Southern roots and routes: mobility, migration, and the literary imagination.

Donaldson, Susan V.

SOME OF THE MOST COMPELLING PASSAGES IN WILLIAM FAULKNER'S fiction, tucked away in the 1938 short story sequence The Unvanquished, describe restless bands of African Americans fleeing slavery and seeking contraband status and thus freedom in the chaos of Civil War Mississippi. So large are their numbers that the very landscape beneath their feet seems to shift and buckle, and the whites who report their passage--the book's young protagonist Bayard Sartoris and his cousin Drusilla Hawks--find themselves at a loss for words amid the huge crowds embodying the transformations wrought by the crossings of peoples and great historical events. Among other things, those passages offer vivid reminders of the ways mobility and migration have shaped the US South, from the earliest encounters between Europeans and indigenous peoples to the new prominence now given regional politicians of South Asian ancestry, like Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and Nikki Haley of South Carolina. Recent historical works like James N. Gregory's The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America (2005), Lisa Krissoff Boehm's Making a Way out of No Way." African American Women and the Second Great Migration (2009), Luther Adams's Way Up North in Louisville: African American Migration in the Urban South, 1930-1970 (2010), Peter M. Rutkoff and William B. Scott's FlyAway." The Great African American Cultural Migrations (2010), and Ira Berlin's The Making of African America: The Four Great Migrations (2010) have argued for the crucial importance of internal population movements in shaping both the US South and the country as a whole; Berlin in particular has gone so far as to insist that a "contrapuntal narrative --movement and place, fluidity and fixity, routes and roots"--has defined African American history from the beginning (229).

Berlin owes that description--the dance between stasis and mobility, roots and routes--in part to anthropologist James Clifford, whose pivotal 1997 book Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, offers a rethinking of "human location as constituted by displacement as much as by stasis" (2). Clifford's primary aim in this book is to complicate and overturn traditional notions of travel and dwelling as radically opposed. "Dwelling," he notes

   was understood to be the local ground of collective life, travel a
   supplement; roots always precede routes. But what would happen, I
   began to ask, if travel were untethered, seen as a complex and
   pervasive spectrum of human experiences? Practices of displacement
   might emerge as constitutive of cultural meanings rather than as
   their simple transfer or extension. (3)

Far from being static, cultural centers from this perspective are defined in part by their exchanges and relationships, by dwellers who are also inveterate travelers apt to cross boundaries, help make and remake identities, and generally problematize the whole notion of place as stationary and foundational. Indeed, Clifford argues that roots and origins--the notion of a fixed center--cannot finally be understood in our global age of empire's aftermath and industrial capitalism except in relation to travel and mobility (7). By his lights the new anthropology is increasingly concerned not so much with location and place as with relations and processes, and his primary concern is to stress "cultural processes that complicate, cross, and cross-up national boundaries and communities" (10).

Much the same concern defines the essays that follow this introduction and that were largely selected from the 2008 conference hosted by the Society for the Study of Southern Literature in Williamsburg, Virginia. The conference theme--Southern Roots and Routes: Origins, Migrations, Transformations--was originally suggested by SSSL program committee member Eric Gary Anderson of George Mason University in partial homage to Clifford's path-breaking scholarship and critique of traditional anthropology. Accordingly, the program committee, consisting of Anderson, Susan V. Donaldson of the College of William and Mary, Suzanne W. Jones of the University of Richmond, and Roberta Rosenberg of Christopher Newport University, sent out a call for papers in the spring of 2007 that asked for projects with revisionist perspectives on Southern histories, migrations, borders, and cultural encounters as well as on Southern versions of modernity, postmodernity, and globalization. The committee received over two hundred submissions, and the result was one of the largest conferences for SSSL with a wealth of paper topics closely associated with the New Southern Studies celebrated in American literature issues edited by Houston Baker, Jr., and Dana Nelson and by Kathryn McKee and Annette Trefzer. Topics ranged--in the spirit of travel championed by Clifford--from the Caribbean to the Border South, from recent films to centuries-old captivity narratives, from Northern and European observers of Southern cultures to fugitive slave narratives seeking escape, redress, and freedom. Participants traveled from all over the country, from Europe, and even from Japan to attend and to contribute to the conference's lively, free-wheeling conversations, and the result was something very like a celebration and critique of the roots and routes, dwellings and travels, stasis and displacement, that have defined and periodically transformed the US South over five centuries and more.

