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1 - The South as Region: Southern History, Southern Identity, and Perceptions of Southern Difference

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 September 2022

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Summary

Abstract

Despite its cultural and ethnic diversity, the South has historically been positioned in terms of a distinctiveness that has functioned ideologically to separate the South from what is generally referred to as the “North.” While this can be linked to the South's historical reliance on, and reluctance to abandon the practice of slavery, as a divisive mechanism in the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries slavery's residues have been both compounded and supplanted, to some extent, by an array of additional factors. This chapter considers those factors by drawing on seminal works of southern scholarship to examine the South's historical positioning in American national discourse and interrogates the role of southern distinctiveness in shaping southern image and identity. It then explores the way in which those discursive practices have created a paradigm ideally suited to the evocation of otherness and Gothicity.

Keywords: Southern Distinctiveness, Myth, North South Divide, Southern Identity, Sunny South, Benighted South

“The past is never dead. It's not even past.”

–William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun

“Talk about genetic deficiencies.”

– Bobby Trippe (Ned Beatty), Deliverance

In the cultural geography of America, the region known simply as “the South” has been historically differentiated from what is generally referred to as “the North” by lines of demarcation that are as ideological as they are physical. As a physical divide, differentiation between the North and the South is marked most conspicuously, and is understood most conventionally, as the boundary of the Mason-Dixon line. Established in the eighteenth century to settle a property dispute between the Penn and Calvert families, the Mason-Dixon line took on additional significance as a dividing line in the nineteenth century when it became the separator between the free states and the slave states (Makowski 1989, 573). Less conspicuous, yet similarly discernible as a marker of division, is the perimeter of the former Confederacy. While now largely diminished in its significance, at one time this division acted as a determinant of political affiliation up to, and during, the Civil War. Designating Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia as independent from the Union, the boundary lines of the former Confederacy stand today as historical imprints − remnants of a secession attempt that split the nation according to the position and arrangement of state borders.

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Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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