the old southern studies andNew Southern Studies, with a particular focus on race. Second, the piece examines how the New Southern Studies requires a different type of literary historical narrative, one which emphasizes pluralism and multiplicity more than homogeneity and cohesion.Third, it provides an overview of the twenty-four essays included in the volume.