What do you do when you come to know that you're stuck to the intractable stuff of other folks' and other times' making, stuck more deeply the more you rail against it for not answering to your hailing? What do you do when you're busted to pieces and can't pull it all together with the hum of a song? What do you do when you find yourself outside a structure that won't let you (or your loves) inside its towered walls and gated communities? What follow are prescriptions divined from fabulous tales of tar babies, terrapins, and supersized machine-horses. Southern myth-science. To borrow from others in this collection: hum/animal songs from outer space(s).

My vision for the future of southern studies is for the field to develop as a site of activism. Since comparative civil rights scholarship and a focus on radical activism in the South are on the rise, I hope that work in these areas can teach us lessons about how to act on our ideas, to convert manifestos into practice. Any scholar of, or participant in, sixties (in the extended, poetic sense of the term) activism will recognize the frustration that accompanies mobilizing for change. As one of the characters in Toni Cade Bambara's novel The Salt Eaters, a community organizer from Georgia, states, “The dream is real, my friends. The failure to make it work is the unreality” (126). I call for us to reflect on the unreality of our limitations, and I suggest places where we could open dialogue that would push the field forward.

Whereas the past decade of progress for LGBTQ Americans has accompanied a turn away from liberalism and a silencing of radicalism, in that gays who face discrimination are seen as innocent victims while unarmed black men gunned down by police are seen as thugs, and in that queers celebrate judicial acknowledgment of their dignity while food stamps disappear, recipients of public assistance are tested for drugs, one third of young black men have been incarcerated, torture is an instrument of American foreign policy, and the top one percent get wildly richer each year;

Our understandings of early moments of southern literature and culture share some common frameworks. Representations (including self-representations) of the South in the nineteenth century, for example, revolve largely around plantation slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. Similarly, we might think about the twentieth-century South as defined by Jim Crow segregation, the out-migration of blacks and working-class whites, and the civil rights movement and its aftermath. What are the issues, then, that structure the twenty-first-century southern imaginary? To what extent does it make sense to talk about “the South” as a unified conceptual, ideological, or geographic place? What does it mean to read, watch, listen to, study, and teach southern literature and culture in the twenty-first century? What do we mean by the terms southern and literature? What cultural forms and media are central to understanding twenty-first-century southern culture? What is the utility of the literary? How do southern literature and culture relate to the nation as a whole?

This is a moment for relentless forward gazing, an impulse already evident, for example, at two conferences in 2013: race in space, a gathering at Duke University, where Mae Jemison spoke about her project 100 Year Starship, and the meeting of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association, with the theme of making meaning in networked worlds. In several ways, the path that I want to propose for southern studies and particularly the study of southern literature is inflected by the conversations at these conferences. It is also informed by my tangential interest in speculative fictions—not necessarily of the literary variety—and by a desire to see more scholarship that goes beyond underscoring the tensions and anxieties of various Souths, scholarship attuned to the generative possibilities and (I, perhaps naively, suggest) the hopes that might emerge from the sites that we call Souths.

In spring 2014, the society for the study of southern literature (sssl) executive council asked us to assemble a roundtable of manifestos by emerging scholars on the future of southern literary studies for Other Souths, a conference to take place in Arlington, Virginia. As a companion to a plenary panel of manifestos by senior scholars, this roundtable, titled Future Souths, was sure to draw an engaged crowd. We anticipated that the speakers would not only delineate their research but also set the stage for new trajectories in the field. Before organizing the event, we discussed our ideas about where southern literary studies was headed in the short term and where we thought it ought to go next.

On 18 august 1492, the lexicographer and grammarian antonio de nebrija'S castilian grammar—variously referred to as Gramática castellana, Gramática de la lengua castellana, and Gramática sobre la lengua castellana—was printed in Salamanca. Modeled on his earlier Latin grammar, Introductiones latinae (1481), it was the first such systematization of a modern (vernacular) European language and part of an emergent print and lexical humanist culture in the early modern period. Nebrija dedicated the project to Isabel I of Castile in a prologue that opens with a declaration for which the text is notorious: “language was always the companion [compañera] of empire, and followed it such that together [junta mente] they began, grew, and flourished—and, later, together [junta mente] they fell.”