Red States examines how the recurrent use of Native American history in southern cultural and literary texts produces ideas of "feeling southern" that have consequences for how present-day conservative political discourses resonate across the United States. Assembling a newly constituted archive that includes theatrical and musical performances, pre-Civil War literatures, and contemporary novels, Gina Caison argues that notions of Native American identity in the U.S. South can be understood by tracing how audiences in the region came to imagine indigeneity through texts ranging from the nineteenth-century Cherokee Phoenix to the Mardi Gras Indian narratives of Trem .
Policy issues such as Indian Removal, biracial segregation, land claim, and federal termination frequently correlate to the audience consumption of such texts, and therefore the reception histories of this archive can be tied to shifts in the political claims of--and political possibilities for--Native people of the U.S. South. This continual appeal to the political issues of Indian Country ultimately generates what we see as persistent discourses about southern exceptionality and counternationalism.