Grounded Globalism: How the U.S. South Embraces the World

FIVE. Southern Space: From Sense of Place to Force Field

c h a p t e r f i v e Southern Space From Sense of Place to Force Field the phrase “sense of place” suggests the perception of a locale as more than just a physical space, as a territory but also as a psychological space, a place imbued with history and memory, community and experience. In short, “space” becomes “place.” The South, it is said, has a sense of place. As Roy Blount Jr. put it, “the South is a place,” and, he added disparagingly, “the North is just a direction out of the South.” Blount captures in a phrase a long history of imagining the South as a place. The land of cotton is not forgotten and instead has been “constructed ” (imagined, envisioned, conceived) for centuries romantically and critically, in song, literature, and in memory and perception of those who live there and those who have left or never been. Certainly it would be foolish to accept the mythologies as true but it would be equally foolish 102 Southern Space 103 to deny their truths. One of those is that of “sense” of place, namely that, regardless of what the South as a place “actually” is, it is experienced by many as a significant space, which, therefore makes it a real “place”—a place in perception and conception, in memory and in action. One could draw a parallel between race and space; both are constructions of a certain kind of physicality, and those imaginative constructions have crystallized into perceptual realities which, regardless of how they square with biology or geography, are real in experience and consequential in behavior. Accordingly, I do not disparage unduly claims that “the South is a place,” meaning that many, native or not, have a “sense” of that place. At the same time, I welcome recent rethinking, especially in literary criticism, of how space is construed in “postsouthern” conceptions to lose old senses of place and to create new senses of place.1 Oppositionality is, as Blount’s comment indicates, part of a southern sense of place: it is a place different from the North, opposed to it in everything from politics to lifestyle, even endangered by it. To go north is like Lee invading Pennsylvania—moving into enemy territory. Dualism is also embodied in Southern space and place. Racism is spacism . Plantations had the big house and the slave quarters. Older towns often had, and still have, a version of that arrangement, with houses for whites on the main streets and houses for black servants nearby on backstreets. More recent settlements and towns divide black and white even more, into separate neighborhoods and communities, though division by class and occupation is also noteworthy, for example, separated, stigmatized neighborhoods for workers in textile mills. As Jack Boger, Julius Chambers, and the Center for Civil Rights at the Law School of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill document, facilities such as electricity and sewers are frequently lacking in the black areas. They also show how redistricting is being used by political parties to determine how voters can and cannot support minority candidates.2 Since integration , wealthier blacks do move into previously white neighborhoods, but at the same time developers create gated communities that largely cater to affluent white residents, many of them retirees from outside the South. 104 Trends “The South is a place,” then, in many senses. As a sentimental, nostalgic , and intimate homeland, as a battleground opposed to that space behind enemy lines, as a dualistically divided, racially segregated space. What happens to the southern sense of place as the South assumes a global identity? Does it disappear, so that one becomes a “man without a country,” a refugee, an immigrant in one’s own land, a cosmopolitan? Is physical space merely maya, illusion, anyway? Or does one retain an inner sense of place identity, as in the old sayings “You can take the boy out of the country but not the country out of the boy?” or “Home is where the heart is”—and the heartless aren’t, adding the social dimension? Do the romanticized, mythologized senses of the entire region as a place diminish along with decay of localized spaces—downtowns, farms, and neighborhoods ? The evidence suggests that either of the above can happen, but it is clear that global identity need not simply destroy local identity, the local sense of place. Instead, it...