Southern Literature, Cold War Culture, and the Making of Modern America by Jordan J. Dominy

Abstract

Reviewed by: Southern Literature, Cold War Culture, and the Making of Modern America by Jordan J. Dominy Greg Barnhisel Jordan J. Dominy. Southern Literature, Cold War Culture, and the Making of Modern America. UP of Mississippi, 2021. ix + 159 pp. In William Faulkner’s 1936 novel Absalom, Absalom!, Shreve McCannon implores his Harvard roommate, Quentin Compson, to tell him about the South: “What’s it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all.” Even a Canadian like Shreve knows that to his Mississippian friend, the South, not the US, was his country of birth. The South was briefly an independent nation just three decades before Quentin’s birth. But it retained, refined, and intensified its separateness in the decades after the Confederacy fell and Reconstruction was sabotaged. Separateness, in fact, became the South’s identity: it saw itself as a captive region, a rump nation, within a larger and not particularly benevolent state. Thus, it seems improbable that Southernness could become a central component of a larger, amalgamated American identity, especially when crafting and selling that identity was a primary concern of American intellectuals and policymakers as the US became, in the years after the war, the world’s primary power and a synecdoche for the Free World. But, as Jordan J. Dominy argues in Southern Literature, Cold War Culture, and the Making of America, that’s exactly what happened. Like so much else, this universalizing of Southernness was largely Faulkner’s doing. Although this book spans the earliest years of the Cold War to the present day (what Dominy might call the Duck Dynasty stage of Western civilization), Faulkner looms over the project, as he did over American literature of the time. Area studies, a foundation-funded academic endeavor that began in the 1930s, became an urgent priority after World War II, when the US had to train leaders and technocrats to lead a loose global empire. Southern studies soon joined Asian Studies, Latin American Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, and, of course, American Studies in scholarly journals and graduate catalogs. And “the figure of Faulkner” (38), Dominy asserts, “is what makes possible the area studies paradigm of southern studies.” When asked, Faulkner was pleased to represent the benign face of America and volunteered to go on numerous cultural-diplomatic trips for the State Department, often reciting his 1951 Nobel speech to foreign audiences. And he was an adamant and vocal anti-Communist. The problem was that he was just so . . . Southern. The Soviet Union, [End Page 789] as well as leftists in the West, made sure to remind everyone about Southern segregation and racial terrorism whenever American diplomats started raising their voices about freedom and equal opportunity. Excusing or even defending Southern resistance to desegregation, Faulkner often did his own cause little help. So how to square this circle? Dominy shows that the US consistently relied on two strategies: stressing the primacy of the individual and aestheticizing. Faulkner’s works were explained, by the Southern-rooted Kenyon Review and others, as formalist tours de force, not as depictions of a South whose culture was poisoned by white supremacy. These New Critical readings “contain[ed] unsavory national political problems by making them into an object of formalistic literary study” (45). And when a work just could not be entirely aestheticized (as with Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust), questions of race became issues of individual morality, or the human heart in conflict with itself, as Faulkner himself put it in the Nobel address. So, in Intruder in the Dust, Dominy explains, Gavin Stevens’s commentary “obscures and depoliticizes the problem [of an attempted lynching] by emphasizing individual moral responsibility and duty to country” (41-42). Dominy argues that the idea of the vital center that Arthur Schlesinger Jr. influentially developed in his 1949 book of the same name became the master concept of this strategy. Centrist politics, individual responsibility, and a commitment to narrowly defined civil liberties were its cornerstones and allowed critics and prize committees to read deeply political works such as All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren and Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison as dramas...