The U.S. South and the Future of the Postcolonial

This essay argues that what matters about the U.S. South for postcolonial theory may not be its past, but its present and future. Politically, white Southern conservatives comprise a sizeable majority of the Republican Party in the South, where the Republican Party holds a majority, and the South is now electorally so large a portion of the nation that whoever wins it wins the nation. Economically, in the wake of NAFTA and other forms of accelerated globalization, the U.S. South today offers a complicated mix of microregions of core, semiperiphery, and periphery. This essay suggests that, as neoliberalism comes to supplant or at least complement notions of "simple" imperialism, the South, despite the obvious advantages bestowed by U.S. citizenship, offers postcolonialists a dystopic vision of the future, a possibility that renders the U.S. South of crucial interest to postcolonial theory.