The American South and the Self

Abstract

Each region of United States has a particular identity hewn from history and culture. Yet none is as distinctive as South, and none has been imbued with such historical weight in nation's making or afforded such metaphorical significance in its collective memory and mythological self-understandings. For centuries New England was understood as genesis and crystallization of American civilization and endlessly unfolding, ever renewing West as embodiment of America's promise. South, however, was America's opposite, its negative image, its evil twin--an alien member of national family, in literary critic Fred Hobson's apt phrase. The South--more accurately, white South--thus was in word and deed among places in America: exceptional in its fierce commitment to slavery, in its failed experiment with secession and nationhood, in its military defeat and occupation by a conquering power, in its poverty, cultural backwardness, and religiosity, and in its pervasive, prolonged resistance to racial justice. This exceptionalism, as much in identity as in practice, historically has been so profound as to provoke repeated changes in nation's laws governing citizenship rights. As Sanford Levinson, a professor of constitutional law at University of Texas, argues, The issues presented by South, as a distinctive region [of United States], have, since founding of our nation, presented most exquisite difficulties in terms of establishing a truly coherent national identity. In establishing this unified national identity, region has served as, in historian Carl Degler's terms, America's indispensable antithesis, country's other, a cathartic, dialectical counterpoint always shadowing America's self-idealizations; consequently, South has been motive and stage for redemptive collective action in what writer J. Bill Berry cites as the nation's major moral drama. (1) Definitions of a region and its culture as exceptional--that is, as significantly distinct from, seemingly at times even antithetical to, other regions and cultures--inevitably also identify in particular ways its folk. Just as history of South is contradictory and contested, so, too, is identity of southerners. Two very different but interdependent processes are crucial here: one of collective definition of region and other of social psychology of regional identification. On question of collective definition, what it means to be a southerner is a complex and historically shifting consequence of imposition of laws, images, stereotypes, and like by powerful forces in public arena (such as military victors, political majorities, federal government, and media), negotiation of meaning among southerners and between southerners and others, and cultural appropriation, whereby a debased label associated with southernness, such as redneck or hillbilly, is transmuted from a mark of stigma to one of pride by those who are so labeled. On question of social psychology of regionalism, why individuals identify themselves as southerners--whatever collective meaning of identity--on other hand, is a function of choices they make--choices, however, constrained by biography, perception of region and its inhabitants, and social interactions, with some southerners arguably having greater latitude in their self-definitions than others. (2) Many southerners are marked, as are members of racial and ethnic groups, by ascriptive or quasi-ascriptive characteristics--accents in particular--and so may be defined, morally as well as cognitively, by others as southern regardless of their own initial self-definitions. Given imposed meaning of southerner, nonsoutherners are also apt to interact with people they perceive to be southern, due to their accents or where they are from, as if they were southerners--or at least their idea of southern--thus reproducing regional stereotypes and collective definitions. …