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“The Tools of the Master”: Southernists in Theoryland
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“The Tools of the Master” Southernists in Theoryland anne goodwyn jones A few years ago, an issue of the Yale Journal of Criticism featured an article whose title had a proclamatory tone. “The Inevitability of Theory in the South” bespoke at once the absence of theory, its desirability, and its irresistible advent. The argument lacked the viciousness and the fantastic nostalgia of H. L. Mencken’s “Sahara of the Bozart” (1920) but came out of certain Menckenesque assumptions: culturally sterile, the South cannot generate its own writing; only the insemination of ideas (one supposes from Paris or New Haven) can enable a shift towards (re)productivity. The author, Jefferson Humphries (himself a Yale-trained southerner), acknowledged in a footnote that he had “never thought of” what the South could offer to theory, only what theory could offer to the South (“Inevitability,” 186n4).1 This is a claim familiar to scholars of the American South, and it is worth thinking about again.2 There can be no doubt that southern academic institutions have not been hotbeds of theory. While English graduate students elsewhere were reading Barthes and Derrida, we graduate students in the 1970s South (I was at UNC–Chapel Hill) read New Criticism, old historicism, and 172 1. Another version of this essay constitutes the introduction to Humphries’s edited volume , Southern Literature and Literary Theory. 2. See also Jones, “Contemporary Literary Theory” (2002), a shorter and significantly revised version of this essay, which was written first in the early 1990s. Since then, southernists have in fact written exciting, challenging, provocative, and often persuasive theoretical or theory-inflected articles and books on southern literature and culture. They are too numerous to name here, and only a few are discussed in the text. But see, for example, the constantly updated bibliography at the Web site for the Society for the Study of Southern Literature (http://www.uark.edu/ua/sssl/). A search in 2004 using the term “theory” produced nearly three hundred annotated entries. bibliography. The elevation of southernhistory to the position of centrality it has occupied for decades depended on scholars like C. Vann Woodward’s moving to northern institutions and training nonsouthern graduate students whose interest in slavery came in part out of support for the Civil Rights movement. The study of southern literature, on the other hand, in the early 1990s still remained —with the exception of those working on Faulkner, women, and African American writers—a large, regional, and generally atheoretical industry. A glance at the newsletter of the Society for the Study of Southern Literature might elicit some surprise at the sheer quantity of work on southern literature that even today is written by southern scholars and published by southern journals and presses but hardly ever cited in national publications. And the emergence of centers of theory in the South—at Duke, Emory, Florida—has depended almost entirely on the importation of scholars neither raised nor trained nor interested in the South or southern studies. Yet in another sense, the absence of theory from the South has been a historical preoccupation of southerners born and trained. In the twentieth century alone, the liberal and the conservative traditions can be distinguished by their response to the absence of what has usually been called, in the discourse of southern literary criticism, not theory but “abstraction.” The Agrarians in I’ll Take My Stand believed that abstraction was a destructive, capitalist, northern habit that derived from the cash nexus and would, if not resisted, destroy the concreteness and personalism of the South. Lillian Smith, on the other hand, believed that the southern resistance to abstraction emerged from conflicts between southern commitments to Christian values and the realities of sexual, racial, and class oppression. The solution to the coexistence of a Christian sense of identity and an oppressive set of behaviors was, she observed, simply to not think. But there is no doubt that at least the antebellum South produced an abundance of explicit theory. Proslavery ideology theorized southern society as a hierarchy built upon rigidly maintained oppositions between races, classes, genders . Thus it is difficult to accept on the face of it Humphries’s assertion of the absence of theory from the South. The work of southern intellectual historians like Houston Baker, Drew Gilpin Faust, Eugene Genovese and Elizabeth FoxGenovese , Richard Gray, Richard King, Michael Kreyling, Michael O’Brien, and Stephen Stowe, to name only a few widely respected scholars, counters that “the tools of...