South to a New Place: Region, Literature, Culture (review)

What does it mean to "tell about the South" in a postmodern and postsouthern age, the essays in this fine collection edited by Suzanne W. Jones and Sharon Monteith ask, especially as the contours of "the South" itself blur and metamorphose under the pressures of globalization, demographic shifts, cyberspace expansion, and increasingly clamorous contests over historical memories? For one thing, these seventeen essays, accompanied by an introduction by the editors, a foreword by Richard Gray, and an afterword by Diane Roberts, argue that the telling is nowhere done despite epitaphs for Dixie that are as old as the region itself and that just may be one of the defining traits of the American South—always fearfully anticipating its impending demise. For another, there are still too many new stories to be told, now more than ever, as a good many of these essays attest—stories by African American writers like Toni Morrison and Albert Murray seeking to reclaim the region as home, by white writers like Larry Brown, Madison Smartt Bell, and Ellen Douglas striving to exorcise old demons and to unearth new multiple voices, by writers like Linda Hogan and Randall Kenan exploring the possibilities—and the radical limitations—of southern places for Native Americans and gay men of color, and by writers of and from one of the region's fastest growing minorities—Asian Americans whose backward glance is directed not upon the American Civil War but on another war, much farther away, in Vietnam. Above all, though, there is still too much to be said about the seemingly endless capacity of the American South to generate stories about itself, and nowhere more so than in a time when master narratives and the places they purport to represent and defend have splintered into a multitude of micronarratives and microplaces.

Just what that capacity for storytelling involves—and how we should ponder it—is probed with verve and theoretical sophistication by the three strongest essays in the volume by Scott Romine, Barbara Ladd, and Michael Kreyling, the first two of which direct their attention to the difficulties of formulating a postmodern critical vocabulary for dissecting a construct— "a sense of place" —that has for so long served the white South in particular as an icon and symbol of resistance to modernity. Place, after all, was where the white Southern Agrarians took their stand in their 1930 manifesto against the forces of industrialization and urbanization, and the southern places they defended were defined by their tradition, timelessness, rural character—and whiteness, following, as Romine points out, "the historical exclusion of African Americans from the category 'southern'" (28). But that sense of place, as Romine and Ladd both point out, has radically changed in the South of the past four decades, as have the body of books labeled as "southern" and general assumptions about just what it is that "southern" books do. Are they now charged with dismantling southern pieties in the spirit of postmodernism? Do southern books have any sense of place remaining to represent? Or are they left, Romine asks, only with a phosphorescence of images dimly reflecting pasts and places that have already disappeared? Barbara Ladd suggests that some of the answers may lie with a remapping of literary regions, repudiating old binaries between centers and margins, metropoles and provinces, for networks spanning national boundaries and defined not by fixity but by exchange and movement, sites of contention, in other words, rather than bulwarks of stability. Michael Kreyling, for his part, explores region much in the spirit suggested by Ladd in his essay examining the "southern problems" of resistance to modernity posed to nationalistic narratives in Italy and the United States and arguing that northerners in both cultures have had a certain stake in wielding representations of their respective southern regions as "a kind of internal rebuke to the triumphant state" (296). This approach, he concludes, suggests a new area...