Deep/South, Up/West

How should a scholar who studies colonial history (and specifically a French colony) respond when asked to ponder the term deep for a special issue of a journal titled south? From my dual perspective as an early Americanist and a historian of French America, deep twinned with south is laden with persistent assumptions that continue to color histories, narratives, and memories. Because the weight of the Deep South looms over the question, to take up the challenge means simultaneously reflecting on the limitations of the word for French, indigenous, and colonial history and subscribing to alternative interpretations of deep. It may also mean questioning, or at the very least historicizing, the word south itself.

If deep and south joined together to refer to the states of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, to evoke, specifically, “slave country” as Adam Rothman dubs it, then what about that which—and those who—came before, where do they fit in? The Deep South makes few allowances for those pasts. This is the case whether we are talking about the long and diverse history of the Amerindian inhabitants of this area or if we are talking about the first European settlers: the French who established the colony of Louisiana in 1682 (the same year as the founding of Pennsylvania) and whose territorial claims encompassed two-thirds of the modern-day United States stretching from the Deep South region all the way up to the Midwest. And what of the Spanish who took over from the French around 1769? Or indeed, the enslaved Africans brought over by the French and Spanish in the eighteenth century in what was already arguably, in purely demographic terms, “slave country” (with African slavery imposed upon a space that was itself marked by indigenous captivity practices; see Snyder). In other words, thinking about the geography of the Deep South forces us to acknowledge that thinking about place should also require thinking about time (see Guldi and Armitage).

Thinking about geography and space further means reflecting on the fact that the idea of the “Deep South” emerged in reaction to another concept that is similarly problematic, though in different ways. That is, the “Deep South” was formulated in opposition to the “old South” of the thirteen original colonies. Thirteen original colonies: in their founding order, this leads from Virginia through Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maryland, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Delaware, North Carolina, South Carolina, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, to Georgia. Where do non-Anglo colonies fit in this schema, specifically the non-Anglo colony that would one day transform into the states of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama? And therein lies another problem for the region that became defined as the “Deep South.” For that term simultaneously lays bare the invisibility of colonial Louisiana in the telling of the history of the South while exposing the marginalization of non-Anglo narratives in the telling of America’s history (see Clark; Havard and Vidal; Usner; and Zitomersky). If we want to be inclusive of these alternative pasts, we need first to recast some of the fundamental premises underlying the idea of the South, starting with the word south itself.

When the South was French, it wasn’t known as South. Cardinal points are not neutral; they are always relational. Nor are they obvious or natural means of inscribing the land but culturally specific configurations. Louisiana (the French colony) was not framed by a north-south axis; instead, it positioned itself as either upper or lower Louisiana—up being represented by the pays des Illinois, or Illinois Country, a key part of the French colony of Louisiana yet not considered a part of “the South.” In adopting an up/down axis rather than one based on cardinal points, French Louisiana replicated the nomenclature adopted in New France, where going westward from Quebec or Montreal was characterized not as going west but as going up, as in going to the upper country (the pays d’en haut). South was not here part of the mind-set of Louisiana’s colonists, nor did Amerindians subscribe to or feel contained within a north-south divide.

So south as applied to...