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Hot Bodies and "Barbaric Tropics": The U.S. South and New World Natures

2003; University of North Carolina Press; Volume: 36; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/slj.2003.0040

1534-1461

Jon Smith,

Latin American and Latino Studies

As American Studies, founded at Harvard and not coincidentally grounded in New England paradigms, melds into a New World Studies boasting multiple points of origin but grounded increasingly in models derived from the Caribbean, scholarly attention is, to quote the title of Houston Baker's latest book, turning south again. After all, it is not Cambridge but Oxford, translated into the seat of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, that Gabriel García Márquez has depicted as having figurative "banks on the Caribbean Sea" (52-53). As he, Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, Antonio Benítez-Rojo, V.S. Naipaul, and Edouard Glissant have variously noted, the U.S. South is tied tightly to postplantation cultures throughout the New World, and, with appropriate qualification, throughout much of the Third World or global south. This observation is not new among historians; Stanley Elkins' Slavery put the U.S. South in hemispheric context forty years ago, and Fuentes and Naipaul, at least, seem to have been influenced by C. Vann Woodward's contemporaneous arguments about southern typicality: Fuentes directly, and Naipaul through the poetry of James Applewhite. U.S. literary critics have been, in contrast, slow to follow the historians' lead, but almost overnight that situation has changed dramatically. A number of recent critical works remind us that the regions share a history of colonial plantations, race slavery, race mixing, vibrant African cultural survival, disappeared [End Page 104] bodies, a predilection for the baroque (as Alejo Carpentier defines it), poverty, state-sponsored right-wing terrorism, insular communities, creole nativism, and what Woodward famously called "the experience of military defeat, occupation, and reconstruction" (Burden 190). 1 The nascent critical exploration of such commonalities is not about repositioning the U.S. South simply and predictably within a fashionable "margin" such as, for example, the "nuestra América" of José Martí. Rather, if as Ella Shohat has argued, postcolonial theory is better understood as "post-First/Third Worlds theory" (134), then the U.S. South—simultaneously center and margin, colonizer and colonized, global north and global south, essentialist and hybrid—represents a crucial locus for the development of such theory. For nearly two centuries it has shimmered—sublimely, seductively, uncannily—as both Self and Other not only before the narcissistic gaze of the imperial London or Boston metropole but also before the global-southern gaze of what Srinivas Aravamudan has recently called the tropicopolitan. As Fuentes once put it to a North American audience, Sinclair Lewis "is yours, and as such, interesting and important to us. William Faulkner is both yours and ours, and as such, essential to us" (qtd in Cohn 2).