The short story remains at heart of southern literature. Anthologies, surveys, and criticism all tout the centrality of the form to the representation of the region. But the short story form does not merely facilitate a focus on diverse, local southern cultures. Because short stories can be easily republished and collected, these “little postage stamps” also allow such diverse, local cultures to circulate broadly. In examining the ways short fictional forms enable access to and communication with far-flung places, this chapter offers case studies of three accomplished short story writers: Kate Chopin, Zora Neale Hurston, and Oscar Cásares. Theirs is a literature of the provinces that is far from provincial – a regional literature par excellence that remains very much engaged with the broader world.

This chapter registers how questions of collectivity and radical change cannot be considered without questions of gender, race, class and power coming to the fore. In William Gibson’s The Peripheral (2014), technology seems at first sight to distinguish the near from far future, but the foundational difference is between gendered bodies. In World Made by Hand by James Howard Kunstler (2008), the jump-starting of history leads to a pre-modern US from which race is excised, and a world that mirrors the role the South has played in the US regional imaginary in such a way that The Peripheral is revealed as a riff on the counterfactual civil war history. Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel (2014) sees the collaborative arts become a societal model in which women can assume prominent roles. However, the novel’s emphasis on timeless ‘beauty’ promotes the post-Fordist creative as human universal, while its patriarchal cult relies on a stereotyped figure of the white South, such that the novel’s utopian overlooking of race threatens to efface the history of slavery. Station Eleven ultimately splits between the return of a fatally compromised history, and a utopian break from it.

The conclusion revisits the book's conceptualization of the geography of freedom in North America. It argues that the main differences between spaces of informal, semi-formal, and formal freedom for fugitive slaves come down to differences in freedom seekers' motivaitons, networks, visibility, and vulnerability. It is clear that runaways’ motivations and expectations of freedom from slavery tended to differ by degrees, and these informed their escape attempts. The networks that facilitated slave flight to all three spaces of freedom also differed by degrees, from family networks in spaces of informal freedom to more organized antislavery networks in spaces of semi-formal and formal freedom. Visibility was an important factor in slave flight. Freedom seekers in the urban South were the most dependent upon developing and cultivating false identities in order to prevent recapture; those who fled beyond the borders did not need to hide their identities at all. Finally, freedom seekers' vulnerability to recapture and reenslavement differed across the continent. Runaways in the urban South were the most vulnerable, whereas those who fled the United States were the least vulnerable.

How was slave flight in North America characterized? How and why did enslaved people flee to—and navigate—different destinations throughout the continent, and to what extent did they succeed in evading recapture and reenslavement? The Introduction lays out overarching questions and purpose. Freedom Seekers examines the experiences of runaways from southern slavery between 1800 and 1860. Taking a continental approach, this study highlights the diversity of slave flight in North America by conceptually dividing the continent into three distinct (and continuously evolving) spaces of freedom for runaway slaves, namely: spaces of informal freedom in the US South, where enslaved people attempted to flee slavery by trying to pass for free; spaces of semi-formal freedom in the Northern United States, where slavery was abolished but where the status of fugitive slaves was contested; and spaces of formal freedom in Canada and Mexico, where slavery was abolished where runaways were considered legally free and safe from reenslavement. The Introduction to this study also positions it within the scholarship on fugitive slaves, explaining its innovative continental perspective and new conceptual approach.

The first chapter examines the changing landscape of slavery and freedom that developed in North America in the revolutionary era. It explores how and why opportunities for enslaved people to permanently escape bondage expanded significantly between the colonial era and the early nineteenth century. The chapter begins with a discussion of how slave flight was characterized during the colonial period, underscoring the informal nature of sancturary spaces and the lack of any spaces of "formal freedom" throughout the continent, as slavery was legally sanctioned everywhere. It then delves into the major transitions that occurred in the Age of Revolutions, with the abolition of slavery in the Northern United States, British Canada, and Mexico; as well as the wave of manumissions in the southern states that greatly bolstered urban free black communities. By the mid-1830s, enslaved people who found themselves trapped in the second slavery of the American South saw potential "spaces of freedom" in every direction: informal freedom within urban areas in the South itself; semi-formal (contested) freedom in the Northern United States; and formal freedom beyond the borders of the United States.

The second chapter delves into slave flight to spaces of informal freedom in the urban South, the most immediate and easily reached destinations for runaways trapped in the second slavery. It considers why enslaved people chose to go to the trouble of fleeing bondage yet remain within the slaveholding states; the networks that helped them do so; the strategies they employed to hide their identities, sustain themselves, and remain at large indefinitely; and the risk they ran of recapture. The actions of these runaways went far beyond mere truancy, as is often suggested in the literature. Many fugitives to urban areas clearly attempted to live their lives there indefinitely. The chapter devotes considerable attention to the importance of family in informing freedom seekers' decisions to remain within the South, even if it meant foregoing more formal freedom in other parts of the continent. It also examines the importance of visibility in runaways' strategies of escape, exploring how they "passed for free" by looking and acting free, procuring false freedom papers and other documentation, and integrating themselves into urban free black communities so as to avoid detection.

The third chapter explores slave flight to spaces of semi-formal freedom in the antebellum North. It analyzes why freedom seekers sought to risk their lives to escape the South rather than flee to nearby spaces of informal freedom; how they did so; their settlement processes; and how they fared in the legal quagmire of rendition and reenslavement. It begins with an examination of enslaved people's perilous northbound journeys, emphasizing the particular reasons some freedom seekers sought free soil and some semblance of legal freedom from slavery. It then delves into refugees' experiences settling in and sustaining themselves in the northern states, with an emphasis on their integration into northern free black communities. The chapter concludes with an extensive discussion of the ambiguous legal status of fugitive slaves in the Northern United States and how conflicts over legal rights and the conditions for rendition developed over time, often stimulating mass civil disobedience to federal fugitive slave laws and de facto protection from reenslavement.

The films shot by Zora Neale Hurston during her anthropological research trip through the US South (1927–1930) were perhaps the first professional recordings ever made by an African American woman. Durkin examines this footage to explore Hurston’s contributions to ethnographic cinema and to black southern cinema more broadly, and to elucidate some of the connections between her anthropological and creative work. The films show how Hurston understood and sought to depict black folk cultures on the page and stage. They draw attention to the international focus of her research and suggest that the textual and cinematic strands of her research project should not be read in isolation because they were conceived as a joint corrective to mainstream US distortions of black artistry. Moreover, the films are rare cinematic documents of the everyday lives of black working-class subjects whose artistry underpinned so much of Hurston’s creative work and interwar US culture more generally.

The First World War was a shock to the US South. When the war started, the South was a provincial region mired in segregation and plantation agriculture, much as it had been before the Civil War. During the war, however, the South mobilized. Nearly one million southerners enlisted; almost all of the nation’s troops trained at bases hastily-constructed in the South, and the war dramatically reshaped the region’s social order. The war brought northerners and southerners into contact on a massive scale, which eroded sectional animosities, it gave African Americans an opportunity to challenge Jim Crow through military service, and it offered women new forms of social, political, and economic agency. All of these changes occurred during the frenzy of wartime. In the South, the war’s full effects were not evident until after the Armistice, when the soldiers returned. The social expansions that happened during the war contracted, but like a deflated balloon misshapen from use, the social order did not return precisely to previous conditions. This essay focus on the works of three Mississippi writers—William Alexander Percy, William Faulkner, and George Washington Lee—who depicted the experiences of soldiers returning from the war and post-war social landscape of the South.