The Imagined South

"The old sectional consciousnesses are rapidly fading. Except for certain slight and diminishing habits of speech, it is impossible to distinguish a Southerner from a Northerner or a Californian from a Yankee." This observation might have been written or uttered yesterday or last week, yet it appears in an essay entitled "The Decay of the Provinces: A Study of Nationalism and Sectionalism" in the Sewanee Review in 1927. That the author, Jay B. Hubbell, should have proclaimed a marked diminishing of regional sensibility eighty years ago may strike many readers of contemporary American literature as odd, especially in light of the numerous regionally focused journals and small presses quietly publishing across the United States today. The venerable age of the observation also may direct some of us to question the authenticity of contemporary regional identities in the face of seemingly unavoidable and influential national and global commercial forces. How much does contemporary literary regionalism reveal the true essence of a distinctive place and its people? How much is merely an act—a formulated drama unfolding on a set, draped partially in nostalgia, that no longer exists save within the confines of the writer's mind?

Of special note in that ancient essay, Hubbell—also the author of the still useful literary history The South in American Literature, 1607–1900 (1954), nearly one thousand pages long—identifies the American South as a region "which represents the sectional extreme in our literature." Pointing to the South as the country's most powerfully distinctive literary region hardly would have surprised anyone, even during the 1920s. Yet, if we accept Hubbell's observation that regional consciousness had become tenuous in his own time, we must wonder at the real nature of the South he was discussing or the one that now exists (if, indeed, it really does exist). Hubbell provides part of the answer himself, for he specifies an image, a "representation," of the region rather than the region itself. Three quarters of a century later, in his foreword to South to a New Place, Richard Gray agrees that the South is portrayed and considered most fruitfully as a series of representational mimetic abstractions: "The South is an imagined community made up of a multiplicity of communities, similarly imagined."

This is all very confusing, of course, but symbolic identity is not something with which southerners, except for a small handful of writers and academics, consciously concern themselves. As Gray points out, everyday southerners still are driven "to position themselves with others in their locality, communality of interest or area, and against or apart from others elsewhere"—a sectional sensibility we might identify as generally familiar and traditional. Nonetheless, for those scholars and academics who do take an interest in the formulated images of what the South may be becoming, South to a New Place offers an engaging collage of possibilities. The editors of the collection, Suzanne Jones and Sharon Monteith, lay out their aims, general though they may be, clearly enough, identifying the South as a place "whose mythic properties have traditionally exceeded its realities and that consequently impels continued investigation, but the novum, the new places that extend our understanding of the South beyond traditional conceptions of regionalism, demand our special attention." Jones and Monteith espouse new articulations of the South based on places recently established within it or meanings that arise from looking away from it—purposefully considering its various aspects peripherally while gazing at international phenomena and using other disciplines.

This overarching critical approach of South to a New Place is only part of an interdisciplinary trend in recent scholarship that proposes to evaluate the South, its literature, and its history in a global context, abjuring traditional considerations...