Long and Wide and Deep

As a scholar who has spent most of my career outside southern studies, I approach this commentary with no small dose of humility, and probably with more ignorance of the established specialty field than most of us are comfortable admitting. Nonetheless, ten years ago my critical work took an unexpected and deep turn south, in a moment of postdisaster panic. I found myself pulled back to my native city of New Orleans, a city that has always occupied an odd position on the map of the U.S. South. Here, I also found myself drawn into a history and poetry that seemed more foreign than southern or American, an experience that has subsequently taken me, conceptually at least, across the equatorial zones of the Atlantic world. As a result of all these confluences, my sense of the depth that we often associate with things south has been influenced less by directional north-south, up-down, high-low coordinates, and much more along a latitudinal network of crosscurrents and intersections into which I found myself drawn. Smaller than the scope of the Global South, but much larger than the U.S. and Gulf South, this network of transport defined a fairly precise region—linking historic Senegambia, St. Domingue and Haiti, Cuba, Mexico, the Congo, the African southeastern U.S. seaboard, the lower Mississippi River watershed, indigenous America all along that river, and a great port city that continues, however precariously, to reside at its mouth.

The conceptual (and actual) map that configures this expanse is one that stretches wide across the tropical and semitropical zones positioned around the equator. Hence what appears as depth gets mapped not so much below whatever is above or north of it, but instead through largely horizontal and angular lines of transport and migration that chart, for the most part, a tropical spread. Historically, this expanse can hardly be positioned below the culture of the U.S. North and its fairly entrenched British language and customs. Instead, this depth assumes its contours within temperate and tropical zones where translation and creolization prevail. When we go deeper south here, beyond what is called the “Deep South” in the continental United States, maps become even more revealing of certain latitudinal and cultural intersections. Mexico, the Caribbean, the U.S. Gulf South, much of the continent of Africa, and the major indigenous empires of Mesoamerica take us closer to and sometimes well into this Southern Hemisphere before we ever get to South America itself. South, at this particular depth, becomes forged by concurrent waterways; evolving histories of conquest, assimilation, and revolution; shared yet distinctive percussive and lyric expression; myriad languages that continually undergo transliteration and translation. Human voices here wake us to words and sounds that at first seem unrecognizable, but soon become familiar in hybridized habitations. Among women alone, Malinche, Marie Laveau, Sor Juana de la Cruz, Kate Chopin, Edwidge Danticat, and Rigoberta Menchú emerge as figures whose lives unfold in an equatorial geography shaped not so much by its placement south of the Mason-Dixon line or south of the equator but by a long and winding history of transport in which they have become positioned—and by the necessary cultural and linguistic translations they have spoken and written.

A related shift in axis has also come to bear on my critical notion of a deep cultural zone: it draws one not so much down but into and through layers—of geologic and cultural sedimentation, into materials that have been deposited over time. Its warmer, its damper and more porous, its more permeable geology has, especially throughout the U.S. Gulf and Caribbean South, made it ripe for digging, even as this South possesses a decidedly tragic archaeology. Dig deep here and you will find layers upon layers of human suffering and environmental degradation, but also a prime landscape for sifting through cultural memory. Under the fields of the U.S. South, as poet Natasha Trethewey reminds us, we will find the “soaked earth red as the wine / of sacrament” (31), earth that will be covered yet again by boundless stretches of wheat, of cotton, of...