Postmodern Geographies of the U.S. South

Abstract

In a 1990 essay, Cornel West identifies a key shift in U.S. cultural politics since the 1960s, the era widely termed “postmodern,” arguing that the “new cultural politics of difference” is distinguished by its emphasis on particularity and diversity as part of a reaction against the universalizing bent of modern politics (19). Drawing on West, Edward Soja and Barbara Hooper assert, in “The Spaces That Difference Makes” (1993, 184), that the emphasis on locally based micropolitics is a defining feature of the postmodern turn in U.S. culture, and that a renewed focus on spatiality is central to this politics. The postmodern emphasis on space is intended to highlight the situated nature of all political knowledge and action, and to disavow the view from nowhere—the global and disembedded claims of modern knowledge and politics. It is not surprising that postmodern cultural politics takes space rather than time as the dimension within which social differences can be made visible and active, given that the self-definition of European modernity has monopolized time, subsuming varied histories into a singular and teleological narrative of History. The hitherto underprivileged category of space offers a way of interrupting modernity’s global march as well as of restoring the divergent histories that have contributed to the modern legacy. The renewed interest in the regional specificity of the U.S. South in recent years offers an instance of this kind of spatialized cultural politics of difference. Since the mid-1970s, U.S. historians, sociologists, novelists, literary critics, and cultural commentators seem to have become obsessed with the South, reviving the enduring debate about what makes the region distinct from the rest of the nation. In this essay, I examine the turn south