The Postsouthern Sense of Place in Contemporary Fiction

Epilogue: Against the Agrarian Grain, Taking the Transnational Turn

Epilogue: Against the Agrarian Grain, Taking the Transnational Turn At the end of Part 1, I quoted David Harvey’s claim that “[t]he preservation or construction of a sense of place” by individuals and social groups, in social reality and fiction, is more important than ever “in a phase of capitalist development in which the power to command space, particularly with respect to financial and money flows, has become more marked than ever before.” In Parts 2 and 3 I have tried to show the various ways in which eight writers—from that original Agrarian white male Robert Penn Warren to an African American resident of “international” Atlanta, Toni Cade Bambara— have represented the capitalist spatial redevelopment of “the South.” I have argued that these authors’ narrative cartographies reconfigure radically the familiar neo-Agrarian, southern literary-critical conception of “place.”1 By now it should be clear that I have focused primarily upon urban and suburban geographies because the mainstream southern literary-critical apparatus —including the foundational concept “sense of place”—has derived from an image of “the South” as predominantly rural and agricultural. I have taken a historical-geographical materialist approach to the socioeconomic production and abstraction of “place” because such an approach has been too often and easily sidelined from southern literary and cultural criticism, to the extent that even the Agrarians’ own important emphasis upon the relationship between “capitalism and land” has been ignored. Nonetheless, a skeptic might reasonably ask: what about the contemporary rural South? The Agrarian ideal of agricultural, subsistence-based real property might be defunct—the Agrarians’ “South” may be redundant—but what of the rural landscape that remains? Real estate may have displaced agricultural real property in Robert Penn Warren’s small-town Alabama or Tom Wolfe’s metropolitan Atlanta, but should we consider the forms of small farming that still survive, albeit not on the yeoman-subsistence model lovingly crafted by Andrew Lytle in “The 1. Harvey, Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Di≠erence, 306, 247. Hind Tit”? When a theorist like Fredric Jameson states that postmodernism has fully erased “precapitalist agricultures,” the empirical evidence seems compelling enough. But might southerners still balk at Jameson’s confident assertion that Nature itself has been e≠aced from postmodern America?2 In a provocative 1997 essay titled “Recognizing Rusticity: Identity and the Power of Place,” Gerald Creed and Barbara Ching rebuke three spatial theorists whom I have cited throughout: Jameson, Harvey, and Edward Soja. Creed and Ching note that “[p]ostmodern social theory’s stable reference point has been the city,” at the almost total expense of the country. They observe that Jameson “feels no need to justify his equation of the postmodern with the urban,” and assert that Soja simply o≠ers a “variation on the Marxist distaste for rural idiocy.” Ching and Creed argue that, not least because of urban(e) intellectual disdain for the “rustic margin,” there has been a “radical embracing of that marginality by many people in order to contest the late twentieth century’s hegemonic urbanity.”3 Upon reading this from a (post)southern perspective, one is impelled to note that the original Agrarian movement was precisely a radical (radically reactionary) embracing of the rural South by not many people in order to contest the early twentieth century’s increasingly hegemonic urbanity. Indeed , southern intellectual and literary-critical thought has been, until very recently, so disproportionately dominated by neo-Agrarianism that one cannot seriously claim that postmodern or postsouthern theory has marginalized the rural South—at least, not yet. Moreover, rather than constructing simplistic binary oppositions between the country and the city, it is important to recognize their dialectical links. I have emphasized the interaction between Nashville high society and the conspicuous performance of farming in A Place to Come To; explicated the economic nexus between Turpmtime and Atlanta real estate in A Man in Full; and discussed the social relations between southwest Atlanta and the Alabamian cooperative farm in Those Bones Are Not My Child. And yet it does seem plausible that, in striving to correct the fetishization of rusticity prevalent in southern thought and fiction, a postsouthern theoretical approach risks reproducing the city-centric logic of postmodern “place” theory. Thus I would like to take this opportunity to consider briefly 2. Jameson, Postmodernism, 366. 3. Gerald W. Creed and Barbara Ching, “Recognizing Rusticity: Identity and the Power of Place,” in Creed and Ching, eds., Knowing Your Place: Rural Identity and Cultural Hierarchy (New...