The haunting of the South: American geopolitical identity and the burden of Southern history

Geopolitics

Volumn 12, Issue 3, 2007, Pages 400-425

  Jansson, David R ^a  

^a UPPSALA UNIVERSITY   (Sweden)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

GEOPOLITICS; NATIONAL IDENTITY; ORIENTALISM; POLITICAL HISTORY;

EID: 34250344145     PISSN: 14650045     EISSN: 15573028     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/14650040701305625     Document Type: Article

References (142)

1. D. Roberts, commentary on Weekend Edition Sunday, National Public Radio (19 May 2002).
2. N. R. Shrestha and W. I. Smith, 'Geographical Imageries and Race Matters', in K. A. Berry and M. L. Henderson (eds.), Geographical Identities of Ethnic America: Race, Space, and Place (Reno: University of Nevada Press 2002) p. 280.
3. A. Walton, Mississippi: An American Journey (New York: Knopf 1996) p. 274.
4. For the best overview of the history of Southern identity and its varied representations, see J. C. Cobb, Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity (New York: Oxford University Press 2005).
5. D. R. Jansson, 'Internal Orientalism in America: W. J. Cash's The Mind of the South and the Spatial Construction of American National Identity', Political Geography 22 (2003) pp. 293-316
6. D. R. Jansson, 'American National Identity and the Progress of the New South in National Geographic Magazine', Geographical Review 93/3 (2003) pp. 350-369
7. D. R. Jansson, 'A Geography of Racism': Internal Orientalism and the Construction of American National Identity in the Film Mississippi Burning, National Identities 7/3 (2005) pp. 265-285.
8. Others making a similar argument include H. Zinn, The Southern Mystique (New York: Knopf 1964)
9. C. V. Woodward, American Counterpoint: Slavery and Racism in the North-South Dialogue (Boston: Little, Brown 1971)
10. E. L. Ayers, 'What We Talk About When We Talk About the South', in E. L. Ayers, P. N. Limerick, S. Nissenbaum, and P. S. Onuf, All Over the Map: Rethinking American Regions (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press 1996) pp. 62-82
11. and J. Winders, 'Imperfectly Imperial: Northern Travel Writers in the Postbellum U.S. South, 1865-1880', Annals of the Association of American Geographers 95/2 (2005) pp. 391-410.
12. P. J. Taylor and C. Flint, Political Geography: World-Economy, Nation-State and Locality, 4th ed. (Harlow, UK: Prentice Hall 2000) p. 234.
13. G. R. Webster and J. I. Leib, 'Whose South is it Anyway? Race and the Confederate Battle Flag in South Carolina', Political Geography 20 (2001) p. 288
14. J. L. Franklin 'Black Southerners, Shared Experience, and Place: A Reflection', in L. J. Griffin and D. H. Doyle (eds.), The South as an American Problem (Athens: University of Georgia Press 1995) pp. 210-211
15. but James Cobb argues that this is changing (J. C. Cobb, Redefining Southern Culture: Mind and Identity in the Modern South (Athens: University of Georgia Press 1999) p. 147).
16. D. Slater, Geopolitics and the Post-Colonial: Rethinking North-South Relations (Malden, MA: Blackwell 2004) p. 234
17. for many scholars "America" is racially coded as white (e.g., G. E. Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940 (New York: Pantheon 1998)
18. and A. Kobayashi and L. Peake, 'Racism Out of Place: Thoughts on Whiteness and an Antiracist Geography in the New Millennium', Annals of the Association of American Geographers 90/2 (2000) pp. 392-403).
19. E. Martinez, 'Don't Call This Country "America," Z Magazine 16/7-8 (July/Aug. 2003) pp. 69-72.
20. S. C. Clemons, 'Recovering Japan's Wartime Past - and Ours', New York Times (4 Sep. 2001) p. A27; subsequent quotes are same page.
21. I. Wallerstein, 'The Eagle Has Crash Landed', Foreign Policy (July/Aug. 2002) pp. 60-68.
22. J. Agnew, Hegemony: The New Shape of Global Power (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press 2005) p. 228.
