The Weird South

How do we read southern literature in a postplantation, postregional, and posthuman moment? How do we address the urgent contemporary catastrophes of the Anthropocene in these newly leveled landscapes? Put simply, how do we parse the levels of human responsibilityboth for apocalypse and for deliverancein contexts where settler-colonial and racial capitalist histories dramatically shape our reality? Reading modern and contemporary southern literary texts from a variety of perspectives, these lectures engage the new materialist, object-oriented ontologies that critique and decenter human agency while uncovering the lasting, determinative, haunting realities of humanitys detention within what Timothy Morton calls the weird web of our entwined social, racial, economic, and natural ecologies. As a concept in the burgeoning conversation about Anthropocenic disaster and climate emergency, the weird is a powerful way to conceptualize not just human hubris but also humility: we are no different from, no more powerful than, any other living or inanimate objectsneither the organisms that take up residence in our bodies nor the myriad things that we imagine we create, fashion, patrol, and control.