My final thesis might seem at first to be a contradiction of the edicts of one or more of my previous theses. After all, social and intellectual systems of organization based on “artificial” ephemerals (the boundaries of the nation state or economies of information) would logically appear to be at odds with models of self-identification based broadly on the relationship of the subject to absolute, deterministic elements congealed and shorthanded in references to “the land.” Indeed, even the most basic configurations of regionalism as a genre or as a style usually take a priori the fact that the region, whatever it might encompass, is not contiguous with the nation. Leigh Anne Duck notes
that “even studies focused on regional transformation” have traditionally positioned the United States South “in a different framework from national or global change, elucidating a specifically southern version of the tension between modernity and traditionalism” (9).
The nation and the region, Duck suggests, require different interpretive schemata owing to their irreconcilable differences. Duck is not alone in this assertion. Barbara Ladd also attributes considerable importance to the origins of the word “regionalism” as a “response to the centralizing discourse of state-sponsored nationalism,” while Richard Gray has commented that the term is largely a measure of the extent of any given “deviation from the national norm” (South to a New Place 51, xiv). Others have cast the national / regional divide in the South particularly somewhat more unkindly, usually suggesting, with C. Vann Woodward, that “nationalism sweeps everything else before it,” leaving those with regional attentions “oppressed” by their own “unimportance” (Woodward 63).
Regionalism’s relationship with the forces of globalization has been no less troubled. Latter-day critical attention to Anderson’s ideas of “imagined” global communities and more recent cosmopolitan theories mark a decay in claims of regional
“attachment” or “rootedness.” The immediate response to this decline of literary regionalist determinism might be to claim that nationalizing and globalizing forces have eroded or even somehow abolished regionalism on the whole, claiming, as Thomas Bontly does, that, as “the internet, the interstate, transcontinental air travel, and the culture they have spawned have all diminished our sense of purely regional identities,”
the term itself carries strong connotations of obsolescence (Place in American Fiction, 201).
The U.S. South provides an intriguing perspective on this dichotomy in that it represents the U.S. region that has most vigorously (and violently) attempted to distinguish itself from a singular national identity. The relationship between Southern regionalism and U.S. nationalism has received more attention in criticism than virtually any regional/national dichotomy. Alex Davis and Lee M. Jenkins, in Locations of Literary Modernism (2000), for example, have traced back to the Agrarians the notion that regional literatures centralize what U.S. national literature acts to decentralize: the existence of communal traditions, beliefs, and idioms (20). This is perhaps unsurprising;
more unusual is the amount of attention devoted to the role of the South in its capacity as a region in the formation of U.S. nationhood. I am thinking in particular of Jennifer Rae Greeson’s “The Figure of the South and the Nationalizing Imperatives of Early United States Literature” (1999) and Leigh Anne Duck’s The Nation’s Region (2006).40 Of the two, Greeson’s article is more overtly historicist in its claims, seeking to trace the formation of U.S. nationalization to an early “intra-national, regionally inflected symbolic geography, in which the terms ‘South’ and ‘U.S.’ formed an ideological juxtaposition,” while Duck performs a more transhistorical survey of largely canonical Southern authors (211).41
While other critics have praised the manner in which regionalism ostensibly preserves cultural multiplicities within the broader framework of the ideologically unified
40 To be fair to some of the critics I have quoted in this section, I should note that Greeson and Ladd’s ideas are becoming more common in academic discourse. For example, Gray supplements his comments on regional “deviation” from a national
“norm” with the claim that those same deviation have, by a “strange but common irony,”
have “helped to determine” that norm (South to a New Place xiv).
41 Dainotto’s interest is also in how “regional fiction” came to represent “various sections of the consolidating nation” (4). It seems clear that regionalism bears more than a tangential relationship to the process of nationalization.
nation, for Greeson, the case is exactly the opposite: early U.S. nationalist rhetoric is able to assert unity specifically because it denounces certain practices of its regions.42 Championing ideals of democratic subjecthood for the nation as a whole meant
“differentiating the figure of the south from the new national idea writ large,” and subsequently “quarantining” the troublesome aspects of a colonial economy and society (slavery, exploitation, dynastic social structures, etc.) within the region of the South (213). This is an almost paradoxical view of the nation/region divide insofar as it suggests that the region defines the nation by not being of the nation. Given the idea of reciprocal national distinction that I have already mentioned, in which the nation is defined in part by what it is not, we are left with a model of the relationship between the nation and its regions that looks suspiciously like the relationship between one nation and others. The nation creates the region just as the region creates the nation, both entities existing in a syntagmatic, dialectic process of identity-formation.
But it will not suffice, as Duck argues, to simply make the nation congruent with the region, or the processes of nation-formation with the rise of the region. First, and most obviously, Duck notes that only the nation is associated with “central government,”
while the regions contained within that nation do not constitute “bureaucratic political entities” (29).43 Though Duck deploys some of the same strategies—and language—as Greeson when noting the tendency, for example, in twentieth-century audiences to
42 Certain critics have suggested that the theoretical cultural and ethnic diversity and tolerance advertised by a nation composed of differing regions may be spurious. George Handley, in Postslavery Literatures in the Americas (2000) has asserted that “U.S.
culture perpetually blinds itself to difference by means of pretended incorporation of symbolic difference within its boundaries” (140).
43 Duck notes that the Confederacy is the (brief) exception to this rule. It may be that sections of a nation at civil war may simultaneously occupy the epistemological categories of nation and region, but this may be too large a subject to address here.
“contain the abjection represented in [Erskine] Caldwell’s work both in the distanced space of the South and in a specifically regional time, one distinct from that of the modernizing nation,” or in noting the persistent nationalizing trope of the “backward South” that “presented racial violence and disfranchisement as the distinct domain of an anachronistic region,” her aims differ significantly (94-95, 215). Though Duck acknowledges the old dichotomy between the “backward South” and the “enlightened nation,” she also notes that this model does not hold up under scrutiny, failing to
“incorporate a conceptual structure for assessing an ongoing conflict between prominent cultural and political models of national affiliation” (3). The final term—affiliation—is key to Duck’s argument, and though she somewhat uneasily acknowledges that such an approach might serve to “idealize regional cultures,” she contends that ideological constructions of region/nation distinction must necessarily rely upon “the idea that the nation-state and its regions mobilize fundamentally different and temporally coded forms of affiliation” (4-5). Though these differing “modes” need not necessarily be harmonious, they also need not be oppositional. The most profitable means of regarding the relationship between nation and region, then, may be one of symbiosis: while the region relies on the nation to govern general coded means of affiliation, as well as, I may venture to say, overarching moral and ideological systems (such as democracy), the nation relies on the region to embody uncoded patterns of affiliations against (or through) which it may define itself.
I have already spoken, at the beginning of this chapter, of the intersection of regionalism and globalization. However, in light of my discussion of regionalism and nationalism, it may be worthwhile to ask briefly whether these two processes do not share
something of the same relationship, with the region to some sense creating the globe, which in turn partitions and defines the region. Globalization theory, in conjunction with postmodernism, has been almost unanimous in its call for a return to the region. On the surface, the reasoning behind this is simple. As Mike Featherstone notes in Global Culture (1990), the dismantling of Lyotardian metanarratives that accompany postmodernism implicitly encourages a new focus on localized truths (2). In the same vein, Anthony Giddens’s The Consequences of Modernity (1990) states that the very definition of globalization is that of the institution of new webs of influence between local and global events (64). Such a configuration emphasizes seemingly scattered points of reference, yet each of these points are indivisible regions in themselves. And, of course, recent years have seen a profusion of interest in local commerce and activism—
the possibility of, as the slogan goes, thinking globally and acting locally.
It must be said, however, that even given these axioms, concerned as they are with the possibility of profitable interchange between globalism and regionalism, the relationship between the two is generally represented as adversarial. Scott Romine, for instance, in The Real South (2008), has noted in the titular region a “recursive retreat to the local” in order to combat “the homogenizing pressures of a global economy” (1). At first glance, it is indeed difficult to avoid regarding such abominations as mainstream country radio, NASCAR, and Larry the Cable Guy as anything other than polemic and somewhat hackneyed stabs at developing reactionary shibboleths to maintain the gap between regional culture and that of the nation as a whole. Yet, Romine’s view is somewhat more optimistic. Though he notes that territorial regionalisms tend to rely on Benjaminian patterns of cultural reproduction insofar as they posit the destruction of
intangible regional qualities (such as we have already seen) by pernicious modern (or global) forces, he finds in those same forces the potential for reinventions of the region.
He concludes by stating that regional “essences, central themes, and nationally resonant dramatic roles” do not become obsolete with the advent of new technologies, but rather become the new “materials out of which cultural reproduction proceeds, if in less totalizing ways than in more homogenously territorial projects of culture” (233). In Romine’s interpretation, as with the discourses between regionalism and nationalism I have cited, as in, to return to an earlier thesis, the intersection of regionalism and modernism (or industrialism), we see ostensibly oppositional forces acting on regionalism in ways that are less destructive than transformative. The remainder of this chapter will concern itself with exploring the nature of such regional transformations.