23. On the relationship between the myths of innocence and virtue and the response by George W. Bush to the terror attacks on the US, see D. R. Jansson, 'American Hegemony and the Irony of C. Vann Woodward's "The Irony of Southern History'", Southeastern Geographer 44/1 (2004) pp. 90-114.
24. See, for example, G. Modelski, Long Cycles of World Politics (London: Macmillan 1987)
25. Agnew (note 13).
26. Taylor and Flint (note 7) p. 67.
27. Agnew (note 13).
28. A. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers 1971)
29. see also P. J. Taylor, Modernities: A Geohistorical Interpretation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1999) pp. 29-31.
30. Taylor and Flint (note 7) p. 67.
31. Taylor (note 18) p. 31.
32. Wallerstein, 'America and the World: The Twin Towers as Metaphor', in C. Calhoun, P. Price, and A. Timmer (eds.), Understanding September 11 (New York: New Press 2002) p. 352.
33. S. B. Cohen, Geopolitics of the World System (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield 2003) p. 3.
34. J. Dittmer, 'Captain America's Empire: Reflections on Identity, Popular Culture, and Post-9/11 Geopolitics', Annals of the Association of American Geographers 95/3 (2005) pp. 638.
35. M. Decter, 'The Never-Ending War: The Battle Over America's Self-Meaning', Heritage Lectures no. 910 (21 Nov. 2005) p. 1.
36. See J. W. Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (New York: New Press 1995).
37. L. F. Kaplan and W. Kristol, The War Over Iraq: Saddam's Tyranny and America's Mission (San Francisco, CA: Encounter Books 2003) p. 106.
38. Ibid., p. 119.
39. M. E. Stuckey, Defining Americans: The Presidency and National Identity (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas 2004) pp. 18-19.
40. See, for example, N. Solomon, War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley 2005).
41. Bercovitch argues that to some extent, the idea of "America" is a rhetorical battleground, and yet in spite of the diversity and conflict this implies, there is a fundamentally American ideology that "has achieved a hegemony unequalled elsewhere in the modern world" (S. Bercovitch, The Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic Construction of America (New York: Routledge 1993) p. 355).
42. C. V. Woodward, The Future of the Past (New York: Oxford University Press 1989) p. 8
43. quoting A. M. Schlesinger, In Retrospect: The History of a Historian (New York: Harcourt 1963) p. 203).
44. K. Phillips, American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century (New York: Viking 2006) p. 125.
45. Apologies to Milan Kundera.
46. See C. V. Woodward, The Burden of Southern History, 3rd ed. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press 1993).
47. There is even a parallel with the Clemons argument in the historiography of the South, to the extent that some historians suggest that the Union was insufficiently dedicated to Reconstruction and this failure of the will contributed to many of the problems that were to beset the South in later years.
48. E. W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage 1979).
49. Positive representations of an exoticised Orient are also consistent with the discourse of Orientalism, which is characteristic of Orientalism's ambivalence.
50. Jansson, 'Internal Orientalism in America', 'Progress of the New South','A Geography of Racism' (note 5)
51. see also L. Schein for a different theorisation of internal orientalism ('Gender and Internal Orientalism in China', Modern China 23/1 (1997) pp. 69-98).
52. D. W. Grantham, The South in Modern America: A Region at Odds (New York: HarperPerennial 1995) p. 333.
53. K. M. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Antebellum South (New York: Vintage Books 1956).
54. When I ask my students to enumerate the "former slave states," the vast majority of them list the Southern states but omit the Northern states which, of course, also gave slavery a home. As Brent Staples puts it, "Americans typically grow up believing that slavery was confined to the cotton fields of the South and that the North was always made up of free states. The fact that slavery was practiced all over the early United States often comes as a shock to people in places like New York, where the myth of the free North has been surprisingly durable" ('A Convenient Amnesia about Slavery', New York Times (15 Dec. 2005) p. A34).
55. They are also sometimes treated as the byproduct of Southern intrusions into an otherwise healthy American body politic: "Many assessments of the popular politics of race in the Midwest have been premised on the assumption that pro-slavery and anti-black values were the product of white migration from the South" (L. A. Schwalm, 'Overrun with Free Negroes: Emancipation and Wartime Migration in the Upper Midwest,' Civil War History 50 (March 2004) p. 151n).
