Southern Spaces

The term "region," first used in the fourteenth century, derives from the Latin regere, to rule. In its medieval context, the region had well-defined geographical boundaries, and an equally fixed feudal society with a tight hierarchy of authority connecting, like a series of concentric circles, the lowliest individual to his ruler, to the pope, and through him, of course, to God. This space, the forerunner of the modern European nation-state, was nothing if not authoritative, inscribed with a political, legal, economic, and religious value that was total.

In the United States, region conspicuously lacks this authority. Legally and politically, it has neither the broad mandate of the nation nor the more narrow powers of state and city governments. Economically, every American region is tied to every other region, and indeed, all are inextricable from a global economic order that proudly brags of having no boundaries whatsoever. As for religion, even during her lifetime Flannery O'Connor's "Christ-haunted" South lacked the kind of arching, systematic, macrocosmic religious identity of the early European region; the modern South was, instead, and in an entirely American way, the setting for what she called "do-it-yourself religion." Existentially tortured, endlessly improvisational, and fiercely individualistic: southern religious experience expressed the unique properties of region in an American context perhaps as well as anything else in the twentieth century. And as for the spatial dimensions of the region in America as compared to Europe, the difference is stark. The region has no boundaries here; or at least, there are enough blurred edges to make all regional boundaries unreliable. T. S. Eliot's native state of Missouri, a slave state that stayed with the Union, a river state committed to railroads, a crossroads of North and South but also the Gateway to the West, provides as good an example of this as any. The fluidity of American culture — and I think ultimately region in the United States must be defined not politically or legally but in the most inclusive cultural terms — invests this space with both the confusion and lack of order that frightened Eliot so much, and the opportunities for cultural expression that have been brilliantly exploited, sometimes unconsciously, by American regional writers who stuck around.

The American region likes to parody anything it views as a monolithic seat of power, from the federal establishment to any other perceived threat to its individuality. The reason for this is quite simple: the region, like all of us, wants recognition and respect on its own terms. The region proceeds, as culture so often does, intuitively, asserting its identity in ways more creative and innovative than any merely legal or economic institution could. And in all the spaces of the United States, endowed as they were, and in many ways continue to be, with the ambivalent and often contradictory forces of empire and republic, slavery and freedom, community and individualism, the region's genius in responding humanistically to such schizophrenic forces makes it an invaluable unit of culture in national and even global contexts. Pejoratively and prematurely consigned to reactionary politics, religious fundamentalism, social unrest of every kind, and, in our field, the kiss-of-death designation of "local color," the mere region nevertheless harbors enormous cultural power for those who know where to look, or perhaps, how to look.