Postmodern Geographies of the U.S. South

In a 1990 essay, Cornel West identifies a key shift in U.S. cultural politics since the 1960s, the era widely termed “postmodern,” arguing that the “new cultural politics of difference” is distinguished by its emphasis on particularity and diversity as part of a reaction against the universalizing bent of modern politics (19). Drawing on West, Edward Soja and Barbara Hooper assert, in “The Spaces That Difference Makes” (1993, 184), that the emphasis on locally based micropolitics is a defining feature of the postmodern turn in U.S. culture, and that a renewed focus on spatiality is central to this politics. The postmodern emphasis on space is intended to highlight the situated nature of all political knowledge and action, and to disavow the view from nowhere—the global and disembedded claims of modern knowledge and politics. It is not surprising that postmodern cultural politics takes space rather than time as the dimension within which social differences can be made visible and active, given that the self-definition of European modernity has monopolized time, subsuming varied histories into a singular and teleological narrative of History. The hitherto underprivileged category of space offers a way of interrupting modernity's global march as well as of restoring the divergent histories that have contributed to the modern legacy.

The renewed interest in the regional specificity of the U.S. South in recent years offers an instance of this kind of spatialized cultural politics of difference. Since the mid-1970s, U.S. historians, sociologists, novelists, literary critics, and cultural commentators seem to have become obsessed with the South, reviving the enduring debate about what makes the region distinct from the rest of the nation. In this essay, I examine the turn south in U.S. postmodern culture as a distinct response to recent processes of economic and political modernization that are dramatically transforming the region. Using southern regionalism as a test case, I also attempt to draw out the political implications of the spatialized cultural politics of difference said to be distinctive of the postmodern era.

As West and Soja and Hooper suggest, one of the defining features of postmodern culture is its thoroughgoing critique of socioeconomic processes of modernization as well as universalizing ideologies of modernity. Accordingly, movements to establish southern difference typically construct the region as a premodern or not quite fully modern space that can ground social and cultural critiques of modernity. One reason the South can function in this way is that it has remained more rural and less thoroughly industrialized than the rest of the nation for most of its history. The region's status as a hinterland left behind by uneven national processes of modernization bolsters contemporary claims that the South constitutes an “elsewhere” to a fully globalized capitalist system. In all instances of southern regionalism, across various disciplines, the South is represented as a nucleus of certain values that are pitted against modern existence: localism or rootedness in place, close-knit racial communities, face-to-face forms of social interaction, and folk-cultural traditions.

This cluster of values is clearly displayed in Why the South Will Survive, a collection of essays by “Fifteen Southerners” published in 1981. Asserting that the South has special lessons to teach a nation caught up in a giddy pursuit of material progress, most of the contributors portray the region as a place of refuge from the alienating and fragmenting conditions of modern U.S. life. In order to function in this way, the South must be characterized as a primarily rural region. William Havard (1981, 39) thus argues that, because the South was “arrested in a preindustrial state for the greater part of America's century of ‘modern development,'” it has managed to preserve unique traits that may prove greatly valuable to a nation hurtling into a “postindustrial” era. Havard identifies these regional traits as a strong sense of place and history, emphasis on family and local community, and preference for “face to...