Look Away! The U.S. South in New World Studies (review)

The devastations of Hurricane Katrina caused a number of media commentators to remark in astonishment that New Orleans appeared to be part of the "third world" rather than a major US port city, but, as Jon Smith and Deborah Cohn's edited volume, Look Away!, makes clear, inter-Americanist scholars are acutely aware of the parallels between the US South, the Caribbean, and Latin America. Taking advantage of a number of critical paradigm shifts, such as the post-nationalism of American and Latin American studies, the resurgence of inter-American studies, and the widening application of postcolonial theory, the volume of twenty-two essays embarks on an ambitious project dedicated to rethinking the US South through a comparatist, New World studies framework.

The prevailing critical method of the collection, exemplified by the editors' introductory essays, is, in my opinion, strategically contrapuntal. On the one hand, for instance, they point to cultural affinities between the US South and its southern neighbors that suggest greater similarities than often admitted by northern Americanists. On the other hand, they attempt to break down the dichotomy between North and South, arguing that the supposed cultural distinctions between the regions are the consequence of an imperial Northern ideology. Similarly, they argue for regarding the US South as both center and margin, hybrid and cohesive, empire and colony, victor and vanquished, knowable and in constant flux. These critical moves ask readers to consider the South with "double consciousness," always cognizant of the multiple dialectic forces that have shaped the region's cultural identity. In addition to the volume's major contributions to revamping Southern/southern Studies, it offers a significant nuance to postcolonial theory: after first proving the applicability of postcolonial theory to the US South, the editors then turn around and read it through the US South, suggesting that the South is able to put pressure on some of the assumptions about cultural hierarchy central to postcolonial theory. What happens when a place, like New Orleans, is at one and the same time a major city of the world's greatest superpower and also a "third world" wasteland of horror and misery caused by that very same superpower? If the US South is able to occupy these two diverse positions simultaneously, what does this mean for the critical mappings that have driven our understanding of postcolonial societies?

Look Away! unites some of the most important scholarly voices working in the field of comparative American studies in a series of essays that treat a wide range of issues important to reorienting the critical assumptions that have been at the heart of US Southern studies. In a reversal of the common flow of intertextual considerations, the contributors analyze how writers from south of the South—such as Edouard Glissant, Gustavo Pérez Firmat, and V. S. Naipaul—have engaged with the northern South. They also tackle more commonplace comparative concerns such as William Faulkner's impact on Latin American literature, especially in relation to that of Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, and Jorge Luis Borges. In addition to essays that reverse traditional comparisons and those that repeat them (but from a nontraditional perspective), a number of contributions attempt to recast the major tropes of south-south comparisons such as those related to shared experiences of plantation society and northern hegemony through the lens of postcolonial theory.

The collection is divided into four sections with a postdata. The first section, "The U.S. South and the Caribbean," disentangles traditional geographical markers used to understand the south and includes articles by George B. Handley, Kirsten Silva Gruesz, Jane Landers, J. Michael Dash, Jesse Alemán, Steve Hunsaker, and Leigh Anne Duck. The second section, "Rethinking Race and Region," examines the identity markers of race and place through essays by Scott Romine, John T. Matthews, Richard King, Robert H. Brinkmeyer Jr. and Debra Rae Cohen, and Lois Parkinson Zamora. The...