Southern Identity In James Cobb's Away Down South

As James Cobb noted those claiming to be “purists” of Southern identities and histories are actually worshipping something that was never pure in the first place. Cobb’s thesis in Away Down South suggested that culture is part of and connected to identity and culture is a process of change that required adaptability to ensure success. The history of the southern identity is not a story of continuity versus change, but continuity within it. Often used stereotypes, for Cobb, strengthen Southerners identites by remaining the same throughout eras of change. These well-worn stereotypes confirm the ability of the South to maintain consistent when the rest of the nation is changing around it. While some historians view the step away from the South as detrimental to the popular image of the South, most have been more concerned
Brenden Martin’s Tourism in the Mountain South is about the advent of tourism culture in the south. Through complicated, “double-edged” realtionships, tourism ultimate, reinforces stereotypes and removed the ability to access “not one South” thesis posited by the majority in this historiography. Martin eschews the kinds of normative dichotomies that often hindered earlier work on tourism and society: good vs. bad, internal vs. external, authentic vs. inauthentic, preservation vs. destruction, and so on. Tourism’s role has been complex and often contradictory, not reducible to sterile oppositions. Equally importantly, his analysis shows how tourism has long been part of the Mountain South, to a degree that it does not make sense to see it as an outside force generating an external impact on localities and regions. Tourism has become as much part of mountain regions as any of their other industries, very much bound up with local, regional, and national stratification and culture, with predictably "double-edged" outcomes. Ultimately, Southern identities, despite being based in a shallow interpretation of the past, are always shifting and