U.S. Southern Cultural Studies in the Obama Era

The presidential election of 2008 may have signified the beginnings of a profound shift in the role that former Confederate states play in U.S. politics in the twenty-first century, four decades after Nixon's duplicitous "southern strategy" tapped white southern resentment to secure national Republican dominance. Academic cultural politics in the U.S. over the same period, at least in humanities departments, never followed so neatly negative a pattern. U.S. southern studies has played a predominately progressive role, but this has rarely been recognized by the majority of academics in the humanities. More often, southern studies has been understood to be a sideshow, a merely "regional" affair, while it is assumed that the most exciting new models for the theory and practice of progressive cultural history were generated elsewhere—in France, Germany, England (especially Birmingham), or among the transnational networks crucial to postcolonial studies, even as many foreign-born cultural studies theorists found important institutional homes in the United States. In short, for many the South hardly seems key to anything except belatedness and marginality, except perhaps if one studies the history of popular music and needs to know the blues.

Wrong. Over the last three decades or so, occurring under the radar of many outside observers (much like grassroots organizing), U.S. southern studies has so transformed itself that it has now become of central importance to global cultural studies. This academic field doesn't merely import theoretical models generated elsewhere, it creates testable models itself. Want to learn models for discourse analysis that will work both on micro and macro levels? Add U.S. southern studies to your reading. It's a different "southern strategy," all right: you've got to include Dixie in your gaze if you don't want to be parochial and piecemeal in assessing the transnational turn contemporary cultural studies has taken. As Michael Kreyling has reminded us (and he was riffing on a long line of southern analysts, including C. Hugh Holman), what we now call the U.S. South is one of the richest sites ever discovered for investigating how a culture under stress can reinvent itself.

The creative destruction driving today's best U.S. southern cultural studies is well demonstrated by two 2008 works of literary criticism by Scott Romine and Melanie R. Benson. Published in distinguished series by well-known university presses—LSU's Southern Literary Studies, edited by Fred Hobson, and Georgia's New Southern Studies, edited by Jon Smith and Riché Richardson—these smart and wide-ranging texts should do much over the next decade or so to change syllabi across the country and to inspire new teaching strategies. The books are not without certain flaws—more on that in a moment—but their strengths so outweigh their problems that it's a pleasure to recommend them to readers of The Southern Literary Journal.

Begin with Melanie Benson's understanding of how capitalism and culture have long been allied contrapuntally in the South. One of the particularly sharp ironies stressed by C. Vann Woodward's histories of the New South was that when the region's ties to northern capital were re-bound in the post-Civil War era, assertions of southern difference functioned as compensatory counter-history. Simultaneously envying and disparaging northern economic power (and the global markets to which northern capital gave the South access), southern elites created a culture of southern exceptionalism that fetishistically repeated fictions of preindustrial memory, bonds of reciprocal obligation, and respect for proper race and class hierarchies. Building on revaluations of Freud's concepts of narcissism and the fetish by an array of theorists, Benson's original contribution is to demonstrate how southern literature in the twentieth century sought to provide fantasy-mirrors depicting both...