56. E. R. Wolf, Europe and the People Without History (Berkeley: University of California Press 1982).
57. Woodward, Burden of Southern History (note 34) p. 16.
58. Ibid., p. 19.
59. Ibid.
60. Ibid.
61. Ibid., p. 21.
62. Ibid.
63. J. A. Agnew and J. P. Sharp, 'America, Frontier Nation: From Abstract Space to Worldly Place', in J. A. Agnew and J. M. Smith (eds.), American Space/American Place: Geographies of the Contemporary United States (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 2002) p. 83.
64. G. Wills, John Wayne's America (New York: Simon & Schuster 1997) p. 302.
65. Woodward, Burden of Southern History (note 34) pp. 23-24.
66. Ibid., p. 21.
67. G. M. Foster, 'Woodward and Southern Identity', in J. H. Roper (ed.), C. Vann Woodward: A Southern Historian and His Critics (Athens: University of Georgia Press 1997) pp. 56-66.
68. D. R. Goldfield, Black, White, and Southern: Race Relations and Southern Culture, 1940 to the Present (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press 1990) p. xiv.
69. C. Flint, 'Conclusion: Regional Collective Memories and the Ideology of State Restructuring', in L. A. Staeheli, J. E. Kodras, and C. Flint (eds.), State Devolution in America: Implications for a Diverse Society (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage 1997) p. 263.
70. Robert Vanderbeck has shown that white Vermonters, for example, think the South is burdened by their past in a way that Vermont is not ('Vermont and the Imaginative Geographies of American Whiteness', Annals of the Association of American Geographers 963 (2006) p. 650).
71. K. Phillips (note 32) p. 172.
72. See also R. B. Brasell, 'The Degeneration of Nationalism": Colonialism, Perversion and the American South', Mississippi Quarterly 56/1 (2002/2003) p. 33.
73. P. K. Conkin, 'Hot, humid, and sad', Journal of Southern History 64/1 (1998) p. 22.
74. Ibid., p. 20.
75. J. I. Leib, 'Teaching Controversial Topics: Iconography and the Confederate Battle Flag in the South', Journal of Geography 97/4-5 (1998) p. 229.
76. Jansson, 'Progress of the New South' (note 5).
77. J. C. Cobb, 'An Epitaph for the North: Reflections on the Politics of Regional and National Identity at the Millennium', Journal of Southern History 66/1 (2000) p. 22.
78. Ibid., p. 23.
79. R. I. Simon, S. Rosenberg, and C. Eppert, 'Introduction. Between Hope and Despair: The Pedagogical Encounter of Historical Remembrance', in R. I. Simon, S. Rosenberg, and C. Eppert (eds.), Between Hope and Despair: Pedagogy and the Remembrance of Historical Trauma (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield 2000) p. 3.
80. Ibid., p. 4, emphases in original.
81. Quoted in P. Applebome, Dixie Rising: How the South is Shaping American Values, Politics, and Culture (New York: Times Books 1996) p. 14.
82. Certainly such assignments also can, and do, come from within the places in question, whether it be the South, Japan, or Germany; after all, Woodward was a Southerner.
83. Goldfield (note 55) p. xv.
84. Agnew and Sharp (note 50) p. 83.
85. D. Georgakas, 'Series Foreword', in D. Roediger and M. H. Blatt (eds.), The Meaning of Slavery in the North, (New York: Garland Publishing 1998) p. iii.
86. A. Farrow, J. Lang, and J. Frank, Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery (New York: Ballantine Books 2005) p. xxv.
87. R. Bailey, Those Valuable People, the Africans': The Economic Impact of the Slave(ry) Trade on Textile Industrialization in New England', in D. Roediger and M. H. Blatt (eds.), The Meaning of Slavery in the North, (New York: Garland Publishing 1998) p. 19.
88. J. P. Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and Race" in New England, 1780-1860 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 1998 p. xiii.
