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  • Global Souths
  • Bryan Wagner (bio)
Our South: Geographic Fantasy and the Rise of National Literature. By Jennifer Rae Greeson. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010. 368 pages. $39.95 (cloth).
American Mediterranean: Southern Slaveholders in the Age of Emancipation. By Matthew Pratt Guterl. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008. 250 pages. $41.50 (cloth).
Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South. By Andrew Zimmerman. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010. 416 pages. $35.00 (cloth).

The United States, Jennifer Greeson suggests, has always been preoccupied with the distinctiveness of its South. According to Greeson, this long-standing preoccupation has given rise to questions ("Why have the southern states lagged behind the mainstream?" or "Has the South become just like the rest of the country?") that are circular insofar as they evaluate the southern states according to norms of national development that were deduced, in the first place, in opposition to the assumption of southern backwardness. In her provocative first book, Greeson offers a cultural history of this common assumption, describing the evolution of southern exceptionalism to the end of the nineteenth century.1

Greeson maintains that the South was already being represented monolithically in the earliest attempts at national self-definition. Writers from Paine to Webster dispensed with European conventions for portraying the North American colonies, not by rejecting these conventions outright, but by projecting them onto the southern states. Differentiated by a tropical climate and the predominance of slavery, the South gave these writers a way to contain and reflect on the nation's colonial past without compromising its present claims to singularity in world history. The South, in other words, was the necessary supplement to nationalization, and it has served ever since as a stable point of contrast against which to measure the representative progress of the nation's political and economic institutions. [End Page 391]

There are two major transitions in Greeson's argument, each marking a transformation in the iconography associated with the southern states. The first transformation comes with the rise of radical abolitionism in the 1830s, a movement that depicted slavery as a social problem whose excesses are analogous to the lurid vices of contemporary urban living. In his polemics, William Lloyd Garrison made the slave states seem dystopically modern by transposing scenes from northern cities onto the southern plantation. Modeled on tracts assembled by temperance and antiprostitution reformers such as John McDowall, the graphic vignettes in Garrison's antislavery writings were meant to suggest the similarity between the recognizable moral degradation of the northern city and the barbarism of southern slavery.

The second transformation takes place during Reconstruction, when carpetbaggers and journalists began to imagine the southern states through a new analogy to Africa, gauging the benefits and risks of military occupation through images of natural bounty and social depravity borrowed from African exploration narratives promoting European colonization. Greeson observes, for example, that Edward King's monumental travel series The Great South (1875) was inspired by the sensation surrounding the publication of Henry Morton Stanley's How I Found Livingstone (1872), and she provides a compelling account of the images of underdevelopment connecting Stanley's East Africa to King's American South.

Anticipated by a series of impressive essays published over the last decade, Greeson's argument in Our South has already exerted wide influence.2 Indeed, it has become foundational to an entire subfield known as the "new southern studies." Bold in scope and conception, it is an argument that is well worth engaging. From my perspective, it is also an argument that sometimes loses sight of its own implications, allowing received wisdom and oblique references to stand unquestioned where further elaboration and analysis is warranted.

This is especially evident in the two sections organized by the trope of analogy. Greeson argues, for instance, that the analogy drawn by Uncle Tom's Cabin between slavery and industrialization "obliterates" the presumed reference to the slave states, leaving a novel that is instead fundamentally "about" the market revolution on the northeastern seaboard (172). Slavery, of course, did not need to be made modern through analogies that transformed its fields into factories, because slavery already...

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