Southscapes: Geographies of Race, Region, and Literature

Notes

377 Notes introduction 1. Clifton, “Entering the South,” in The Terrible Stories, 36. 2. In his chapter “The Word Itself,” John Brinckerhoff Jackson uses the term “fact of the land” in order to distinguish it from the idea of landscape. See Jackson, Discovering the Vernacular Landscape, 3–8. His discussion is also reprinted in Horowitz, Landscape in Sight, 299–306. 3. Gillian Rose observes that landscape is a most resilient term in geography “because it refers to one of the discipline’s most abiding interests: the relationship between the natural environment and human society.” Gillian Rose, “Geography as a Science of Observation,” 342. 4. Landscape, Mike Crang points out, “implies a collective shaping of the earth over time. Landscapes are not individual property; they reflect a society’s—a culture’s— beliefs, practices, and technologies.” Crang, Cultural Geography, 15. 5. My term “southscape” responds to Edward W. Soja’s challenge “to invent a different term to capture what [he was] trying to convey” with “Thirdspace” to make “both theoretical and practical sense of our contemporary life-worlds at all scales, from the most intimate to the most global.” Soja, Thirdspace, 1–2. 6. Homi Bhabha initially articulated “Third Space” at the end of the 1980s. Operating from a provenance of postcolonial theory with India-Britain as his matrix and Frantz Fanon, Stuart Hall, Jacques Lacan, and Edward Said as his interlocutors, Bhabha identi fied Third Space as a “political strategy for empowerment and articulation” particularly useful in exploring questions of race and representation, as he explained in “The Other Question: Stereotype, Discrimination, and the Discourse of Colonialism,” a 1992 essay reprinted in Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 66–84. See Gillian Rose and Steve Pile for the early acceptance of Bhabha’s work as enabling new geographic paradigms. Edward Soja and Robert Young, among others, critique Bhabha for the somewhat abstract generalizations of his historical and geographical formulations. 7. Bhabha used “Third Space” in his 1989 essay “The Commitment to Theory” and in an interview with Jonathan Rutherford, “The Third Space: Interview with Homi Bhabha” (1990). He deployed the term to inscribe and articulate a culture of hybridity that could counter hegemonic colonial hierarchies. See Bhabha, “The Commitment to Theory” (1989), reprinted in The Location of Culture, 38ff., 25; and Rutherford, Identity , 207–21. 8. hooks, “Choosing the Margins as a Space of Radical Openness,” in Yearning, 145, 146. 9. The Black Public Sphere Collective, The Black Public Sphere, 1, 3. The Collective responded to Habermas’s The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. |378| NOTES TO PAGES 4–8 10. Daphne Spain, for instance, has pointed out, “Space is essential to social science; spatial relations exist only because social processes exists. The spatial and social aspects of a phenomenon are inseparable.” Spain, Gendered Spaces, 5. In recognizing the impact of people and social communities on landscape, cultural geographers have delineated forms such as communication networks, which demonstrate the inextricable interaction of the spatial and the social. One example that has had an impact across disciplinary boundaries is the work of social scientist Paul Gilroy, who in conceptualizing the “Black Atlantic” as a social space focused attention squarely on the interlocked social and spatial relations manifested in black migration and diasporic practices. See Gilroy, The Black Atlantic. 11. Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 117. 12. Ibid. (Certeau’s emphasis). 13. Ibid., 118. 14. Importantly, as David Harvey’s interpretations have underscored, justice is as much a constitutive element of geography as is place and space. See Harvey, Justice,Nature , and the Geography of Difference. Harvey’s chapter “City and Justice: Social Movements in the City,” in his Spaces of Capital, links urban organization and environment with Marxism and the production of space and uneven geographical development. 15. Cresswell, Place: A Short Introduction, 11. 16. Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 117. 17. Kathryn McKee and Annette Trefzer state in the forward to a 2006 special issue of American Literature: “As we plough new fields and chart new territories, we are certain in our knowledge of the South’s metonymic relation to the nation and convinced of its centrality to American studies, but we are equally interested in the region’s fascinating multiplicity and its participation in hemispheric and global contexts.” McKee and Trefzer, “Preface: Global Contexts, Local Literatures,” 677. 18. Greeson focuses on the role of the nineteenth-century South in the development of a national literature and concomitantly in the ascendancy of the United States as a...