Regionalism and the Humanities

9. Regionalism and the Realities of Naming

9. Regionalism and the Realities of Naming stephen c. behrendt Complications seem inevitably to arise whenever one tries to de- fine either regionalism in general or any specific region like the South or the Great Plains or to categorize the art and artifacts that come from or relate to that area by means of such language. Commentators occasionally try to take the easy way out of these taxonomic difficulties by simply declaring that “writing is writing,” by which reductive expression they apparently mean that all writing is “universal ” in nature (the local manifestation of some “universal language”) and that, therefore, all that varies from “region” to “region” is the inflection. Inflection is a convenient word because it seems to delimit linguistic variation (or other variations) less strictly than words like dialect or idiom. A less immediately diagnostic term, inflection appears to permit a far greater range of localisms within the discourse in question. Even so, it is not convincing that what we usually think of as “regionalisms” (whether in literature, the arts, culture, society, class, or economics) actually amount to little more than differing in- flections upon some universal or general language or discourse that is itself associated with a larger and more heterogeneous geographical or cultural entity like a nation, continent, or socioeconomic class. Consequently, this essay represents an attempt to articulate a slightly different perspective upon the matter of regionalism and its slippery Regionalism and the Realities of Naming 151 definitions. This attempt comes with a significant disclaimer: it does not so much resolve the difficulties as suggest a different and perhaps more constructive way of regarding them. The cultural geographer Yi-Fu Tuan—native of Tientsin, China, graduate of Oxford, longtime resident of Madison, Wisconsin, and author of ten books and dozens of remarkable articles on geography and human perception and cognition—has often expressed his belief that all of us carry with us throughout our adult life the landscape in which we lived our early lives. Wherever we find ourselves, our real “home” lies in this internal landscape that informs our sense of who we are and that makes us “whole” in ways that can scarcely be imagined by those persons whose fragmented view of the world (and themselves) reflects the rootlessness inseparable from the peripatetic nature of modern life.1 People tend to identify with their earliest experiences and the places in which those experiences transpired, perhaps because those residual places and experiences provide a security that rootless adulthood usually denies us. Indeed, it is often the particularly and peculiarly local aspects of those early experiences that most clearly associate them with notions of “home.” This idea of being intuitively rooted in a particular place—a geographical and cultural origin—is of course one distinguishing characteristic of what academic discourse usually identifies as regional. The more apparent the evidence of this rooting is in the local and the particular in any artifact of culture, the reasoning seems to go, the more powerfully regional are those artifacts. One consequence of such thinking is an inevitable privileging of natives. If one is born in a particular place and then stays there, what that person produces is especially likely to be defined as directly re- flective of that person’s region. This formulation assumes an intensive and longstanding personal interaction between the individual self and the external (and to some extent the internal) environment. It also assumes that a native person is able to know more—and better —the cultural minutiae of a region than the immigrant, the late-arriving artist or observer, who is assumed to be less capable of producing a genuine regionalism in the locale precisely because she or he is 152 pl ace is a rel ationship a late-comer, an “outsider,” a “foreigner.” Faced with this prospect, the individual (or social unit) characterized by mobility rather than rootedness must compensate by privileging some other quality. Expanding one’s locational and cultural horizons in this fashion is therefore typically regarded as “bettering” oneself or one’s society. More than two centuries ago, Immanuel Kant advocated at the close of the European Enlightenment what he called a “universal cosmopolitan existence,” which would help humanity overcome its seemingly instinctive parochialism.2 Recent social theory in the modern age of the global community has increasingly preached the desirability of this sort of cosmopolitanism, precisely...