Search Results

This chapter uses the memoirs of Caryl Phillips and the theoretical writings of Atlantic historian David Armitage as the springboard for a wide-ranging critical survey of scholarly and creative attempts to place the American South in an Atlantic World framework. Spanning a variety of traditional disciplinary and temporal divides, it evaluates those efforts in the context of other moves within American Studies and the New Southern Studies to place the nation and the region in Global and Hemispheric (or New World) contexts. Noting the tremendous technical challenges posed by situating the American South within a comprehensive Atlantic World framework, the essay stresses the value of “granular” approaches to the mutually constitutive relationships between the American South and the Atlantic World: a granularity evident in studies that focus primarily on particular places, individuals, groups, moments, or themes in order to trace the significance of much broader Atlantic forces as they flow in and out of the South.

The Creating and Consuming the South volume may be less about moving the field forward than about bringing ideas from the early 2000s (and even the 1970s) to the attention of theory-averse southern historians. Most new southern studies today is not interested in questions of “southern identity,” even as constructed, virtual, or “postsouthern.” These latter terms in practice not only move us backward toward old agrarian categories, but also function to preserve what Jodi Dean calls the “postpolitical,” an inherently conservative effect of postmodernism that forecloses real political activity on the left. To illustrate its points, the chapter takes issue with Michael O’Brien for his misunderstanding of both postmodernism and the empirical roots of the new southern studies, and with Scott Romine for his postpolitical relativism.

Two recent, interconnected, and intriguing developments have been the projects of globalizing southern history and that literary scholarship which has come to be called the “New Southern Studies.” Both are worth encouraging but also merit a scrutiny, and both are of help in making sense of the problem of citizenship. The former is of direct relevance to the nineteenth century; the latter has, for the most part, been preoccupied with the twentieth or, at least, the status of the South since the defeat of the Confederacy. At the heart of the former project are economic historians and occasionally sociologists, who have been making a case for the deep engagement of the southern economy and its attendant social relations in a wider global market. In fact, the entanglement of the South with international markets has been fairly continuous since the seventeenth century. For the “New Southern Studies,” the more complicated of the two projects-in part because it is more interdisciplinary and so has more balls to keep in the air, in part because Southern literary studies has long been marked by the anxiety of influences-the focus is generational conflicts, multicultural sensitivities, and the bemusing if exhilarating premises of postmodernism and postcolonialism.