This essay develops a history of salvage both as particular activity and as concept, arguing that it has quietly become one of the fundamental structures of thought that shape how we envision future possibility. However, the contemporary sense of the word, which designates the recuperation or search for value in what has already been destroyed, is a recent one and represents a significant transformation from the notion of salvage in early modern European maritime and insurance law. In that earlier iteration, salvage denoted payment received for helping to avert a disaster, such as keeping the ship and its goods from sinking in the first place. Passing through the dislocation of this concept into private salvage firms, firefighting companies, military usage, avant-garde art, and onto the human body itself in the guise of “personal risk,” the essay argues that the twentieth century becomes indelibly marked by a sense of the disaster that has already occurred. The second half of the essay passes into speculative culture, including fiction, video games, and film, to suggest that the most critical approaches to salvage have often come under the sign of science fiction but that the last decade in particular has shown how recent quotidian patterns of gentrification and defused antagonism have articulated stranger shifts in the figure of salvage than any speculative imaginary can currently manage.

The three books reviewed here each examine the American South with one central idea in mind: violence, citizenship, and the Atlantic world. The first two seem quite primal ideas, the sort of things historians have been using for ages, and even the Atlantic world is getting rather long in the tooth now. However, each of these three books, in different ways, demonstrates new ways of thinking about ideas central to our understandings of the South and, at their best, make the familiar strange, giving us new ways to understand an old region. Since two of them are edited collections, it probably makes best sense to take them up first, leaving the monograph for later.

For fifteen years, the New Southern Studies (NSS) has been doing battle on two very different fronts. To Americanists, we have tried to talk about what Houston Baker and Dana Nelson, in the essay that named the movement, called “the national formation of the United States and the dynamics of race, region, and citizenship entailed by, as it were, a putatively split and decidedly Manichean geography”; to southernists, we have talked about the need to get beyond what the same pair of writers called “our familiar notions of Good (or desperately bad) Old Southern White Men telling stories on the porch, protecting white women, and being friends to the Negro.” Although in both struggles we keep bumping up against putatively objective scholars’ unacknowledged and deeply self-serving fantasies about who “we” are (whether as “Americans” or “southerners,” “radical” Americanists or Atticus Finch-y liberal white southernists), the former arguments – as Baker and Nelson's diction suggests – have tended to be more abstract, theoretical, ambitious, interesting, and smart; the latter, in contrast, have always felt like a rearguard action.

Thinking about the approach and scholarship called the New Southern Studies takes me back to the first years in my position in southern studies and history at the University of Mississippi. When I started that job in 1988, I had a great deal to learn, especially about the recent and contemporary South. So I turned to the best scholarly books I could find, especially those by my fellow historians and also by social scientists, literary scholars, music scholars, and folklorists.