Identifying the antebellum era in the United States as a transitional setting Imagining
Southern Spaces´investigates spatialization processes about the South during a time when
intensifying debates over the abolition of slavery led to a heightened period of
(re)spatialization in the region. Taking the question of abolition as a major factor that
shaped how different actors responded to these processes this book studies spatial
imaginations in a selection of abolitionist and proslavery literature of the era. Through this
diversity of imaginations the book points to a multitude of Souths in various economic
political and cultural entanglements in the American Hemisphere and the Circumatlantic. Thus
it challenges monolithic and provincial representations of the South as a provincial region
distinct from the rest of the country.
