Introduction: Cavaliers in Paradise: The U.S. South and the Pacific Rim

The June 10, 2009 NPR headline read like an exposé: “Move Over Cotton, There’s a New Fiber in the Delta—Big, Bad Bamboo.” Farmers in the Delta, “the first outside of Asia,” were planning to grow and harvest bamboo for flooring, grown in Greenville and produced in a plant in China. It was clearly an exotic human interest story, played up for novelty. Bamboo! In the South! Crazy. Of course, as the story acknowledges, the Mississippi Delta used to have bamboo, before it was cleared for cotton production after the Civil War, but that fact doesn’t temper the surprise that surrounds such stories: Toyota in Mississippi; Chinese groceries in the Delta; Vietnamese fishermen on the Gulf coast—all exceptions to fixed images of the U.S. South and Southern identity as traditional, rural, isolated, markedly different from the rest of the country, and defined primarily by black/white relations and the legacy of the Civil War and slavery.

Recent scholarship of the U.S. South, of course, reimagines it as a complex contact zone, not a stable agrarian fantasy of “eternal verities.” The U.S. South in New World Contexts, edited by Jon Smith and Deborah Cohn, suggests that it is best understood as part of “New World plantation colonialism” (2), one manifestation of a global economic system. “From such a perspective,” Smith and Cohn contend,

the U.S. Civil War, crucially in parallel with the War of 1898, represents not a decisive break in southern (or U.S. or New World) history but merely one more step in wresting control of this global-southern region’s land, largely black labor, and capital from local elite white (or creole, in Mary Louise Pratt’s useful adaptation of the term) men by other elite white men in distant, global-northern metropolises.

(3)

This investigation of the South within the larger context of the Americas leads Smith and Cohn to define it as “a space simultaneously (or alternately) center and margin, victor and defeated, empire and colony, essentialist and hybrid, northern and southern (both in the global sense)” (9). Their insistence on placing the U.S. South within both the Caribbean and the Americas yields suggestive new readings and investigation.

Kathryn McKee and Annette Trefzer, in their special issue of American Literature, “Global Contexts, Local Literatures: The New Southern Studies,” expand this New World orientation to consider larger global and theoretical contexts for transnational Southern Studies. They frame their introduction with a series of questions:

What happens when we unmoor the South from its national harbor, when it becomes a floating signifier in a sea of globalism? How does the South participate in the global networks of culture and economy? How have the South’s culture and history always already been global? What are the global gestures in literary texts that we were formerly interpreting as regional or national issues?

(678)

In a series of provocative position statements and articles, McKee and Trefzer are more suggestive than definitive in answering these questions. A global perspective both remakes traditional Southern topics and opens up new kinds of configurations and languages to be included in Southern studies.

The Pacific Rim, so far, has not figured prominently in these larger discussions of the global South and the “new” Southern studies. There have been some excellent individual essays¹ but no sustained attention. McKee and Trefzer make this clear when they rewrite the Southern canon “to include the literature of Latin America and South America, Mexico, the Caribbean, Cuba, and any other place in the global South,” and “texts in French, Spanish, Portuguese, and other languages” (682); the Pacific Rim is buried under this “other.” The global South is largely defined by the Caribbean and the Americas, I suspect, because of the centrality of slavery in the global plantation system. It may be that more traditional understandings of the U.S. South are still embedded in the new Southern Studies. However, the “and other” configuration of the global South provides an opening for configurations that go further afield.

Thus far, key book-length studies on the...