The New Mind of the South by Tracy Thompson (review)

With her book The New Mind of the South, Tracy Thompson contributes yet another perspective to the long tradition of thinking and writing about the constitution of “the South” in American society. This perspective consists of a narratives of herself and her family “whose roots go at least six generations deep in the soil of Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee” (2), of her impressions when traveling through the South, and of extensive research of the sociocultural history of this region. With this mixture, she attempts at formulating Southern identity in the twenty-first century and at discussing the current “mind” of the South.

This “mind” as she claims, is actually a double-consciousness. In a rather superficial manner she refers to W. E. B. Du Bois’s “famous remark” about the consciousness of African Americans in the early twentieth century and attests Southerners, thus also herself, a “two-ness” that is supposedly not comparable to other regional identities in the United States (2). To be Southern and American means to have an “extra layer of identity,” which is in constant struggle for self-definition (2). In eight chapters she elaborates on the complex network, a “box” as she claims, that is Southern identity today (8). In this box she stores religion, slavery, conservatism, adaptability, a lack of historical awareness, and race. Although most of her arguments are based on her personal observations and on her knowledge of the South, she creates a suitable historical context for each of her approaches to Southern identity, which is due to the detailed research she conducted.

Yet Thompson occasionally reproduces an exceptionalist discourse of the South that seems outdated. Although she repeatedly states that certain observations, like the disappearance of “[r]ural America” is also a “phenomenon … very much in evidence in the Midwest” (141), its effects are “magnified” (143) in the South, because this region holds a special place in American history, having existed “from the earliest days” of the American nation, “when the definition of ‘American’ was still struggling for consensus” (8). She thereby implicitly states that the South is more American than other regions and thus “special” (10, 14) in every way. This was also W. J. Cash’s argument in The Mind of the South (1941), the book her title alludes to. It is debatable to what extent such an exceptionalist argument is helpful today.

What is certainly helpful is Thompson’s conclusion that the “two-ness” of being Southern and American is not only a burden, but rather a symptom of the South that will never, and should never be overcome. It is a symptom that allows for the plural society that is the South today. She exemplifies this plurality appropriately and deviates from Cash’s understanding that the South is a homogeneous region. In a positivist and idealist manner she finally defines Southern identity as a biracial (not post-racial), multiethnic, communal, and overall contested identity that fluctuates between nation and region, history and imagination.