Southscapes: Geographies of Race, Region, and Literature

INTRODUCTION: A Map of the Territory

1 introduction A Map of the Territory In “Entering the South,” Lucille Clifton transmutes the stark geographic metaphor that often appears as the landscape of the South for African Americans. The map she draws is a living one, alive in memory and in blood, but dead too in the literal skin of animals and in the material body of the mother. Luxury, beauty, and heritage combine into a familiar space; however, the familiar also sustains and is sustained by death and destruction. The South Clifton maps is not without the weight of a horrific past that continues on in hushed voices, coiled rope, and dark blood. i have put on my mother’s coat. it is warm and familiar as old fur and I can hear hushed voices through it. too many animals have died to make this. the sleeves coil down toward my hands like rope. i will wear it because she loved it but the blood from it pools on my shoulders heavy and dark and alive.1 Clifton’s poem is a reminder of the allure of the South as a warm, luxuriant familiar, but it is also a road map referencing the weight of the South alive today in all of its complexity. Without ever naming “race” as an aspect of the configuration of the South as a space, Clifton evokes the lynching of The map is not the territory. —alfred korzybski, Science and Sanity (1933) |2| INTRODUCTION black bodies and the ever-present oppressive danger enveloping the bodies and minds of black people. Clifton maps a “southscape,” a geography of race and region. My term “southscape” is intended to call attention to the South as a social , political, cultural, and economic construct but one with the geographic “fact of the land.”2 It references landscape in broad geographical-social contexts and mediated symbolic structures. As a concept, “southscape” has both subjective and objective elements, but primarily it acknowledges the connection between society and environment as a way of thinking about how raced human beings are impacted by the shape of the land, or what German geographers in the nineteenth century termed “landschaft.”3 My formulation of “southscape” engages, then, the natural environment and the social collective that shapes that environment out of its cultural beliefs, practices, and technologies.4 This notion of a collective shaping carries with it an assumption of a power dynamic that can obscure how a society’s practices or beliefs take shape. Southscapes: Geographies of Race, Region, and Literature examines the political and power dynamics of the South. It is invested in understanding the persistent conceptual power of the South as a spatial object and ideological landscape where matters of race are simultaneously opaque and transparent. TheexaminationfocusesonplacingAfricanAmericansatthecenterofcurrent discourses on “The South” and “Southern Literature” as categories of critical inquiry, literary analysis, and theoretical positioning, but it is also committed to situating visibly black southern writers as central to any full analysis of writing within the southern region and its local and global contexts. It is intended to complement contemporary expansions of the boundaries mapping the American South and formulating the Global South. Attention to the local in this study, therefore, does not preclude today’s dynamic global world but rather engages that world at individual points of accessibility where the connection between society and environment are legible. That legibility allows for the close reading and critical speculation in Southscapes. As a concept, “southscape” is an effort to think about space, race, and society in the Deep South. It functions to expand “geographical imagination beyond the current limits,” as Edward W. Soja has urged in deploying “Thirdspace” as a “flexible term that attempts to capture what is actually a constantly shifting and changing milieu of ideas, events, appearances, and meanings.”5 “Southscape” is, then, an attempt to expand the boundaries of regional discourse by coining a term that accepts Soja’s underlying assessment of a spatial imaginary or Thirdspace, while also extending its concep- |3| INTRODUCTION tual frame to race matters. The result is an engagement with the politics of race, space, and representation. Engaging racial-spacial representation as a political strategy in Southscapes derives from three sets of formulations that recognize the complexity of race within contemporary geographies. First, Southscapes attends conceptually to racial representation as “a political strategy for empowerment and articulation ,” as Homi Bhabha has suggested in thinking through “Third Space” as a means of...