Bryn Mawr College Scholarship, Research, and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr College English Faculty Research and Scholarship English 2019 Practices of Imagination: Learning from the Vision of Thadious Davis Mecca Jamilah Sullivan Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.brynmawr.edu/engl_pubs Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Let us know how access to this document benefits ou.y This paper is posted at Scholarship, Research, and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr College. https://repository.brynmawr.edu/engl_pubs/32 For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Mecca Jamilah Sullivan (2019). “Practices of Imagination: Learning from the Vision of Thadious Davis.” Women's Studies. DOI: 10.1080/00497878.2019.1639506 Practices of Imagination: Learning from the Vision of Thadious Davis Mecca Jamilah Sullivan In her 1988 Essay “Expanding the Limits: The Intersection of Race and Region,” Thadious Davis traces late twentieth-century black writers’ acts of what she terms “historical imagination,” in which moments of creative and geographic return to southern regional pasts open new possibilities for black identification (9). This prefigures her path-breaking work in Southscapes: Geographies of Race, Region, and Literature, in which imagination works alongside–and, at times, in a tension with – memory and history to produce sites of black regional identity in the Deep South. Throughout the creative production of “southscapes,” Davis argues, black southern artists, “by means of a spatial imagination, locate themselves within a relationship to ‘homeplace’ … ” in the South, subverting dominant racist ideologies and thus “claim[ing] the very space that would negate their humanity and devalue their worth” (Southscapes 19).