The Marketing of Southern Identity

Writing in the pages of The Journal of Southern History in 1984, Carl N. Degler rhetorically asked, "What reader of this journal has not complained at least once that there seemed no end to books seeking to explain the South?"1 Indeed the issue of how to define the South has been explored repeatedly not only in memoirs, travelogues, novels, films, and music, but also in an ever-expanding library of scholarly investigations about the region. Studies of Southern identity construction run the gamut from those that attempt to engage with an actual past to those that seek to examine the South as it exists in the imagination. Frankly, all self-styled "Southern" history engages this question if only implicitly by the very use of the label "Southern." Sometimes this question is approached concretely as with the checklist given to me as an undergraduate history student first encountering the concept of Southern distinctiveness. Was there a history of one-crop plantation agriculture in your region? Check. Did your state secede from the Union? Is the climate semitropical? Check. Check. You must be describing the South.

Whenever the topic of what it means to be a Southerner comes up, the ghost in the room, acknowledged or otherwise, is always race. U. B. Phillips cut to the chase in 1928 when he observed that the driving force behind the creation of the idea of a cohesive, identifiable South is "a common resolve indomitably maintained—that it shall be and remain a white man's country."² For all the brutal simplicity of his claim, Phillips has come as close as anyone to actually answering the question of Southern distinctiveness.

More recent studies have made answering this already deceptively difficult question even more challenging by moving from the realm of an actual past and concrete, identifiable characteristics to the world of the imagination. How have Southerners and non-Southerners alike come to their understanding of what the South means? To what extent is the idea of the South self-consciously created and recreated? What means are used to create this South? Jack Temple Kirby's pioneering 1978 study, Media Made Dixie: The South in the American Imagination, examined the role that the mass media has played in not only transmitting but also creating ideas of Southernness. Contemporary reviewers hardly knew what to make of Kirby's text. Most enjoyed reading it, but many were uncertain whether or not it should be treated as serious scholarship. Roger D. Abrahams thought that the book belonged "on the drugstore racks," and James Bernard wondered if the book should be classified as a "well-researched piece of popular culture."³

Southern historians ever since have benefited from Kirby's expansive view of the enterprise of writing history. Any aspect of culture, however high or low, is now considered fair game for analyzing the question of Southern identity. The very best studies, many from the history-and-memory subgenre, examine the imaginary South in relationship to the so-called real one. W. Fitzhugh Brundage is the foremost member of this school, and the introduction to his edited collection, Where These Memories Grow: History, Memory, and Southern Identity (1999), is a must read for anyone with the vaguest interest in grappling with these perplexing issues. Brundage makes the seemingly pedestrian observation that "the claim that the American South is historically richer than other regions of the United States is sophistry."4 This remark comes as a burst of fresh air to those of us who are put on edge by the tendency of some to excessively exoticize (and thus trivialize?) the South.

This new generation of Southern identity scholarship has begun to pay more and more attention to the role that the marketplace has played in promoting and inventing the South. For example, Grace Elizabeth Hale's influential study, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation, 1890-1940 (1998), tackles the key issue of white...