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Afterword. "Getting Pretty Fed Up with This Two-Tone South": Moving toward Multiculturalism
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187 AFTERWORD “Getting Pretty Fed Up with this Two-Tone South” Moving toward Multiculturalism IN HIS ESSAY COLLECTION Beyond the Binary, my friend and former colleague Timothy Powell called for a new paradigm for American cultural studies. It is time, he wrote in 1999, to move beyond the long-established theoretical binaries of Self/Other, Center/Margin, and Colonizer/Colonized that “helped scholars to delineate the inner workings of oppression and to establish a new critical paradigm that would allow minority voices not only to be heard but to be esteemed as a critically important point of view.”1 At a more elemental level, one could argue that for historians of the South, the central binary of White/Black—along with others such as Haves/Have Nots, Urban/Rural, and even North/South—has been just as integral in how we see and explain the structure and tensions inherent in southern society over the past century or more. Certainly the essays here lend themselves to those dualities —along with whatever variations, complexities, and subtleties I may have entwined within them.2 Yet, even as Powell and his compatriots have been among those advancing a more multicultural American past, both historically and literarily, as an academic field, multiculturalists have been slow to embrace the South as an entity worthy of special attention or to acknowledge those southerners whose ethnicity or national origins do not adhere to the basic Black/White binary that has so dominated analysis of the region. In Powell’s Beyond the Binary, for example, not one of its eleven essays is set fully in the South, and only one even incorporates a southern component—post-removal Cherokees in East Tennessee.3 That 188 afterword void seems equally apparent in the vast and growing scholarship on autobiography . In the fullest treatment of the topic, an essay collection titled Multicultural Autobiography: American Lives, editor James Robert Payne acknowledges the South as the first to embody the “notion that distinctive cultures of American regions or sections may produce distinctive autobiography”; yet only one of eleven chapters deals with the work of a southerner—Payne’s own examination of an unpublished memoir by New Orleans writer George Washington Cable.4 Given the dearth of scholarly attention to southern multiculturalism as reflected in autobiography and memoir, I conclude this volume with a brief sampling of work, most of it recent, that helps move us beyond the traditional southern binary or binaries in a variety of ways. The fact that we don’t have more works by Native Americans, Asians, or Latinos living in the South makes the few we do have all the more valuable and worthy of serious attention by both scholars and teachers. Despite their lengthy and integral role in southern history, it is particularly striking that we have so little autobiographical work by southern Indians (not including those from Oklahoma). Several life narratives by Cherokees, some quite unconventional in form, offer particularly rich testimonials to the unique struggles many face in terms of identity and status in a post–civil rights South. Marilou Awiakta, a Cherokee poet who grew up in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, has written extensively, if somewhat obliquely, about her life as an Indian, an Appalachian, and as a part of a closely guarded scientific community in two multigenre works, Abiding Appalachia: Where Mountain and Atom Meet (1978) and Selu: Seeking the Corn-Mother’s Wisdom (1993). In both, she incorporates poems, stories and legends, and nonfictional essays to explore issues of Cherokee history, spirituality, and identity, including her own Cherokee-Celtic heritage. She quips that she had “grown up in the 1940s on a government reservation —for atoms, not Indians” and explores the tensions and contradictions between those two worlds, or three, as she notes in Selu.5 Returning home from an extended stay in France in the mid-1960s, where her husband was assigned, Awiakta wrote that she had struggled there with finding herself and her place among people of different cultures, but that “by the time I returned to America, I knew I was a Cherokee/Appalachian poet. I was determined to sing my song.” The turbulence of identity politics in the mid1960s proved a challenge, and that “outer turmoil” forced her to seek harmony “from my three heritages: Cherokee, Appalachian, and scientific.” The atom, she insisted, was a part of her, and the new technology brought with it its own cul- [54.196.106.106] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 10:39 GMT) afterword...