The American South and the Atlantic World

11. Dish-Washing in the Sea of Ndayaan: What We Make of Our Souths in Atlantic World Initiation

11 Dish-Washing in the Sea of Ndayaan What We Make of Our Souths in Atlantic World Initiation Keith Cartwright “ Gimme the tea, Guitar. Just the tea. No geography.” “ No geography? Okay, no geography. What about some history in your tea? Or some sociopolitico—No. That’s still geography. Goddam, Milk, I do believe my whole life’s geography.” “ Don’t you wash pots out for people before you cook water in them?” Milkman Dead and Guitar Baines in Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon For those of us studying the American South in the aftermath of the election of President Barack Obama (and the backlash from the right’s Tea Party), there is much to ponder in this scene from Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon. I particularly like the geography lesson that Florida-born Michigan resident Guitar Baines gives to his friend Milkman Dead with his cup of tea: “I live in the North now. So the first question come to mind is North of what? Why, north of the South. So North exists because South does. But does that mean North is different from South? No way! South is just south of North.”1 Guitar goes on to school Milkman most playfully on global politics and economy, putting North and South (the American nation) into relation with India (and tea), France, and the Congo. We see that North exists (in global tea-partying economy) because South does. And we come to see that North has existed as a destination for black Floridians because something called the South has existed on the plantation frontiers of hell. Mostly, however, I think it is the other way around. The South has been determined and defined by relations with a magnetically fixed northern compass point. This has been as true of global, colonized souths as much as it is true of the U.S. South. In the United States, New England and the 240 · Keith Cartwright North are so central to the national narrative as city on a hill—with the whole accompanying march of originating chronology (1620, 1776)—that the North is no region. It is nation. East and west coasts become North too in relation to a South, according to Leigh Anne Duck, that is every bit as abject, scene and stage of national crimes, disasters, and supposedly peculiar institutions.2 As “the nation’s region” and internal other, the South has come to be seen as an unprogressive, backward space, but— as often happens with such spaces—the South also gets tapped as storehouse of what has been kept most real, what is most “country” or “folk,” most authentically or conservatively nationalist, most Christian(ist), and even most feudally English.3 The South is a chronotope (time-space) that makes North and Nation possible as positive or progressive time-space. But the plantation economy of this relation leaves much to be desired. As much as I like Guitar Baines’s teatime geography lessons, his friend Milkman’s question of pot-washing may be even more compelling. Putting the South into relation with a larger Atlantic World offers us a cleansing expansion of regional scale, an alternative to national and sectional pots so crusty we can hardly cook with them. This is not to say that the Atlantic provides an escape from the racialized traumas of the “Dirty” South. Legacies of conquest, enslavement, and genocidal and environmental devastation are, of course, writ large across this originary ocean of modernity. Nevertheless, circum-Atlantic chartings of the South may foster fresh approaches to agency in the long cross-cultural encounter. In “Consuming Subjects: Theorizing New Models of Agency for Literary Criticism in African Studies,” Wendy Belcher recently argued that a “reciprocal enculturation model of agency” can help us understand how Western texts may be infused and shaped by the discursive agency of African genius.4 Belcher attends to modes of “transcultural intertextuality” by which the words, speech, tales, music, and performances of a colonized culture’s repertoire may “penetrate, we might even say animate or possess, European identities and literatures.”5 The entire Atlantic World—and perhaps the U.S. South and the circum-Caribbean in particular—may be recognized as a locus of transcultural possessions: a space shaped by asymmetrical relations of power but also by reciprocal routes of enculturation. This is an initial and initiating gulf-space in which we can wash our pots. The Atlantic World’s rhizomatic interpenetrations, according to Édouard Glissant, wrought “not merely an encounter,” not...