Concerning Our Dirty Little Imperium, the Archive, and Southern Deeps

It’s been said that the plantation is at the center of southern culture, which is another way to say that slavers and the enslaved are at the center. One might also say that the plantation is at the center of Irish culture today, which, in a slightly different register, is to say colonizer and colonized. These are crude oversimplifications on some level—there’s plenty of play for agency in between—but I will keep to such broad assertions in this essay in the hope of going someplace deeper. What’s of interest to me is the deep connection between the two, the way that they come together in a Gordian knot.

I’m a short walk down this road, around twenty years spent trying to get clear of the fog of nationalism into which I was born—the stuff that we all receive in one form or another. Perhaps the deepest revelation I’ve come to is something that should have been patently obvious: the main pattern of the southern world—the meridional one, that tugs our frame of vision toward the meridian and the global south—is fashioned out of a protean colonialism. Colonization attempts to create order out of an all-too-human tendency to find solace in racism. And this self-perpetuating system accommodates readily to just about any model of capitalism one throws at it.

Once this jinni is loosed from the bottle, it cannot be stopped; it goes about energetically setting up its kingdoms and principalities in a series of organic refractions. As Antonio Benítez-Rojo imagines the plantation, it is an “extraordinary machine . . . [that] repeats itself ceaselessly” (11). Christopher Dickey’s Our Man in Charleston describes the career of Robert Bunch, Her Majesty’s consul in Charleston from 1853 to 1863, from one outpost of the machine. A son of empire, Bunch was raised largely in Bogota and once confided to his superior in Washington that “I only look upon this consulate as a pis aller” (Bunch 40). He concealed his opinions from the thin-skinned southern slavocracy, sometimes writing in cipher, even as he sent back reports with observations such as “[i]t is rather hard that we are to dance to the fiddle of this dirty little abortion of an imperium” (Bunch 40).

Thus wrote the agent of the empire that had legally abolished its slave trade in 1807. But England was no more successful in snuffing out the system it had helped translate across the globe than the current juggernaut, the United States, has been in eradicating slavery and racism through the present day.

FATHER, BEHOLD THY CHILD

This is what I think of as the real/really deep south—where latitudes yield to hemispheres, where wave meetings and refraction and clapotis point to the submerged patterns of migration. It is a South of deep currents, and it is fact that the sediments of the Atlantic coast are composed partly of materials borne very slowly by sea currents from the coast of Africa, then making their way gradually from north to south in the transport of longshore currents. To paraphrase Michael O’Brien, we might think of a deep defined by being more north of the South than south of the North.¹ The ongoing wars on the indigenous prepared the way for a war that fixed a nation’s political vision to a standing frame of reference, a war that would make it hard ever after to invert the map. In this way we’ve held the more interesting depths—the wash of the native, the Atlantic, western Africa, the Caribbean, the Yucatan, the gulf rim—at bay, or else had difficulty seeing them.

Suppose the deep south (which encompasses the dear old dirty South and is not the same thing as the lower south) is a failed imperium, a word of ancient coinage that, at its core, describes the power to command. The finest quasi-fiction to plumb the meaning of that term in the American literary canon is Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno,” a story that poises New World...