Rose marie ramsey biography of william

Terrance Hayes and Natasha Trethewey: Contemporary Black Chroniclers of the Imagined South

The Southern Literary Journal
Volume 44, Number 2, Spring
pages
DOI: /slj

William M. Ramsey, Professor of English
Francis Marion University, Florence, South Carolina

“I Don’t Hate the South.”
— book title by Houston Baker, Jr.

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” William Faulkner famously wrote in Requiem for a Nun (73). His assumption—that the southern writer is a chronicler accessing the essence of a wholly objective place, transparently “explaining” a history to outsiders who misunderstand it—has been undermined by the theorizing in New Southern Studies. To chronicle the historical South as a special space enacts a social construction positing an ideologically reductive, essentialist regional myth. As Richard Gray argues, the invented South is an “imagined community” as well as a real and given space (xix). Diane Roberts terms it “the South of the mind” (). Faulkner, conflicted and ghost-haunted by memories of the past, saw himself in the grip of a concrete reality so palpable that it could not be wiped away with time. But multiple communities, genders, and races lived in that past, and they stimulate divergent takes on it. Thus Houston Baker, Jr., borrow

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