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  • Critical Regionalism: Connecting Politics and Culture in the American Landscape
  • Amanda Rees
Critical Regionalism: Connecting Politics and Culture in the American Landscape. By Douglas Reichert Powell. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. 2007.

American Studies came of age embracing the concepts of landscape and region with the likes of Henry Nash Smith’s The Virgin Land and Leo Marx’ The Machine in the Garden. Douglas Reichert Powell’s Critical Regionalism is a powerful reminder that region, landscape, and spatial awareness are a central part of American culture. Drawing on examples from his Appalachian upbringing, Powell begins with a useful and timely exploration of region informed by a variety of contemporary regional historians, geographers, and cultural theorists. Using the case study of the Appalachian Trail, chapter two explores the relationship between the built environment and region. Popular cultural productions of region are explored in chapter three. Powell suggests that there are two types of regional movies, those like Deliverance and Cape Fear work to reproduce reductive regional stereotypes, while movies such as Fargo offer a more hopeful regionalizing narrative. Moving from film to literary productions of region, chapter four suggests that texts should be read through place rather than reading a place through text.

For Powell critical regionalism assumes that regions are not merely sum of their essential qualities but are produced through ongoing debates and discourses that coalesce around particular geographical spaces. Though we may be more familiar with conflict in the production of urban spaces, Powell reminds us that this dynamic also works in rural, regional spaces; spaces in which many academics are located. Powell advocates two roles for critical regionalism in contemporary scholarship. First, that critical regionalism offers a larger scale of thinking about problems that are insoluble at a more local level or scale. Second, that it offers a balance against dislocating forces of globalization, suggesting that regional scale locates thought and action in a particular place, both physical and human. At the same time, Powell warns that critical regionalists need to guard against self containment and parochialism by considering region as process rather than a passive social construction. Indeed, Powell may briefly have become a victim of that thinking as he privileges regional articulations that arise from within region rather than that produced in the twin metropolitan centers on east and west coasts. This outsider-insider dichotomy [End Page 139] seems too simple, especially if the aim is to claim authenticity in producing region. In addition, Powell’s theoretical argument would have benefitted from a discussion of the relationship between landscape and region. The possibilities and limitations of applying cultural landscape theory at the scale of region remain tantalizingly untheorized.

Perhaps Powell’s richest gift to his readers is his belief that critical regionalism is a tool that self-consciously shapes an understanding of the spatial dimensions of cultural politics and supports change. Indeed, Powell suggests that critical regionalism is ultimately pedagogy, teaching students to draw their own regional maps and connect their experience to that of others near and far, both like and unlike themselves. In conclusion, this book offers useful and accessible interpretive tools and a powerful interpretative lens with which to ponder region and culture.

Amanda Rees
Columbus State University
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