Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Spring 2010
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly 30:3 (Spring 2010).
Abstract
Emerging out of a 2003 conference in Lincoln, Nebraska, organized by the Consortium of Regional Humanities Centers, the sixteen disparate essays included in this engaging volume, ably edited and introduced by Timothy Mahoney and Wendy Katz, testify to the catholicity and vitality of the "new regionalism" in American studies. They both illustrate and justify what has been labeled by some the "local turn" in humanities scholarship. Because of the location of the conference on the border between the Midwest and the Great Plains, half of these essays focus upon those two regions. Each author assumes that place matters-that in addition to the standard explanatory variables of class, race, ethnicity, gender, demography, and so forth, geography needs to be assigned high priority in any cultural analysis.
These regionalist scholars have moved a long distance from the geographical determinists of an earlier day, such as Frederick Jackson Turner, who is mentioned in six of the essays. Both implicitly and sometimes explicitly they champion multiplicity, contingency, indeterminancy, permeability, contestedness, ambiguity, and change. Beyond that, they reflect a growing consensus that regional studies in the twenty-first century need to be interdisciplinary, methodologically flexible, and creative.
Comments
Copyright © 2010 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska.