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

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 Garcia Marquez has depicted as having figurative "banks on the Caribbean Sea" (52-53). As he, Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, Antonio Benitez-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 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 America" of Jose Marti. 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). This liminal (rather than simply marginal) South does more than trouble some of the identitarian binarisms of first-wave postcolonial theory. It also asks us to rethink what Amy Kaplan has called "the racially inflected distinction between images of the 'jungle' and 'wilderness'" that grounded Perry Miller's founding ideas of American Studies in the preface to Errand into the Wilderness. "In contrast to the enervated 'barbaric tropic,'" Kaplan writes, "marked by its unspoken connotations of blackness, the 'inexhaustible wilderness' offers the challenging space of implicitly white achievement" (9). Though Kaplan maps this distinction onto an east-west axis, saying it "underwrites the familiar opposition between Old and New Worlds," Miller's overtly latitudinal diction seems more precisely to underwrite the distinction between (global) North and (global) South, as Kaplan's own terms suggest: "If America is not like the decaying empire of Rome, implies Miller, it is even less like the depleted undeveloped continent of Africa" (9). Barbara Ladd has examined nineteenth-century U.S. Northern concerns precisely about the formerly French and Spanish South's connotations of blackness, connotations that threatened to make it less "American" than the North: if the white southerner's insistence that "Creoles" are "white"--and only "creoles" (lowercase) are mixed--is intended to protect the southerner from being aligned too closely with former slaves or with colonialism in the New World, the creole metaphor also marks the southerner as a dangerous border figure, someone who might look like an American and claim to be so (with greater fervor than other Americans at times) but who carries within him- or herself traces of the displaced and who might at some point act traitorously to undermine the progressive nation. …