The papers as a whole, then, were very much in the spirit of "comparative cultural studies" espoused by Clifford in Routes (39)--that is to say, a spirit that questions and unsettles assumptions about foundational terms like "dwelling" and "origins," critically examines its own underlying assumptions about margins and centers, acknowledges the spatial practices regulating the production of knowledge, stresses the unfinished processes underlying negotiations and renegotiations of communities, and reverses common assumptions about the priority of roots over routes. "The new paradigms," Clifford asserts,

   begin with historical contact, with entanglement at intersecting
   regional, national, and transnational levels. Contact approaches
   presuppose not sociocultural wholes subsequently brought into
   relationship, but rather systems already constituted relationally,
   entering new relations through historical processes of
   displacement. (7)

This is an approach, in short, that allies itself with something very like what David Harvey calls "relational dialectics" (7). In Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (1996), Harvey offers an invaluable analysis of just what dialectical thinking involves and summarizes its principles in eleven propositions. Chief among those principles is the proposition that dialectical thinking foregrounds "the understanding of processes, flows, fluxes, and relations over the analysis of elements, things, structures, and organized system" (49). None of those elements, things, structures, or systems is stable or unchanging, nor do they exist outside "the processes, flows, and relations that create, sustain, or undermine them" (49). From this principle emerge all the others--questioning what constitutes the thing under analysis, acknowledging the underlying contradictions of things and systems constituted by multiple processes and relations, recognizing the consequent heterogeneity of the products of those multiple processes, including multiple relations of space and time, and understanding the mutually constitutive bond between parts and whole (49-53). Less abstractly, Clifford himself would merely assert that the community origins, centers, and "insides" are defined in part by the distance traveled to and from them, by their margins, and by their "outsides." Roots do not necessarily precede routes; origins and stasis are made and remade by movement, transition, and change. Space and place are accordingly revealed as socially constructed, and in this respect, Clifford and Harvey are both drawing from what Barney Warf and Santa Arias have pronounced "the spatial turn" in social sciences and the humanities--a theoretical perspective that like poststructuralism in literary and cultural studies resists "naturalistic and universal explanations" and by implication "single-voiced historical narratives" (1). Taking their lead from predecessors as early as the Chicago School of sociologists and geographers in the 1920s, those scholars, following "the spatial turn," interpret space not as "a passive reflection of social and cultural trends, but an active participant, ... constitutive as well as representative" (Waft and Arias 10).

This kind of theoretical perspective is already proving itself to be immensely useful in the study of the US South, the region of the country long associated with attachment to place, with staying put, and with resisting change and movement. As both literary critics and historians of the region have been reminding us for the past ten years and more, though, movement and migrations have been nearly synonymous with regional history and with its cultural productions. Mobility and transformation, in fact, have been cited repeatedly by historians of Southeastern American Indians as defining traits of indigenous communities since the arrival of Spanish explorers in the early sixteenth century. One of the consequences of contact, as Theda Perdue and Michael D. Green have pointed out in their authoritative history of Southeastern American Indians, was the transformation of the region's chiefdoms into confederacies and mobile communities as towns across the Southeast were abandoned in the wake of Spanish expeditions beginning with Ponce de Leon in 1513 and culminating with Hernando de Soto's landing in Florida in 1539 (40-43 and 34-35). By the early national period, as Angela Pulley Hudson argues in her 2010 history of the Creek Nation, "territory and mobility were primary concerns" for Southeastern indigenous peoples like the Creeks, who established a network of paths for hunting, trading, visiting, and religious rites to define both their territory and their sense of community (1 and 1-2). Indian Removal in the 1830s in turn led to the resettlement of some 100,000 Eastern Indians in the West by 1840, according to the Office of Indian Affairs in the US War Department, and of that number between sixty and seventy percent originated from the Southeast (Perdue and Green 97). Those that remained in the region, like the Lumbees in the Carolinas, came to define their community and their very identity, as Malinda Maynor Lowery points out, in terms of "geographic movement (rather than attachment to one specific place) and expansive attitudes about adoption and cultural exchange (resulting in racial mixing and cultural adaptations)" (xii).

Mobility continued to be a dominating feature of the regional landscape even as the institutions of slavery and then segregation required increasingly elaborate ideological defenses of a seemingly static, rooted, and traditional society. In his magisterial two-volume Conjectures of Order Michael O'Brien portrays an antebellum South deeply implicated in the sweeping changes defining the country as a whole and often bewildered by "a world where rootedness seemed an aberration" (17). The region, he reminds us, "had one of the fastest rates of urbanization of the first half of the nineteenth century" (18), and the small intellectual groups that emerged in urban centers like Richmond, Charleston, and New Orleans were as susceptible to Romanticism as "a philosophy of movement and change" as were their New England compatriots in Concord and Boston (21). In his The Promise of the New South, Edward L. Ayers has made a persuasive argument for the fluidity of daily life and community marking the late nineteenth-century South until the rigidly imposed institutionalization of segregation, and most recently Ira Berlin has traced four large-scale movements, from the Middle Passage to the most recent arrival of peoples of African descent on US shores, as the defining forces of African American history. James N. Gregory for his part in The Southern Diaspora sees the massive shifts of white and black Southerners into Northern and Western cities and suburbs as "the most momentous internal population movement of the twentieth century" (xii). During the last century, Gregory says, more than twenty-eight million Southerners--whites, blacks, and Latinos--left the region and thereby changed the rest of the country forever, particularly in the realms of religion, music, and politics (4).

Literary critics have offered equally valuable reassessments of place and mobility in Southern life. In her path-breaking 1995 book "Who Set You Flowin'?": The African-American Migration Narrative, Farah Jasmine Griffin makes a powerful case for the migration narrative as "one of the twentieth century's dominant forms of African-American cultural production" in music, literature, and the visual arts (3). Following the heed of "traveling theory" as developed by Clifford and Harvey in particular, Suzanne W. Jones and Sharon Monteith drew together in their 2002 edited collection South to a New Place pioneering essays that portray place as increasingly fluid and mobile in a postmodern age. Similar concerns also shaped Jon Smith's and Deborah Cohn's 2004 edited collection Look A way/The US. South in New World Studies, the essays of which unsettle fixed notions of place by situating the American South within the fluid context of Caribbean and Latin American cultural productions and the common legacy of plantation economies.

Eric Gary Anderson addresses some of those cultural dislocations in the opening essay, "Red Crosscurrents: Performative Spaces and Indian Cultural Authority in the Florida Atlantic Captivity Narrative of Jonathan Dickinson." Focusing on Dickinson's neglected 1699 narrative, Anderson's analysis offers a fascinating glimpse into an unexpected encounter between shipwrecked sailors and Florida coastal Indians and the impromptu performances of identity provoked by that encounter. In the contests of cultural authority and mobile identities that follow, the narrative itself changes form and moves across the generic boundaries of journal, proto-ethnography, travel narrative, and captivity narrative and thereby suggests something of a metanarrative exchange and movement across three different disciplines--Native Studies, Southern Studies, and Early American Studies.

