Displacement and Indirection: Prism Life in the Antebellum South

The essay acknowledges attempts by white writers to provide the US South with a clear ideological identity, but it explores works by white writers that reveal the fractured, incoherent character of a region that struggled to account for slavery in terms of its own professed principles and actual practices. Black writers, who were the products of the contradictions and incoherence of southern culture, were the writers best able to represent the region. Slavery served as a prism that affected the light that any writer tried to bring to an examination of southern culture; African Americans engaged with that refracted light as an aesthetic method.