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Laying Claim: African American Cultural Memory and Southern IdentityPrecious Perversions: Humor, Homosexuality, and the Southern Literary Canon

2020; Duke University Press; Volume: 92; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00029831-8267840

1527-2117

Michael P. Bibler,

Asian American and Pacific Histories

As scholars expand our understanding of the US South as both a diverse region and a constructed idea of region, some have argued that continuing to focus on questions of southern identity can limit scholarship by leaving too many old assumptions about the region in place. Some have even suggested doing away with “southern” altogether and subsuming southern studies within larger fields such as American or transnational studies, environmental studies, and so on. But, as these two books by Patricia G. Davis and Tison Pugh demonstrate, southern identity remains a deeply tenacious and contested matter that cannot be set aside so easily, not just in scholarship but also in the social, political, and creative lives of those not historically granted access to that identity, particularly southern African Americans and southern queers. The label “southerner” has traditionally been reserved for white southerners who are also, by implication, religious, conservative, and heterosexual. These books detail the sophisticated efforts of African American performers, intellectuals, and activists (in Davis) and queer white writers of literary humor (in Pugh) to challenge that construction and remake southern identity into something more fluid and inclusive.Focusing particularly on cultural memories of the US Civil War, Davis explains how southern blacks have experienced “symbolic annihilation” (7) because they have been excluded from the pervasive image of a white South that is rooted in the Confederacy and always positioned in contrast to the North. But in our contemporary moment, which Davis calls the “new New South,” many southern African Americans are working to make “inclusion . . . the default value for all things southern” by changing the scripts of those cultural memories (5). Davis’s first case study is the rise of black southern performers in Civil War reenactments. These reenactors educate others about the important role played by black soldiers during the war as well as other aspects of black community and resistance, thus reshaping the larger cultural memory of the Civil War and inspiring their audience to recognize that black southerners have always had agency and were never just passive victims of slavery. Davis’s other case studies make similar interventions. Southern museums in Richmond (Virginia), Washington, Selma (Alabama), and Hampton (Virginia) teach their visitors about black southern histories during slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. And digital media projects like Memory Book, a networking community and “cybermuseum” (125) created by the National Museum of African American History and Culture, allow visitors to build interactive memories by sharing pictures and stories of the past. These ventures allow participants to “control the production and representation of their own historical narratives” and take “responsibility” for their work by “sharing their knowledge with others, particularly youth” (155).By challenging symbolic annihilation, these projects do not shy away from the traumas of slavery and its afterlives; in that respect, Davis is careful to stress that some African Americans are critical of these ventures, especially those that are part of history museums. But these projects do not simply dwell on stories of trauma. Instead, they rewrite those stories to emphasize agency, resilience, endurance, community, and historical change. Moreover, by keeping the question of black southern identity at their core, they also force us to reconsider our understanding of the present: “practices of recovering black-centered narratives of the past perform the work of articulating connections between the antebellum, Civil War, and Reconstruction eras and current sociopolitical realities” (14). Focusing on regional identity is important because it “disrupt[s] the hegemony of those aligned with traditional southern identity” (9), and in doing so, it ironically helps to loosen the grip of regional identities. Black southern identity “acknowledges a sectional identification while remaining grounded in an ideal of belonging to the national community,” deploying Civil War memory “as an assertion of Americanness” that is specifically “mobilized to address contemporary goals” (15). In many ways, avoiding a critical discussion of southern identity would simply leave traditional southern identity unchallenged and intact. But black southern identity “expands southern identity” by “de-territorializing it” (15).Tison Pugh’s book also explores the ways that marginalized southerners reimagine and rescript larger cultural memories of the South and southern identity, in this case through humorous literature written by white southern queers: Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, Florence King, Rita Mae Brown, Dorothy Allison, and David Sedaris. Although each of these writers deploys his or her own unique style and approach to humor, a common denominator exists in their efforts to replace the exclusionary binary structure of insider/outsider with a both/and model of simultaneous difference and inclusion. Williams does this by combining the erotic structures of sadomasochistic desires with the “hyperbolic posturings” of camp to undermine the stability of “fixed erotic identities” (35). Capote does it by combining the arch comedy of camp with the southern gothic, thus reassessing “cultural codes of sexuality” and inserting an explicitly gay sensibility into the traditions of southern literature and culture (44). By impossibly combining frank depictions of lesbian sex with feminist sensibilities and deeply conservative politics, King “foists” her various “disidentifications” on her audience and compels them to recognize the fracturing of all binary structures (89). In a similar but clearly more liberal vein Brown uses her representations of southern lesbians to unsettle the binary structures of identity and promote a queerly inclusive feminism. Allison uses lesbian humor to offset her attention to the personal and cultural traumas linked to white poverty and sexual abuse. And Sedaris crafts narratives of a semi-nonfictional South full of racism and homophobia to show how those problems are actually ubiquitous beyond the region, thus “dismantl[ing] the meaning of gendered, racial, and sexual normativity as mediated through geography” (137).Reading Pugh next to Davis, I wish he had considered works by queer writers of color such as Alice Walker, Ann Allen Shockley, or Pat Parker. (While his chapter on King offers, to me, the sharpest analysis in the book, I also wonder about his use of José Esteban Muñoz’s theory of disidentification to discuss such a conservative white writer.) Reading Davis next to Pugh, I wonder about queer efforts to recover and rescript black southern memory in ways that explicitly challenge heteronormative models of masculine heroism, family, and community. Where are the queer black southerners? And for that matter queer Native, Latinx, and other nonwhite southerners? Nevertheless, these aren’t criticisms so much as comments on the useful possibilities both of these books open for further study and activism. Southern identity isn’t going away, no matter how much we might recognize its limitations. But these books show us powerful efforts to remake southern identity in ways that suggest new critical methods and lines of exploration for reconstructing region and nation in the twenty-first century.