Corporeal Legacies in the US South Memory and Embodiment in Contemporary Culture

This book examines the ways in which the histories of racial violence, from slavery onwards, are manifest in representations of the body in twenty-first-century culture set in the US South. Christopher Lloyd focuses on corporeality in literature and film to detail the workings of cultural memory in the present. Drawing on the fields of Southern Studies, Memory Studies and Black Studies, the book also engages psychoanalysis, Animal Studies and posthumanism to revitalize questions of the racialized body. Lloyd traces corporeal legacies in the US South through novels by Jesmyn Ward, Kathryn Stockett and others, alongside film and television such as Beasts of the Southern Wild and The Walking Dead. In all, the book explores the ways in which bodies in contemporary southern culture bear the traces of racial regulation and injury.

1. Introduction: The Body of/in Memory

2. The Plantation to the Penitentiary: Monster’s Ball and Bodies at their Limits

3. The Plantation to the Apocalypse: Zombies and the Non/human in The Walking Dead and A Questionable Shape

4. The Home of Jim Crow: Toilets and Matter in Kathryn Stockett’s The Help

5. “Everything deserve to live”: Animals, Hurricane Katrina, and Salvage the Bones

6. “Fabric of the universe is comin’ unraveled”: Beasts of the Southern Wild, from Flesh to Planet

7. Conclusion: Corporealizing Southern Studies

Christopher Lloyd is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Hertfordshire, UK. He is author of Rooting Memory, Rooting Place: Regionalism in the Twenty-First-Century American South (2015), and numerous special issues, journal articles and book chapters on race and memory in contemporary US literature and culture.