Regionalism and The Humanities (review)

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Reviewed by: Regionalism and The Humanities Eric Sandweiss Regionalism and The Humanities. Edited and with an Introduction by Timothy R. Mahoney and Wendy J. Katz. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. 2008. Readers inclined to pick up this anthology of place-based cultural essays will likely believe already, with editors Timothy R. Mahoney and Wendy J. Katz, that "the regionalist impulse is still very much alive." (ix) If the case for such an impulse had ever been in doubt, then it should have been strengthened by the previous appearance of such similar anthologies as Edward Ayers, et al.'s All over the Map: Rethinking American Regions (Baltimore, 1995) and Andrew Cayton and Susan Gray's The Identity of the American Midwest: Essays on Regional History (Bloomington, 2007). At a more material level, it has found confirmation in the National Endowment for the Humanities' (NEH) 1999 commitment to funding ten centers devoted to regional study of the humanities. Like the University of Mississippi's Center for the Study of Southern Culture—headed by folklorist William Ferris before his accession to the NEH directorship in 1997—these academically based centers based their existence on the assumption that cultural regions, even in an age of globalization and cultural homogenization, continued to provide a meaningful unit of study for scholars of literature, history, and the arts. One of the centers that eventually resulted from the endowment's widely publicized initiative, the Plains Humanities Alliance at the University of Nebraska served in 2003 as host for the first meeting of a consortium of the new agencies. The result of those proceedings is Mahoney and Katz's edited volume, a varied collection of essays that should provoke the interest not only of scholars tracing the intellectual foundations of American regionalism, but also of those whose interests turn more specifically to such topics as midwestern literature and American architectural history. This is, in other words, a grab bag, a mix of broad and narrow explorations across a range of conventionally defined fields. Yet Regionalism and the Humanities coheres, better than most, as a sustained exploration of a broad and worthwhile theme. Katz and Mahoney help to strike the right note in their introduction, asserting a place for regionalist thinking amidst the "ongoing erosion of space and place" as distinctive elements of our cultural self-definition (ix) and cautioning, rightly, against crossing from that commitment into one of the "varieties of essentialism" (xvii) that have in the past resulted in excesses of both romanticism and barbarism. Finally, their note that "any regionalist discourse…is a performance" (xi) helps to highlight the common thread within a number of the pieces to follow: If culture reflects and promotes important regional differences, and if, at the same time, we can dismiss the archaic idea that it naturally inheres to place, then [End Page 116] it makes sense to look at regional culture as a shifting, historically contingent interaction of people, extant cultural artifacts, and places. The "performance" of place is at times quite explicit in Regionalism and the Humanities, as in Nicolas S. Witschi's examination of a mock shootout in Paradise, Nevada, in 1876; or in William Slaymaker's defense of "ec(h)ological conscience," which the author defines as the act of "projecting the conscious and conscientious self into an unconscious environment" (28) through literary and other means; or in Patrick Lee Lucas's analysis of Greek Revival architecture as an example of "cultural work performed by the settlers" of the trans-Appalachian West (275); or in Guy Reynolds's study of the "self-fashioning" (79) of Willa Cather and other place-conscious writers of the early twentieth century. Other contributions, less specifically related in their methodology, share the notion that region is a concept continually reinvented through the interaction of physical spaces and human acts. Their varied theses will prove compelling to varied audiences: Ginette Aley's insistence on "internal histories" (96) as the defining elements of regional identity will serve some researchers, just as Edward Watts's opposing focus on "larger international processes" (169) will attract others. Annie Proulx's keynote essay on landscape and fiction (which includes a surprising dismissal of the work of J...