The American South in a Global World (review)

The South has been integrated into the global economy since at least the sixteenth century when human beings were dragged here from Africa to produce the agricultural commodities that would be sent to Europe as part of the infamous triangular trading system which linked together Africa, Europe, and the Americas. This book examines how contemporary processes of globalization are impacting the South and how, in turn, what the experience of the South may have to say about broader processes of globalization. Although the South as a region has long been thought of as culturally insular and dominated by the outside world (especially by the northern United States), several contributors to this book argue both that the South as a region was remarkably diverse in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For instance, some fifty languages were spoken in Charleston, South Carolina, as the city's wharves served as the point of intersection between cultural and economic realms in Africa, Europe, the Caribbean, and the interior of the North American continent. In addition, other contributors point out that the South has increasingly served in the late twentieth century as the model for the neoliberal political and economic regime which has replaced the post-war Fordist compromise of the industrial heartland of the northern U.S. The South is also worth examining because of the dominant role played by the U.S. in processes of "globalization" and consequently of the broader new world order-a new world order marked by the preponderance of non-union work, a distrust of government and its "social engineering" welfare programs, and support for "business-friendly" policies and low taxation, amongst other things.

The book itself comes out of a series of Rockefeller Foundation institutes pertaining to "the South" held at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill, beginning in 1992 and ending in 2005. The topics covered are quite varied, ranging from issues of immigration into the South, to issues of how "global" processes are playing out "locally," to the impacts of "globalization" upon local industries and workers, the rise of transnational identity associated with migrations into the region, and ways in which some activists and educators are trying to challenge some of the social practices for which the South has traditionally been known. The book ends with three summary reflective pieces. Undoubtedly, each reader will have their own list of favorite chapters in the book, and there are too many here to give a detailed accounting of each. For myself, I found most interesting the articles by Meenu Tewari on the development of the North Carolina furniture industry, by Rachel Willis on the continued localization of the sock-making industry in North Carolina, and by Steve Striffler on changes in the organization of the (dis)assembly-line in the poultry processing industry. All of the chapters are competently written. Some chapters are longer pieces laying out arguments about particular theoretical issues, and then recounting how they are playing out empirically in the South (such as how cultural identities are formed and how this is impacting cultural politics in the South). Others are shorter interventions offering observations on various matters (such as how business boosters in the city of Mobile, Alabama, engaged in an ultimately unsuccessful recruitment campaign to land an Indonesian aircraft manufacturing company).

The book is written at a level that makes it accessible to the average undergraduate student, and thus it could be used as a text if one were to be teaching a course on the role of the South in the contemporary global economy. There are, however, three lacuna that I felt presented themselves as I was reading the book. The first is that, despite its claim to be about the "American South" in a global world, the chapters focused to a large degree...