| Summary: | Southern local color in the post-Reconstruction era provided the region with one of its most effective pathways back into national prominence through its appeal to northern curiosity and nostalgia. Like other regional varieties, southern local color could both celebrate the way that different cultures affirmed nationally favored similarities, and it could also make separatist claims more palatable through the charming presentation of difference. A regional affinity for this genre grew out of the South's plentiful unusual accents and vernacular vocabularies and its association in the national mind with a unique plantation economic base. Most importantly, the South had race, America's most visible metaphor of human difference, so that southern practitioners of local color, writing out of backwoods Georgia, James River plantation Virginia, or Creole New Orleans could adapt regional peculiarities of all kinds to plots that frequently hinged on one favored peculiarity, racial difference.
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