Disturbing Calculations: The Economics of Identity in Postcolonial Southern Literature, 1912-2002

INTRODUCTION: The Fetish of Number: Narcissism, Economics, and the Twentieth-Century Southern Ego

Oh I know. I know. You give me two and two and you tell me it makes five and it does make five. william faulkner, ABSALOM, ABSALOM! Never mind about algebra here. That’s for poor folks. There’s no need for algebra where two and two make five. thomas wolfe, LOOK HOMEWARD, ANGEL The boss wants to break a colored boy into the optical trade. You know algebra and you’re just cut out for the work. . . . But remember to keep your head. Remember you’re black. richard wright, BLACK BOY Count, count. They came to her straight from math and waited for the logarithms of poetry. Measure me, Miz Walsh. Am I sufficient? doris betts, “beasts of the southern wild” Moments of mathematical reckoning like these are ubiquitous in the literature of the twentieth-century South. In works by white and black, male and female, rich and poor, and native and immigrant southerners, these calculating fixations impart critical lessons about southerners’ tendencies to measure, divide, and value themselves and the Others against whom they find balance. While many of these writers have little to connect them by race, class, gender , or even geography, they consistently—if variously—fetishize 1 Introduction The Fetish of Number: Narcissism, Economics, and the Twentieth-Century Southern Ego 2 Introduction the numbers, figures, and calculations that come to signify their most personal equations of self-worth. As we see throughout Disturbing Calculations, this phenomenon is rooted in the history of the South, of capitalism, colonialism, and the language and technologies of Western rationality. Delivered from slavery, Reconstruction, and segregation, the twentieth-century South finds itself at least nominally integrated into an American capitalist economy of limitless opportunity , but increasingly attached to slavery’s prescriptive calculations of worth, value, certainty, and hierarchy. Yet between these seemingly inimical economies, an unexpected affinity emerges; confronted by the tools and promises of a new order, modern southerners find themselves uncannily revisiting the discourse and calculations of the old. That is, the calculations of twentieth-century southerners are so “disturbing” precisely because they evoke not slavery’s cold calculus but that of American capitalism in its most basic and enduring forms. Southern exceptionalism has long been asserted and perpetuated by both citizens and critics of the South for a variety of motives. However, I suggest instead that southerners’ anxiety over maintaining an exceptional status in fact uncovers surprising correlatives between the antebellum southern and the modern American capitalist psychology. When abjected southerners apprehensively calculate their sense of self-worth and status in the new order, they respond to the liberties and limitations of modern American capitalism generally—imperatives that echo plantation codes in both comforting and alarming repetition. In the twentieth century’s agonized spaces of wage labor and free-market capitalism, industrialization and modernization, economic expansion and social progressivism, New Southerners find themselves haunted by slavery’s methods yet both tantalized and curtailed by capitalism’s uncannily analogous promises and priorities. In various readings that span the earliest works of the twentieth century to the most recent productions in the twenty-first, I propose a new way of viewing U.S. southern literature that draws variously on neo-Marxist, psychoanalytic, and postcolonial theories in order to account for the apparent transformation of a material reality into a calculation-obsessed discourse. While the origins of this phenomenon plainly include slavery and its principles of human quantification and commodification, it is not just former slaves but white women, elite men, Native Americans, and immigrants who have precise economic value in this system and betray anxious fiscal attachments and desires lasting long beyond emancipation. At the same time that elite southerners distance themselves from capitalism’s dehumanizing mechanisms, the marginalized yearn to realize the uniquely American narrative of accumulation and ascent. For both, the fetish of number emerges to signify the futility and danger of overidentification with the figures and measures of their fragile value. The Fetish of Number 3 As a concept, the fetish originally denoted a man-made object perceived to have supernatural or religious significance and transformative power, particularly for the so-called primitive cultures of Egypt and Africa in collision with European Christianity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.1 Already saddled with latent implications of material value, the trope found ready applicability in Marx’s notion of commodity fetishism, central to his critique of capitalism, as well as in...