89. Loewen (note 25) p. 135.
90. Melish (note 73) p. 6.
91. Ibid., pp. 7-8.
92. Ibid., p. 3.
93. P. Nora, 'Between Memory and History: Les Lieux des Memoire', Representations (Spring 1989) p. 9.
94. L. Litwack, North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790-1860 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press 1961) p. vii, emphasis added.
95. To say nothing of what should be considered the severe historical burden that should rest upon Americans for the mass murder and forced relocation of the indigenous population, however much it may have been dressed up in that horrific nationalist euphemism, "manifest destiny."
96. Interestingly, Susan-Mary Grant shows that during the antebellum period, many Northerners recognised slavery as a national problem, though this did not impede the othering of the South. "Paradoxically, the recognition that slavery was a national and not a sectional issue actually encouraged the development of a northern, predominantly sectional critique of the South" (North Over South: Northern Nationalism and American Identity in the Antebellum Era (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas 2000) p. 49).
97. Z. Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 2000) p. xii.
98. This is not to say that there are no exceptions to this tendency produced by this discourse; there have been and will continue to be people like Litwack and Melish and others who see through the fog of internal orientalism.
99. D. L. Madsen, American Exceptionalism (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi 1998).
100. E. Alterman, 'And the Beat Goes On...', The Nation (8 Jan. 2007), available at
101. See, for example, C. V. Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, 2nd rev. ed. (London: Oxford University Press 1966).
102. U. C. Lehner, 'Fifty Years Later, Pearl Harbor Still Divides U.S., Japan', Wall Street Journal (6 Dec. 1991) p. A1.
103. K. Maclear, Beclouded Visions: Hiroshima-Nagasaki and the Art of Witness (Albany: State University of New York Press 1999)
104. see also V. L. Zolberg, 'Museums as Contested Sites of Remembrance: The Enola Gay Affair', in S. Macdonald and G. Fyfe (eds.), Theorizing Museums: Representing Identity and Diversity in a Changing World (Oxford: Blackwell/The Sociological Review 1996) pp. 70-82
105. and V. L. Zolberg, 'Contested Remembrance: The Hiroshima Exhibit Controversy', Theory and Society 27/4 (1998) pp. 565-590.
106. In fact, in 1991 President George H. W. Bush declared: "War is hell, and it's a terrible thing, but there should be no apology requested." Bush added that Truman's decision to drop the bombs was justified because it ended the war, and he recycled the dubious claim that the bombs saved "millions" of American lives (S. R. Weisman, 'Japanese Apology Over War Unlikely After Bush's Stand', New York Times (6 Dec. 1991) p. A1). Of course it is not true that everyone in the US shared this view, but it was a dominant viewpoint and one informed by a particular vision of American identity.
107. S. R. Weisman, 'Pearl Harbor Remembered', New York Times (8 Dec. 1991) section 1, p. 26.
108. R. J. Lifton and G. Mitchell, Hiroshima in America: A Half Century of Denial (New York: Avon Books 1996) p. xiv.
109. As just one example of such divisions, in 1991 the Socialist opposition rebuked the Japanese government for "turn[ing] its back on the historical truth" by declining to "sincerely apologize" for its aggressive actions in World War II (S. R. Weisman, 'Japan's Socialists Reproach Rulers for Refusal to Apologize for War', New York Times (9 Dec. 1991) p. A7).
110. For a discussion of such attitudes, see N. Chomsky, Year 501: The Conquest Continues (Boston: South End Press 1993) pp. 246-251.
111. J. Brooke, 'Japan Must Show 'Deep Remorse' for Wartime Actions, Official Says', New York Times (8 Dec. 2005) p. A16.
112. See Woodward, Future of the Past (note 31) p. xi.
113. As Karen Till has described, the act of confronting the Nazi past within Germany is sometimes displaced from West Germans to East Germans, the suggestion being that West Germany did not inherit the Nazi legacy in the same way the East Germany did, a view Till finds problematic ('Reimagining National Identity: 'Chapters of Life' at the German Historical Museum in Berlin', in P.C. Adams, S. Hoelscher and K. E. Till (eds.), Textures of Place: Exploring Humanist Geographies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2001) p. 292).
114. C. Burress, 'Japan and the German Sackclot', San Francisco Chronicle (17 July 2005) p. B3.
115. T. U. Berger, Cultures of Antimilitarism: National Security in Germany and Japan (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press 1998) p. 29.
