What's Left of Memory In a new book of criticism, Michael
Kreyling challenges perceptions of Southern identity What is the
South, and who owns its memory? The question of Southern
identity is hardly new, and yet it persists in provoking
considerable and often uncivil argument. At the core of the
debate, renewed in Michael Kreyling’s The South That Wasn’t
There: Postsouthern Memory and History, is the conflict between
an idealized cultural “memory” of the South as it appears in the
iconic Gone With the Wind, and the grim, brutal realities of
Southern history that both figuratively and literally haunt the
characters of Toni Morrison’s 1987 masterpiece, Beloved. In one,
Southern history is defined by faith and family, honor and
chivalry; in the other, a privileged few gain their leisure on
the backs of the slaves whose bondage was all too frequently
compounded by even more hideous atrocities. It would seem
impossible for white Southerners in the twenty-first century to
cling to a vision of the past that omits ou