Overview

Indians are everywhere and nowhere in the US South. Cloaked by a rhetoric of disappearance after Indian Removal, actual southeastern tribal groups are largely invisible but immortalized in regional mythologies, genealogical lore, romanticized stereotypes, and unpronounceable place names. These imaginary 'Indians' compose an ideological fiction inextricable from that of the South itself. Often framed as hindrances to the Cotton Kingdom, Indians were in fact active participants in the plantation economy and chattel slavery before and after Removal. Dialectical tropes of Indigeneity linger in the white southern imagination in order to both conceal and expose the tangle of land, labor, and race as formative, disruptive categories of being and meaning. This book is not, finally, about the recovery of the region's lost Indians, but a reckoning with their inaccessible traces, ambivalent functions, and the shattering implications of their repressed significance for modern southern identity.

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9781108495318

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Melanie Benson Taylor is Professor of Native American Studies at Dartmouth College. She is the editor of The Cambridge History of Native American Literature and the author of two previous monographs: Reconstructing the Native South: American Indian Literature and the Lost Cause (2011); and Disturbing Calculations: The Economics of Identity in Postcolonial Southern Literature, 1912–2002 (2008). Her articles have appeared in American Literary History, The Mississippi Quarterly, Texas Studies in Language and Literature, and elsewhere. She is currently editing a Norton Critical Edition of William Faulkner's Light in August and serves as Executive Editor for the journal Native South.

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