Reconstructing the World: Southern Fictions and U.S. Imperialisms, 1898–1976 (review)

Harilaos Stecopoulos’ Reconstructing the World emerges from and successfully synthesizes two academic movements within American studies that have hitherto remained separate, largely along generational lines: the “Cultures of United States Imperialism” group, which still dominates the field’s discourse, and whose old lions include, among others, Donald Pease, Amy Kaplan, John Carlos Rowe, and Colin Dayan; and the “New Southern Studies” group, perhaps a bit edgier now, whose chief figures include, among others, Jennifer Greeson, Leigh Anne Duck, Tara McPherson, and Riché Richardson. Both movements have made their way by attending to unpleasant realities that threaten longstanding narratives of American exceptionalism: the imperialism and the racist backwardness that, each group respectively has argued, were not minor exceptions to the national project but its disavowed foundations. Both movements also have substantial implications for modernist studies. As a political context for modernism, U.S. imperialism has received far less attention than, say, European fascism. And despite modernist studies’ recent interest in alternative modernities and bad modernisms, that field’s engagement with the U.S. South remains desultory and hesitant. (The obvious exception remains Duck’s brilliant 2006 The Nation’s Region: Southern Modernism, Segregation, and U.S. Nationalism.)

Stecopoulos’ significant contribution lies in giving a crucial tweak to a longstanding model in southern studies: the idea popularized by C. Vann Woodward that the (white) South had undergone “the experience of defeat,” which made it unlike the rest of the U.S. but more like the rest of the world. For later historians such as Joel Williamson, the Civil War and Reconstruction were the U.S.’s first wars of imperial expansion. The first wave of New Southern Studies, following Fred Hobson and others, extended these narratives to Black Southerners, and proceeded—especially in the comparatist work of Deborah Cohn and George Handley—to examine parallels between U.S. Southern and Latin American literatures. As a historical context for U.S. imperialism, Stecopoulos, however, is less interested in Reconstruction than in its abandonment, less interested in extending white models to people of color than starting with the effects of U.S. policy on people of color to begin with. “The ‘unending tragedy of Reconstruction,’” writes Stecopoulos, is

a sign of the United States’ tendency over the twentieth century to impose its compromised, if not hollow, promises of freedom and modernization on a host of subaltern peoples. The United States might have failed to meet its own democratic standard in the southland, leaving African Americans to the mercy of a violent Jim Crow regime, but that failure has hardly deterred the nation-state from making similarly false claims about liberty and democracy to other oppressed populations the world over.

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Whereas earlier models had tended to tie global-southern peoples of color to white southerners—Carlos Fuentes’ remark that William Faulkner is “both yours and ours, and hence essential to us” has been widely and justifiably deployed in this regard—Stecopoulos’s approach centers on peoples of color from the outset.

As a result, white southern writers are refreshingly in a (slight) minority here. Faulkner, Thomas Dixon, and Carson McCullers appear, but ultimately the emphasis falls slightly more upon Charles Chesnutt, James Weldon Johnson, Richard Wright, and Alice Walker. Rather than subjugating these writers to some grand, overarching version of the above thesis, Stecopoulos examines their negotiations of the South’s relationship to U.S. imperialism very much on their own terms, unearthing a sort of prehistory of our present theoretical moment. For example, he compellingly demonstrates, in close readings of Dark Princess (1928) and Black Reconstruction (1935), Du Bois’ “belief that any attempt to understand and combat the problem of global racism demands that one recognize how the U.S. South is at once part of a white imperial nation and part of Africa and Asia” (79)—arguably the central thesis of the 2004 essay collection Look Away! The U.S. South in New World Studies.^1...