Postcolonial, Black, and Nobody's Margin: The US South and New World Studies

Southern Aberrations: Writers of the American South and the Problems of Regionalism. By Richard Gray. Louisiana State University Press, 2000

The Narrative Forms of Southern Community. By Scott Romine. Louisiana State University Press, 1999

Postslavery Literatures in the Americas: Family Portraits in Black and White. By George Handley. University Press of Virginia, 2000

Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern WomenÕs Writing, 1930-1990. By Patricia Yaeger. University of Chicago Press, 2000

Turning South Again: Re-thinking Modernism/ Re-reading Booker T. By Houston A. Baker, Jr. Duke University Press, 2001

As American studies, founded on New England paradigms, melds into a New World studies that boasts multiple points of origin but seems increasingly to derive its models from the Caribbean, scholarly attention is focusing again on the US South. As Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, Antonio Benítez-Rojo, Deborah Cohn, V. S. Naipaul, and Edouard Glissant have variously noted, the US South is tied tightly to postplantation cultures throughout the New World, and, with appropriate qualification, throughout much of the Third World or global south. A number of recent critical works remind us that the regions share a history of colonial plantations, race slavery, race mixing, vibrant African cultural survival, disappeared bodies, a predilection for the baroque (as Alejo Carpentier defines it), poverty, state-sponsored right-wing terrorism, insular communities, creole nativism, and what C. Vann Woodward famously called "the experience of military defeat, occupation, and reconstruction" (Burden 190). The nascent critical exploration of such commonalities is not about repositioning the US South simply and predictably within a fashionable "margin" such as, for example, the "nuestra América" of José Martí. Rather, if, as Ella Shohat has argued, postcolonial theory is better understood as "post- First/Third Worlds theory" (134), then the US South—simultaneously center and margin, colonizer and colonized, global north and global south, essentialist and hybrid—represents a crucial locus for the development of such theory.

This liminal South does more than trouble some of the identitarian binarisms of first-wave postcolonial theory. It also asks us to rethink what Amy Kaplan has called "the racially infiected distinction between images of the 'jungle' and 'wilderness'" that grounded Perry Miller's founding ideas of American studies in Errand into the Wilderness (9). "In contrast to the enervated 'barbaric tropic,'" Kaplan writes, "marked by its unspoken connotations of blackness, the 'inexhaustible wilderness' offers the challenging space of implicitly white achievement" (9). Though Kaplan maps this distinction onto an east-west axis, saying it "underwrites the familiar opposition between Old and New Worlds," Miller's overtly latitudinal diction seems more precisely to underwrite the distinction between global north and global south, as the terms of Kaplan's own assessment suggest: "If America is not like the decaying empire of Rome, implies Miller, it is even less like the depleted undeveloped continent of Africa" (9). Barbara Ladd has examined nineteenth-century US Northern concerns precisely about the formerly French and Spanish South's connotations of blackness, connotations that threatened to make it less "American" than the North: "[I]f the white southerner's insistence that 'Creoles' are 'white'—and only 'creoles' (lowercase) are mixed—is intended to protect the southerner from being aligned too closely with former slaves or with colonialism in the New World, the creole metaphor also marks the southerner as a dangerous border figure, someone who might look like an American and claim to be so (with greater fervor than other Americans at times) but who carries within him- or herself traces of the displaced and who might at some point act traitorously to undermine the progressive nation" (xv-xvi).

With its libidinal connotations of commerce, blackness, the body—commerce in black bodies—the South must be repressed to achieve the "coherence" (Miller viii) of a disembodied, spiritual New England Puritan theology, the stable ego of the Americas.

If the marginalization of...