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CHAPTER 1. Southscapes: Race, Region, & Reclamation
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23 chapter one Southscapes RACE, REGION, & RECLAMATION i. reclaiming the south [W]ithin this dynamic simultaneity which is space, phenomena may be placed in relationship to one another in such a way that new social effects are provoked. The spatial organization of society, in other words, is integral to the production of the social, and not merely its result. It is fully implicated in both history and politics. —doreen massey, Space, Place, and Gender (1994) One of Marion Post Wolcott’s most recognizable photographs bears the description : Negro Going in Colored Entrance of Movie House on Saturday Afternoon , Belzoni, Mississippi Delta, Mississippi.1 The subject is a dramatic interplay of light and shadows, of sharp angles and flat surfaces, but more it is a stark reminder of segregation and the racial separation in public spaces practiced by law and custom in Mississippi and throughout the South well into the last decades of the twentieth century. The spatial separations, only partially imaginable from Wolcott’s 1939 photograph, were accompanied by the injustices and inequities always already visible because of the proximity of black and white lives. Climbing the stairs to the colored entrance to the movie theater meant walking past “the entrance,” or the main access point for whites that did not even have to carry a sign designating it as such. The indignity of seeing what could not be used, accessed, or enjoyed compounded the exaggerated sense of difference and undermined any sense of equality. As a visual representation of segregation, social and racial, the photograph marks both a material configuration of literal space (the stairs to the gallery that contains, holds, and separates blacks from whites) and a conceptual framing of abstract space (the distance between the races that the subject cannot traverse and for which there is no measure). SOUTHSCAPES|24| Wolcott’s photograph suggests the different planes within the frame from which a reading or interpretation of “region” as subject might begin. Region as a section of the nation is clearly at work in the largest general sense; Belzoni , Mississippi, represented in the photograph by the single man amid multiple planes or surfaces, is also standing for the southern region. Wolcott’s vision inspired my approach to the South as a region in this book. I use Mississippi and her contiguous sister state Louisiana as representative of the larger southern region for initiating focused individual readings and suggestive expanded interpretations while acknowledging the difference of these two states, both from each other and from other southern states. Michel de Certeau complicates the definition of region while locating the term as a simple basic union, “the place where programs and actions interact. A ‘region’ is thus space created by an interaction. It follows that in the same place there are as many ‘regions’ as there are interactions or intersections of programs. And also that the determination of space is dual and operational, and, in a probNegro Going in Colored Entrance of Movie House on Saturday Afternoon, Belzoni, Mississippi Delta, Mississippi. Segregation for black Mississippians belied “Good for Life” slogans. (Marion Post Wolcott, photographer, 1939; Farm Security Administration/ Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.) [18.206.14.46] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 10:59 GMT) SOUTHSCAPES |25| lematics of enunciation, related to an ‘interlocutory’ process.”2 Mississippi and Louisiana, then, assume the intricate spatial position of interlocutory in my approach to region. Wolcott’s photograph, however, serves another introductory purpose in “Reclaiming the South.” It helps to underscore distinctions in geographical distances, or in actual spaces and theoretical spaces. Mike Crang and Nigel Thrift have made clear the “problem” that space has become in contemporary analysis: “Space is the everywhere of modern thought. It is the flesh that flatters the bones of theory. It is an all-purpose nostrum to be applied whenever things look sticky. It is an invocation which suggests that the writer is right on without her having to give too much away. It is flexibility as explanation: a term read and waiting in the wings to perform that song-and-dance act one more time.”3 In cautioning against rendering space too elastic, Crang and Thrift emphasize that “in all disciplines, space is a representational strategy”: “For example in literary theory, space is often a kind of textual operator, used to shift registers. In anthropology, it is a means of questioning how communities are constituted in an increasingly cosmopolitan world. In media theory...