Southern Selves

Received the new Southern Selves book yesterday from Amazon.  A note on the back matter/metatext of this book featuring various southern authors writing about identity:

The publisher writes:

"Whether slave or master, intellectual or 'redneck,' each voice in this collection..."

Apparently these are the choices in the realm of southern selves who wrote here or might be purchasing this book.

It continues:

"... southern literature richly deserves its reputation for irreverent humor, exquisite language, a feeling for place, and an undying, often heartbreaking sense of the past."

Here we have the hallmarks (some might say the stereotypes) of southern lit laid out before us:  the sad sack, make-the-best-of-it antebellum humor; rich poetic language; sense of place (geography?); and nostalgia for the lost past.  Are these really the way we would describe varying voices of Southern writers, such as African American voices?  A nostalgia for the past?  Humor?

I'm thinking of Alice Walker's quote about Southern women writers, that all of them write so eloquently, beautifully, poetically about the South.  But none of them live there.