116. H. Williamson, 'Germany 'Will Keep Alive War Memories", Financial Times (9 May 2005) p. 8.
117. G. Grass, 'The U.S. Betrays Its Core Values' (7 April 2003), available at .
118. Grass's comments take on an added poignancy (and perhaps irony) given his admission in August 2006 that he was drafted by the Waffen SS and served in a tank division.
119. Berger (note 96) p. 25.
120. Ibid., p. 27.
121. For Woodward, though, the South during Reconstruction was treated similarly to Japan and Germany: "A terrible burden of guilt was incurred in all this, but the guilt was conveniently regionalized... The South was the theater of the Negro's sufferings and betrayals, and the South therefore bore the responsibility and the guilt. Whatever measures the nation took to correct these evils - and they were few and far between - were aimed at the supposed seat of the trouble, the South" (Burden of Southern History (note 34) p. 223).
122. W. R. Mead, Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World (New York: Knopf 2001) p. 258. Mead argues that for the American public, the ultimate goal of these reconstruction efforts "was for Germany and Japan to resume their places in the community of nations," and thus reparations and more (materially) punitive measures were not pursued.
123. Cobb, Redefining Southern Culture (note 8) p. 210.
124. Bertram Wyatt-Brown's view of the Civil War makes an intriguing connection between the actions of the US at the international and national scales: "For all the suffering that the Civil War battles caused, the result was the advancement of human freedom. That theme had much to do with the moral character of the struggle against Nazi Germany and militarist Japan, a conflict which in turn helped to prepare the nation for the civil rights effort of the 1950s and 1960s" (B. Wyatt-Brown, Yankee Saints and Southern Sinners (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press 1985) p. 218).
125. Both quotes from Woodward, Strange Career of Jim Crow (note 86) p. 132.
126. Applebome (note 66) p. 171. Thanks to Colin Flint for originally bringing this quote to my attention.
127. See, for example, C. Fraser, 'Crossing the Color Line in Little Rock: The Eisenhower Administration and the Dilemma of Race for U.S. Foreign Policy', Diplomatic History 24/2 (2000) pp. 233-264
128. J. Dollard, Caste and Class in a Southern Town (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor 1957) p. xii
129. and T. Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 2001) p. 3.
130. Cobb, 'Epitaph for the North' (note 62) p. 9.
131. A. Deconde, 'The South and Isolationism', in D.W. Grantham (ed.), The South and the Sectional Image: The Sectional Theme Since Reconstruction (New York: Harper & Row 1967) p. 126.
132. Grantham (note 39) p. 191.
133. C. Burress (note 95).
134. M. B. Young, The Vietnam Wars, 1945-1990 (New York: HarperCollins 1991) pp. 301-302.
135. In 2000 President Clinton's Secretary of Defense William Cohen, speaking of Vietnam, stated: "Both nations were scarred by this. They have their scars from the war. We certainly have ours" (N. G. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry (New York: Verso 2001) p. 84. The scars of which Cohen speaks are the scars of the victim, not the aggressor, and thus no apologies or reparations are called for.
136. E. Barkan, The Guilt of Nations (New York: Norton 2000) p. 284.
137. Ibid.
138. M. Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, The AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (Berkeley: University of California Press 1997) p. 29.
139. J. M. Smith, 'American Geographical Ironies: A Conclusion', in J. A. Agnew and J. M. Smith (eds.), American Space/American Place: Geographies of the Contemporary United States (Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press 2002) pp. 319-331.
140. Walton (note 3) p. 273.
141. Which is one reason why Adam Hochschild would note that in the South "there are hundreds of Civil War battle monuments and preserved plantation manor houses for every exhibit that in any way marks the existence of slavery," without feeling it necessary to note the absence of reminders of slavery in the Northern landscape. This is especially relevant in light of his claim that "the world we live in...is shaped far less by what we celebrate and mythologize than by the painful events we try to forget" (King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (Boston: Mariner Books 1999) p. 294).
142. Quoted in F. Fukuyama, 'After Neoconservatism', New York Times (19 Feb. 2006) section 6, p. 62.