CFP: Conjuring a New Old South: Culture and Tourism along the Lower Mississippi River Valley

Deadline for abstracts: March 15, 2025

The Lower Mississippi River Valley historically has been a place ripe for historical tourism. Between river, bus, and auto tourism, thousands of individuals a year traverse this culturally rich area to experience their imagined Southern pasts. American histories of music, the Civil War, food, art, literature, and the environment all intersect in major ways with this relatively small part of the South. The regions along the Lower Mississippi rely heavily on this tourism to bolster their economy, with Memphis recently spending $36 million to increase its docking capacity for river cruises. The long history of Old South tourism pushed by southern sites connected to pilgrimages and river cities like New Orleans and Natchez is now converging with outside cultural perceptions of the region brought by tourists who expect to experience authentic Southern experiences that may no longer exist, but also want to engage with modern museums, cutting-edge food, and advanced infrastructure. Many tourists do not want to see the economic and racial inequality that plagues the region, while others seek these experiences out directly. We are interested in how tourism has helped reshape ideas of the past in the region just as much as the region’s historic sites.

Possible topics include:

    Carceral tourism
    Creating new versions of the “Old South”
    Work building on Clyde Woods’ “Blues Epistemology”
    Disaster tourism
    Plantation tourism
    Horticultural and zoological tourism (for example, Avery Island Jungle Gardens or swamp tours and importation of nutria and invasive species)
    Sportsman or sporting tourism
    Mardi Gras, festivals, or cultural events tourism
    Culinary tourism and Atlantic geographies
    Gambling/casinos and resulting forms of tourism
    Cities of the dead/cemetery tourism
    Music tourism (e.g., jazz, blues, zydeco)
    Civil Rights Trails and commemoration as tourism
    Civil War and Confederate mythologies
    SEC football as tourism
    Art, literature, and media tourism
    Architectural and engineering tourism
    The Big Muddy/Mark Twain and ideas of the Mississippi itself
    Plantation Country as Cancer Alley

We encourage submissions beyond these suggestions that address tourism and history in the region.
We hope to submit the volume for publication in early 2026 so contributors will have until late 2025 to draft their complete 7,000-8,000-word essays. Please send abstracts of up to 500 words (in Chicago style) and a 100-word biographical statement to editors Ian Beamish and Liz Skilton, at ian.beamish@louisiana.edu and liz.skilton@louisiana.edu, by March 15, 2025.

Image: "Boat Landing from River View, Natchez, Miss." Anchor Line steamboat at levee, Natchez-Under-The-Hill, Natchez, Mississippi, before 1899. Postcard view, ca. 1907. Public domain. By Absecon 49 - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=33874917