This is a moment for relentless forward gazing, an impulse already evident, for example, at two conferences in 2013: race in space, a gathering at Duke University, where Mae Jemison spoke about her project 100 Year Starship, and the meeting of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association, with the theme of making meaning in networked worlds. In several ways, the path that I want to propose for southern studies and particularly the study of southern literature is inflected by the conversations at these conferences. It is also informed by my tangential interest in speculative fictions—not necessarily of the literary variety—and by a desire to see more scholarship that goes beyond underscoring the tensions and anxieties of various Souths, scholarship attuned to the generative possibilities and (I, perhaps naively, suggest) the hopes that might emerge from the sites that we call Souths.

Africanist studies conventionally restrict considerations of space to its physical dimensions. affective representations in literary writing oppose the village to the city, imbuing the village with comprehensible, but rarely historicized, routines. Until disturbed by uninvited and troubling ideas, institutions, and individuals from unknowable distances and places, the village nourishes existential certainty and sustains spiritual balance. In contrast, the corrupting, bewildering city signals instabilities of all kinds, even in the social sciences. Across the disciplines, while organic production and genuinely reciprocal relations dominate in the village, the insatiable city absorbs without giving back and never offers spiritual renewal. The village half of the spatial dyad represents what is truly African, and folklore, or orality in general, holds Africa's romance together. Its schematic character notwithstanding, the predisposition toward construing space as little more than the thin cover of more vital substances that facilitate self-understanding has produced enduring parameters for interpreting African expressive forms. With convivial marketplaces and festivals, evil forests and sacred groves, village squares and humble homesteads, depictions of the village in novels set at the beginning of colonization have fixed, perhaps permanently, perceptions of the African cultural past in reader's imaginations, and efforts to read these narratives have generated useful, axiomatic insights about meanings of traditional, everyday African life and its ritualized calibrations of the movement of time, its reifications of the social compact, and its coded references to the society's cosmic bearings. he African city has not been that fortunate.

Working for More Than Fifteen Years in Public Universities—First as a Graduate Teaching Assistant, then as a Nontenure-track full-timer, finally making my way onto the tenure track—taught me a great deal about how public education works and literature's place in a world where the concepts of the public and education are devalued if not attacked. J. M. Coetzee's novel Disgrace stages some of the challenges of teaching literature in the contemporary university. The novel's protagonist, David Lurie, is a Romanticist struggling to connect with his students: “[H]e does not expect them to know about fallen angels or where Byron might have read of them. What he does expect is a round of goodnatured guesses which, with luck, he can guide toward the mark.” He is disappointed by the virtual impossibility of this task: “[H]e has long ceased to be surprised at the range of ignorance of his students. Post-Christian, posthistorical, postliterate, they might as well have been hatched from eggs yesterday” (32). In this context, he thinks—and readers probably agree—that he is “no great shakes as a teacher” (63).

In spring 2014, the society for the study of southern literature (sssl) executive council asked us to assemble a roundtable of manifestos by emerging scholars on the future of southern literary studies for Other Souths, a conference to take place in Arlington, Virginia. As a companion to a plenary panel of manifestos by senior scholars, this roundtable, titled Future Souths, was sure to draw an engaged crowd. We anticipated that the speakers would not only delineate their research but also set the stage for new trajectories in the field. Before organizing the event, we discussed our ideas about where southern literary studies was headed in the short term and where we thought it ought to go next.

Had shahrazad lived today she might have been on the first boat of middle eastern refugees to europe, posits the theater director Mahmoud al-Hurani in his new play 1001 Titanics. First performed in September 2015 by the Arab Puppet Theatre at the Metro al Madina Theater in Beirut, the play toured in Lebanese refugee camps throughout the fall. In al-Hurani's play Shahrazad tells the tale of a skinny boy named Ahmad, a refugee driven by the fall of rockets from his quaint village to an unnamed Arab metropolis symbolized by the paper cutout of a skyline of high rises. The production relies on silhouette, puppetry, and mime to tell its story. In one climactic scene, two characters play cards over an upturned fan, and when a cutout of a missile drops to the stage their cards are blown into oblivion.

On 18 august 1492, the lexicographer and grammarian antonio de nebrija'S castilian grammar—variously referred to as Gramática castellana, Gramática de la lengua castellana, and Gramática sobre la lengua castellana—was printed in Salamanca. Modeled on his earlier Latin grammar, Introductiones latinae (1481), it was the first such systematization of a modern (vernacular) European language and part of an emergent print and lexical humanist culture in the early modern period. Nebrija dedicated the project to Isabel I of Castile in a prologue that opens with a declaration for which the text is notorious: “language was always the companion [compañera] of empire, and followed it such that together [junta mente] they began, grew, and flourished—and, later, together [junta mente] they fell.”

Postcolonial Publishing and Indigenous Publishing, like Hegel's Africa, are Often Imagined to be Without a History. Indeed, in A Companion to the History of the Book, published by Wiley Blackwell in 2009 and heralded by Adrian Johns as particularly exemplary in that the editors “take the term book in a broad sense to include not only codex volumes and scrolls, but also periodicals, ephemera, and even ancient Babylonian clay tablets” (Review of Companion 782), no region of the global South gets a chapter to itself, and Africa gets only two entries in the index: in a one-sentence remark about Middle Eastern and North African Islamic book production before 1100 and in a parenthetical reference to slavery in a chapter on libraries that mentions colonization. Johns himself has written a huge work on “the book”—that is, about early modern Britain (Nature). In David Finkelstein and Alistair MacCleery's recently reprinted An Introduction to Book History, “the book” is unapologetically introduced as a Western form: the introduction makes it clear that the topic of the volume is overwhelmingly “Western European traditions of social communication through writing …” (30). The definite article is fearless in book history and occludes the history and travels of the book elsewhere, reinstalling it, time after time, in the North Atlantic regions that seem to be its natural habitat.

