This Ain’t Chicago: Race, Class, and Regional Identities in the Post-Soul South by Zandria F. Robinson (review)

This Ain’t Chicago, the title of Zandria F. Robinson’s new book, is the comment she heard again and again from longtime black Memphis residents. It was a statement about their identity as southerners, of their cultural distance from the urban North, and most specifically the distinction between themselves and the migration generations who headed to Chicago, Detroit, and other northern cities in the mid-twentieth century. Robinson’s informants do not see themselves as part of a rural preindustrial South, the black southerners so fully described and later etched into cliché by ethnographer Howard Odum. Instead, twenty-first century black Memphis residents articulate a new “post-soul” southern identity, which Robinson calls “country cosmopolitan” (18). In this sharply analyzed, somewhat jargon-studded study, Robinson examines what it means to be a black southerner in a post-civil rights border city.

Robinson, a sociologist and Memphis native, brings place—in particular the American South—back to studies of African American identity. She explores how region shapes and intersects with the long-entrenched categories of race, class and gender. She interviewed 106 people, including longer and multiple interviews with thirty-two respondents. The interviewees range from postal workers to beauty shop owners, hip-hop artists, teachers and lawyers, and men and women of a variety of ages. All are African American, and most were second and third generation southerners, people with deep family roots in the South. With her interviews, Robinson seems particularly adept at analyzing shifts in tone and nuances in speech that reveal larger cultural attitudes. She also discusses popular culture—film and music about the South—attempting to show that cultural representations reveal as much as they shape southern black identities. That part of the argument is less persuasive.

Robinson’s informants see black southerners as “better” than northerners. Southern food, music, and friendliness are seen as the sources of an “authentic” black identity. Even southern racism can be framed in positive terms. Many respondents contend that southern racism, which they say is more virulent and overt than in the North, builds stronger character and a clearer sense of African American identity. Robinson is not searching for authenticity, but rather uncovering what her respondents understand as “authentic black identity.” For those interviewed, region—a version of southernness—is central to African American identity.

Southernness proves a powerful force in reshaping black gender identities. Manhood and womanhood, so rigidly defined for white southerners, largely obscured the experiences of black men and women. African American women, for example, who were enslaved and forced into agricultural labor, or later, under Jim Crow, worked as house servants were defined out of a womanhood that confined women’s work to the family home. Robinson’s respondents appropriate and “perform” versions of standard white southern womanhood: the southern belle and steel magnolia. But at the same time, some respondents, including Robinson’s mother, reject the identity of a “southern woman,” claiming that it is so deeply suffused with whiteness that black women must construct alternative southern identities. “It is through gender that country cosmopolitism enters terrain that resists the existing social order through strategic appropriation and performance” (123). How black women reappropriate southern womanhood reveals creativity, humor, and the mutability of gender identities.

Robinson is most insightful in considering how attitudes about race and gender have shifted across generations, especially in the move from the rural to the urban South. Memphis residents under forty talk about translating their parents’ outright fear and resentment of whites to a “gentler” skepticism. “This willingness to give whites the benefit of the doubt” she writes, “is reflective of attempts to shed a ‘Granddad’ kind of countryness…” (104). Yet most continue to experience some form of racism almost daily. Even the upper-middle class professional who says he puts the racist “in the rear view mirror” admits that a white colleague stole his work...