What's old about the new southern studies?

Lightweis-Goff, Jennie

POSTCOLONIAL THEORISTS ACKNOWLEDGE--RELUCTANTLY AND RUEFULLY --that their object of study died an early death. Its tombstone reads 1978-2000, dates indexing the publications of Edward W. Said's Orientalism and, later, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Empire (Cooppan 82). Sometimes I worry that we in southern studies might fall into dreaming and wake, like Scrooge, standing over our own tombstones, inscribed 2001-2010 to indicate Dana D. Nelson and Houston A. Baker's call for a new southern studies at the earlier juncture, and Jennifer Rae Greeson's Our South at the later. In the temporal between, we have Jon Smith, whose scholarship rests like a supporting beam in the edifice of new southern studies, pointing southernists toward combination, juxtaposition, hybridity: that is, the South's postmodernity (21). From Nelson and Baker we take our urgency, and from Greeson we take a resistance to boundedness and boundaries that delimit our South. I hesitate to bury us (alive, especially), but wish that the field had learned different lessons from Greeson. After Our South, we cast our critical searchlights at the region as a quarantine for pathology, but we have seemingly ignored Greeson's innovative, ancient, and nearly pre-regional archive in favor of syncopating our work to the new: to Southern Renascence texts of the last century and the culture industry products of the post- and neo-southern present. Must our archive be as new as us?

Herein lies the central paradox of the field. At conferences and in journals, in conversation and in print, we seem split between those who believe the New modifies Southern, and those who believe that New modifies Studies. What is the endgame of finding new Souths in Panama and Canada, when so much of the region, defined in the most procedural of terms--cardinal directions--remains alienated and ostracized from the whole? New southern studies has promised, in James L. Peacock's work and elsewhere, to restore the South to the world, but I still await the South in the South. Whither Key West, Laredo, and my beloved New Orleans (recently annexed by the Antilles, if its academic mentions are any indication)?

I am a partisan of the oldest of Souths, the urban core that resides at its physical periphery: Charleston, Savannah, St. Augustine, Baltimore, Mobile, New Orleans, and other twinkling lights along the shore that form the Southern Littoral. Though urbanity is often seen as signifier of the new and the post-, these cities evince a longstanding dissensus within regional boundaries. They are our capitals and destinations. As a distinctly urban southernist, I find the region to be an exquisite repository of cities, places where we other Southrons learned to be Jewish, women, feminists, black, immigrants, queers, punks, radicals, flaneurs, flaneuses: all the identity categories that traditional southernisms elide. Other Southrons did not wait for the neo- and post-Souths of Atlanta and Houston to be born in the twentieth century; they made it around them with the law at their heels. They (and we and I) live in a state of resistance, revision, and, yes, sometimes unwitting capitulation to dominant senses of the South.

If you are thinking to yourself "But those aren't cities; they're too small!," you are likely not alone, but you are also operating under a narrow sense of what constitutes the metropolis. Look not to size but to scale: calibrated to the human body, these cities provide us a place to walk across in a fit of pleasure or panic (if, for example, Atlanta's "Walking Dead" find themselves thirsty for salt water). When I teach about the people and texts that arose within these boundaries, I find myself turning from southern studies, with its intense contemporaneity, to French theorists and mid-century Greenwich Village denizens like Jane Jacobs to make sense of places "to stroll, to chinwag, to be alive in" (Lefebvre 117).

Perhaps I'm admitting that, like the straw man of Lauren Berlant's The Queen of America Goes to Washington City, I hate (y)our archive (10). I admire so much recent thinking in the field, but like an anxious hostess, I peer out the window and await the New's arrival in the oldest of Souths, for extant southern urbanisms to shake off the smell of Charlotte's barfing exhaust pipes and tarry with me in cities with "doors older than most American trees ... manhole covers that can be read just like a natural formation" (Codrescu 131). Since this cluster of essays offers the occasion to consider myself emerging--superannuated as I am--I hope readers might permit themselves, too, to consider the old South and make it new.