In his fascinating study of accra, ato quays0n quickly alerts his reader to the idea that one must not separate ways of knowing shakespeare from ways of knowing Accra. “Reading” the city as a literary critic, but much more, Quayson gives a discursive framework to his historical account of the material, social, and esoteric life of the city. Underlying the text is an implicit argument with other prominent accounts of African cities, which take a more utopian view and present these cities as mapping the innovative, exciting, and creative possibilities of urban space for the rest of the world. Quayson's mode of history is explicitly linked to storytelling in a number of ways beyond his disclosure that “[t]he retelling of Accra's story from a more expansive urban historical perspective is the object of Oxford Street” (4). From the start, it is also clear that his approach will utilize a broadly Marxian framework, which is to see (city) space in terms of the built environment as well as the social relations in and beyond it: “space becomes both symptom and producer of social relations” (5). But ultimately Quayson's apprehension of his city is Marxian because it recuperates ideas, desires, and creativity from the realm of the unique or inexplicable, of “genius,” to effectively insert them into various systems of production or into spaces that lack them. In so doing Quayson enhances, not hinders, our appreciation of those forms of innovation. Also Marxian is his employment of the “negative,” which refers to the way he splits apart many of the accepted relations between things in the scholarship on the development of the city, the postcolonial African city in particular, and pushes beyond the evidence of the “booming” or “creative” city. Quayson thus binds a more philosophical method of reasoning to his analysis of urban social relations while he straddles different disciplines. His work is illuminated when we locate a personal impulse, which we will track through the autobiographical narrative, to intervene not just in the ways the city is understood but also in the ways it is actually developing.

I Am Not Particularly Sensitive to Space and Location, Except When it Comes to Real Estate. Still, I Cannot Help But Notice their increased importance in the human sciences: philosophers evoke heterotopies and dream of geophilosophy, historians explore lieux de mémoire (“sites of memory”), and distant reading or surface reading competes with close reading. It is as if to the end of history there corresponded a beginning of geography, and some scholars, like Michel Collot, have even spoken of a spatial turn (15).

In teaching and studying French literature, which I have been doing for a long time, geographic forces have always had a significant role, because of the distance between France and the United States and because of the global situation of the two countries. That the distance has become less daunting in the past fifty or sixty years has led to more scholarly exchanges, smoother collaborations, easier access to subjects or objects, and the study of the literary extrême contemporain (“extremely contemporary”), say, or that of modern popular literature is now less problematic. As for the global situation, there has been a French loss and an American gain of cultural power, with less United States attention paid to French cultural products. This relative disaffection permeates many texts. I remember quite well how Donald Morrison buried French culture (Morrison and Compagnon), and I will not forget that Mark Bittman even argued in the New York Times that one ate better in London than in Paris. Across the ocean too, there was concern. As early as the 1990s, Jean-Marie Domenach deplored the twilight of French civilization. A few years later, Nicolas Baverez described a falling France.

I first encountered ato quayson's transcendent account of accra and its enigmatic oxford street in 2009, a full five years before it was published as a book. In August of that year the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD) held its fifth biennial conference in the Ghanaian capital. This was ASWAD's first conference on the continent, and it drew an impressive array of scholars from all over the world to a country that has long been a focal point of the diaspora's engagement with its African past and present. Because of its location, the conference attracted an especially large contingent of scholars who work on Ghana, among them quite a few historians, including me. Just when it seemed that the atmosphere of intellectual exchange could not get any headier, Quayson invited a small group of us to join him on a bespoke tour of Accra that heralded the arrival of Oxford Street in 2014.

In the Autumn of 2002, I Gave a Lecture on Mourning the Dead to Final-Year Undergraduates at the University of Cambridge studying the compulsory course on tragedy. The lecture covered the care devoted to the dead body in Sophocles's Antigone and Hamlet's reflections, over Ophelia's grave, on the “fine revolution” of the material corpse (5.1.82-83). But it also extended its range to include the then very recent excavation, for eight and a half months, at Ground Zero in search of the remains of the dead victims of the attack on the World Trade Center, and the simultaneous daily publication in the New York Times of “Portraits of Grief.” These portraits, I maintained, fulfilled a similar function to tragic drama by refocusing attention on the individual life and by finding a narrative arc to each victim's story, like Aristotle's tragic plots, which must have “a beginning, a middle, and an end” (26). While the firefighters' digging equipment at Ground Zero searched in vain for the missing remains of about 1800 people and eventually hit bedrock, the newspaper reinvested each lost person with significance, finding a value and a pattern in the person's life.

If you have to explain a proverb, it is too esoteric for popular use; but if it is too mundane and obvious, it will not circulate or gain notoriety. It should be witty and rhythmic but obscure; it should attract new meanings and move among various contexts and genres, taken up by listeners who recirculate it in new media to new audiences. Effective proverbs use indirection as a performance strategy, provoking new interpretations and lubricating social circulation across disparate spaces (Yankah).