Mobile identities metamorphosing over time also concern Rebecca L. Godwin in her essay "Breaking (and Keeping) Silences: Tricksters in Josephine Humphreys's Nowhere Else on Earth." Humphreys's most recent novel excavates the elusive and half-forgotten story of the Lowrie War waged by Lumbee Indians against Confederate authorities on the Carolina Border during the Civil War, and Godwin concentrates much of her attention on the strategies of survival and culture-crossings pursued by her Lumbee protagonists as they struggle to maintain their community, their history, and their very identities against the cultural and historical forces arrayed against them. For the Lumbees survival means to embrace the fluidity of outlaw status and the margins of white Southern society, and Godwin's reading of the novel underscores the idea that mobility and shape-shifting defined both Lumbee identity and their chances for survival in a world that threatened both.

A similar problem of survival is addressed by Kendra Hamilton in her essay "Mother Tongues and Captive Identities: Celebrating and 'Disappearing' the Gullah/Geechee Coast." Beginning with her own experience growing up in Charleston, South Carolina, Hamilton takes on the role of the "vulnerable observer" resisting the artificial opposition of observer and participant-observer to probe the abject status of Gullah/Geechee identity, language, and culture in a twenty-first-century world that links those remnants of a creolized African American past with everything static, backward, and resistant to change. Despite the championing of creole languages from West Africa to the Pacific, Gullah remains, in Hamilton's words, a largely unexamined "cultural curiosity" grouped with ebonics, hiphop culture, and street slang, relegated to the status of "vanishing," and all too vulnerable to attack even by such luminaries as comedian Bill Cosby.

Alan C. Taylor, in contrast, examines the threat posed by that quintessential figure of dislocation--the refugee of twentieth-century wars--to the status quo of Jim Crow Georgia as portrayed in Flannery O'Connor's "The Displaced Person." In "Redrawing the Color Line in Flannery O'Connor's 'The Displaced Person,'" Taylor offers an ingenious reading of the racial anxiety generated by a Polish refugee whose very presence seems to destabilize the racial assumptions of his white hosts and by association the institution of Jim Crow. Seemingly embodying an alternative notion of whiteness, the displaced person's mere presence exposes the fissures and contradictions of segregation and thereby sets the stage for an ending evoking nothing so much as the murderous logic of Nazism and the Holocaust.

The disruptive and even transformative possibilities of dislocation concern Suzanne W. Jones as well in her essay "The Haitian Connection in Connie May Fowler's Sugar Cage." Fowler's 1992 novel exposes the global ramifications of an interracial romance among Haitian, mixed-race Seminole, and white migrant workers in 1960s Florida. Drawing from Antonio Benitez Rojo's perspective on the revolutionary potential of creole discourse, Jones explores the way the novel's Haitian migrants manage to disrupt Florida's color line, envision alternative realities, and blur geographical boundaries through the power of the imagination and African belief systems.

Dislocations imposed by world war and its aftermath also loom large in Frank Cha's essay on "Migrating to the 'Broiler Belt': Japanese American Labor and the Jim Crow South in Cynthia Kadohata's Kira-Kira." Cha focuses his sights on the emergence of Japanese American workers in the postwar Georgian poultry industry as told through the story of a young girl who learns to navigate her way through her own Japanese background and the new unfamiliar world of small-town Georgia, where race is defined in strictly binary terms. In this strange new setting, Cha argues, the protagonist and her family gradually come to redefine their own sense of belonging and place by crossing class and racial lines and by building their own sense of community anew in the Georgian countryside.

In "Dying Routes: Charles Wright's Remembered Roadscapes of the US South in Transit," Daniel Cross Turner focuses his attention on a similar project of redefining community in some of Wright's more recent poetry collections, but his preoccupation is mainly with the poet's remappings of regional byways and back roads--in Tennessee, western North Carolina, and southwest Virginia--as published in his collections of the 1980s. Wright's road poems, Turner suggests, evoke the landscapes of both youthful memories and of a countryside transformed by the new consumer demands of post-World War II capitalism driven by what geographer David Harvey has called the fordist and post-fordist models of mass production and service-oriented consumer economies.

