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American Literature 73.2 (2001) 231-244



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Preface:
Violence, the Body and “The South”

Houston A. Baker Jr. and Dana D. Nelson

An animated telephone call between the North and the South was the origin of the present special issue. We had just agreed to serve as visiting coeditors of American Literature and visiting faculty members in the Duke University English department for the 1998–1999 academic year. This telephone conversation commenced as a planning session for the joint work we hoped to undertake for the journal. But the talk veered almost from the outset to “The South,” as we discovered the intersection of our personal histories in Kentucky and of our professional interests in matters Southern. The intersecting geographies of our telephone conversation were emblematic, we felt, of the nuanced inseparability of North and South in any fruitful model of American cultural studies we could imagine for a new millennium. As one of us quipped during the call, “Every time a shocking act of racist violence occurs in New York, Illinois, or Pennsylvania, you can bet another movie on Mississippi will appear within six months.” From this observation came our idea for a course entitled “Mississippi,” whose subject would be the national formation of the United States and the dynamics of race, region, and citizenship entailed by, as it were, a putatively split and decidedly Manichean geography. We recalled Malcolm X’s pithy summation of U.S. regionalism as a possible epigraph for the course syllabus: Mississippi, Malcolm declared, is anywhere in the United States south of the Canadian border.

Slowly the idea took hold that we needed to collaborate on a project that would contribute to a new Southern studies, an emerging collective already producing a robust body of work in current American [End Page 231] Studies scholarship. By a new Southern studies, we have in mind efforts such as Patricia Yaeger’s Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women’s Writing, 1930–1990; Ann Goodwyn Jones and Susan Donaldson’s collection Haunted Bodies: Gender and Southern Texts; Richard Gray’s Southern Aberrations: Writers of the American South and the Problems of Regionalism; and other monographs, essays, histories, and films that reconfigure our familiar notions of Good (or desperately bad) Old Southern White Men telling stories on the porch, protecting white women, and being friends to the Negro. We thus resolved to edit a special issue of American Literature investigating regions, national formations, speculations, intuitions, and assertions adumbrated in our extended telephone conversation. The plans for our special issue were in place when we hung up telephones north and south.

In literature, music, film, popular culture, religious records, and studies by social scientists, we find bodies in jeopardy in the South—violence always in ascendance. Bodies are disappeared in “The South.” Bodies are made grotesque. And certain bodies in “The South” are romanticized. Why does this happen? Whose “South” is it that appears in so many discourses? Whose interests are served by varying inscriptions of “The South”? How far does our gaze extend and how extensive are our maps when we look southward? What are the relations of borders and bodies when we say “The South” and think (U.S.) racism? The macabre dragging and decapitation of James Byrd Jr., a black man, by three white men in Jasper, Texas, assures us that the South plays a durable, extravagant partner in racist violence. But the brutalization of the black Haitian immigrant Abner Luima in a Brooklyn police precinct and the horrific shooting to death by New York police officers of Amadou Diallo reminds us that Northern violence against the body of the Other is still, in the words of a famous black nationalist of the 1960s, “as American as apple pie.”

We decided to focus on the body because our speculation was that the visual, bounded body of the Other was bedrock for the construction of both regionalism and racism in the United States. As one contributor to our special issue, Jennifer Rae Greeson, has argued elsewhere, the “consistent and pervasive relocation of colonial attributes onto the...

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