Finding Purple America: The South and the Future of American Studies by Jon Smith (review)

Jon Smith presents a pointed, often cutting critique of the disciplinary practices of traditional southern studies for its obsession with “folklore, orality, the presence of the past, the sense of place, and the sense of community” (30). Old southern studies has been marked (marred, per Smith) by baby boomers’ maudlin (and, he argues, self-serving) preoccupation with asking “whether, as a result of modernity’s instability, we have not Lost Something Very Important” (6). Just as standard-issue southern studies has been stuck in a tautological feedback loop around its Lacanian objet a of “The Past,” American studies is similarly cathected, not on pastness, but on futurity, especially “crisis” thinking. “The South,” for Smith, is “a meaningless term, naming nothing but fantasies: either a great, 100-million-resident void at the heart of American studies, or a ridiculously strained attempt at identity politics at the heart of old southern studies” (22). He opts instead to train down to “Alabama” as a more manageable nexus of “several and very complex, alternative modernities” (22) that sidesteps the fetishizations pervading American studies (futuristic “postmodern” Los Angeles) and traditional southern studies (old-timey Mayberry). Birmingham becomes an appropriate metonym for Alabamaness as a striated, synthetic (meaning both “mixed together” and “artificial”) space, color-schemed neither blue nor red, but “purple,” which “substantively denotes hybridity and temporal ambivalence, and methodologically denotes a consequent impatience with disciplinary ideologies, still surprisingly strong, of national and regional exceptionalism and purity” (23). Smith analyzes an impressive sweep of cultural complexities, from Johnny Cash to Neko Case, William Faulkner to Parade magazine ads, postwar Germany’s melancholia to hardcore right-wing religiosity to the author’s own backyard garden. If capaciousness threatens to fall into capriciousness via this scattershot approach, Smith trades depth for breadth, and, taken as a whole, Finding Purple America presents sufficient exemplars of the sort of cultural readings he advocates for a new brand of cultural studies no longer saddled with excess forward- or backward-gazing. Smith meticulously identifies the ways in which institutional politics have forged allegiances and arguments that have shaped the course of southern and American studies. He employs marketing theory to account for these forms of intellectual “branding” because “what we choose to ‘work’ on as scholars is, perhaps paradoxically, more closely linked to the anxieties that drive people’s consumption preferences than to any particular account of production” (6). The book’s tone may strike some as hypercritical, as Smith singles out by name (plus generation) high-profile southern/American cultural studies scholars. Yet Smith attends to the productive, not simply repressive structures of a new cultural studies, one that can balance future and past by concentrating most fully on the entangled commitments and unkempt ambivalences of the present. Smith’s book makes good on its promise to impel southern studies forward as a model for what American studies should look like in the future—or more properly, in the now.