This collection of essays concludes, appropriately enough, where it began: with original inhabitants of the Southeast dislocated by the arrival of European settlers who took it upon themselves to construct narratives of place, space, race--and "vanishing Indians." Monika Siebert's essay on "Historical Realism and Imperialist Nostalgia in Terrence Malick's The New World" focuses on long-cherished--and highly misleading--white myths about Pocahontas and John Smith by turning a skeptical eye on the efforts of the film's producers and director to maintain historical accuracy in their portrayal of early Jamestown and the Powhatan capital of Werowocomoco--efforts made in part, Siebert argues, in response to the controversy generated by the 1995 Disney film Pocahontas. But the result in The New World, Siebert concludes, is yet another example of imperialist nostalgia--Renato Rosaldo's trenchant term for the curious phenomenon of mourning exhibited by Western explorers and colonists who have succeed all too well in conquering and destroying indigenous cultures. Despite conspicuous efforts to do justice to historical authenticity, the film ultimately resorts, Siebert declares, to the well-worn myth of America as empty virgin land awaiting "civilized" settlement by European migrants.

In many respects Charles Wright's 1980s poetic roadscapes as analyzed by Turner have the last word in these innovative, path-breaking essays. The roadscapes that emerge in the poems according to Turner's readings suggest something like brief glimpses of vanishing scenery caught in rearview mirrors and of half-forgotten memories--elusive, fragmentary, and thoroughly disorienting. Lingering in the poems and in Turner's eloquent essay as well is the dizzying sensation of ceaseless movement--rapidly passing landscapes glimpsed through windows and evoking nothing so much as the unending mobility of American history, the routes, if you will, that have shaped the region and the country itself as definitively as long-fabled preoccupations with roots and origins.

Works Cited

Adams, Luther. Way Up North in Louisville: African American Migration in the Urban South, 1930-1970. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2010.

Ayers, Edward L. The Promise of the New South: Life Aider Reconstruction. New York: Oxford UP, 1992.

Baker, Houston A., Jr., and Dana D. Nelson, eds. Violence, the Body, and the "South. "Special Issue. American Literature 73 (2001): 221-458.

Benitez-Rojo, Antonio. The Repeating Island." The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1992.

Berlin, Ira. The Making of African America: The Four Great Migrations. New York: Viking, 2010.

Boehm, Lisa Krissoff. Making a Way out of No Way." African American Women and the Second Great Migration. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2009.

Clifford, James. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1997.

Faulkner, William. The Unvanquished. 1938. The Corrected Text. William Faulkner: Novels 1935-1940. New York: Library of America, 1990. 317-492.

Gregory, James N. The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2005.

Griffin, Farah Jasmine. "Who Set You Flowin'?." The African-American Migration Narrative. New York: Oxford UP, 1995.

Harvey, David. Justice, Nature & the Geography of Difference. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1996.

Hudson, Angela Pulley. Creek Paths and Federal Roads: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves and the Making of the American South. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2010.

Jones, Suzanne W., and Sharon Monteith, eds. South to a New Place: Region, Literature, Culture. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2002.

Lowery, Malinda Maynor. Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South: Race, Identity, and the Making of a Nation. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2010.

McKee, Kathryn, and Annette Trefzer, eds. Global Contexts, Local Literatures: The New Southern Studies. Special Issue. American Literature 78 (2006): 673-924.

O'Brien, Michael. Conjectures of Order." Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810-1860. 2 vols. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2004.

Perdue, Theda, and Michael D. Greene. The Columbia Guide to American Indians of the Southeast. New York: Columbia UP, 2001.

Rutkoff, Peter M., and William B. Scott. Fly A way." The Great African American Cultural Migrations. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2010.

Smith, Jon, and Deborah Cohn, eds. Look A way! The U.S. South in New World Studies. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2004.

Warf, Barney, and Santa Arias. "Introduction: The Reinsertion of Space into the Social Sciences and Humanities." The Spatial Turn: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Ed. Barney Warf and Santa Arias. New York: Routledge, 2008.1-10.

SUSAN V. DONALDSON

College of William and Mary