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Article Excerpt
Regions are best viewed as initial contexts for themes that generate variable geographies, rather than as fixed geographies marked by pre-given themes. These themes are equally "real," equally coherent, but are results of our interests and not their causes.
-Arjun Appadurai, "Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagination" (7)
American literary regionalism perhaps seems an unlikely starting place for examining the sorts of cosmopolitan discourses that have come to be associated with a post-national aesthetic. Unlike the modern landscape of globalization, which is characterized by its profoundly uncertain spatial dimensions and the general mobility of its economic networks, the notion of region in the United States is mostly aligned with very different paradigms. In contemporary thinking about region in both cultural studies and geography, region often retains a kind of dormancy, a sense of spatial decidedness and finiteness. (1) In contrast to the wider, politicallycharged spaces of nation or the depersonalized economic sphere of globalization, it holds a place in the popular imagination as something connected to the land and its folk. It is linked to tradition and local forms of belonging.
In popular literary culture, the movement historically most responsible for characterizing the American vernacular tradition as a repository of social nostalgia within an otherwise rapidly-transforming national scene was widely known as regionalism or local color. Regionalism flourished as the dominant genre in United States print culture shortly from after the Civil War until the first decade of the twentieth century. As a magazine movement, it was a powerful post-bellum cultural force. It targeted a middle-class, urban readership in eastern seaboard publishing cities like New York and Boston, and had the capacity to generate a fairly durable vision of what constituted American local life. Regionalist literature depicted region as something both spatially and temporally set apart from the more urbanized, mainstream social pressures of a young and rapidly transforming nation. As critics such as Amy Kaplan and Richard Brodhead have observed, regionalism reaffirmed the possibility of a purer, more sustaining national landscape in an era otherwise marked by the rapid growth of mass-circular advertising, transportation technology, immigration, and urban population.
Regionalism also authenticated the existence of a national diversity from "within." This diversity, on one level, appeared to be mostly organic insofar as it predated post-bellum federal centralization, and also, importantly, the contemporary tides of mass immigration from southern and eastern Europe, Asia, and Russia. It was the sort of preexisting diversity that could be found in the quaint-seeming and lesser-populated locales of the rural South, the far Northeast, and the sparsely populated Midwest. The peoples regionalist authors portrayed were coastal Maine villagers, Tennessee mountain folk, and pioneering prairie farmstead communities. They were emblems of a pre-industrial Americana, and their languages were the very dialects that circulated in post-bellum America's quiet spaces.
Region in turn-of-the century American literature thus came to stand for something not so much out of time as in its own time, a carved-out chronology that was largely self-contained. Regionalist writing, Richard Brodhead has suggested, took the form of a "cultural elegy" for a past that was quickly being supplanted by modern movements (120). Consequently, region in America is frequently associated with earlier modes of living. It is less commonly regarded as a contending force within new social developments than as a stage on which outside decisions can unfold, sometimes inciting resistance and sometimes little other than compliance. More generically, region constitutes an aesthetic retreat from the more rapidly developing global infrastructures that lend design to contemporary life.
In what will be my effort to rethink the tropes of stasis and the social insularity attached to region, the literature of the first generation of African-American fiction writers presents a compelling case. For one thing, throughout most of the nineteenth century--from slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, to Jim Crow--many African-Americans who may have possessed clearly-defined community and local identities remained mostly unincorporated into the official nation-state. The vogue of regional writing provided a point of access for their literature to enter into the mass-periodical market. For African-Americans like Charles Chesnutt, Paul Dunbar, and Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson, region was a platform for both deliberating national structures and recasting American social history for a people largely kept outside the official discourse.
As their writings revealed, these authors knew about borders, social stratification, and lines of access more than practically anybody--and consequently, region's value in their literature was less connected to its nostalgic containment of older orders. Rather, Chesnutt, Dunbar, and Dunbar-Nelson each negotiated a literary tradition's expectations of an authentic African-American culture with the versions of black experience they encountered, experiences in which racial violence and social segregation were central.2 In their fiction they challenged core presumptions about regionalism, particularly its nativist isolationism and vaunted quaintness. They also revealed interconnections between shifting national orders and the voices that circulated in local culture.
In this essay I focus my attention toward the regional Creole literature of Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson from the two collections of fiction she published in her lifetime: Violets and Other Tales (1895) and The Goodness of St. Rocque (1899). Born in New Orleans of mixed African-American, Native American and European-American ancestry, Dunbar-Nelson wrote about the peoples and geography of the post-Reconstruction South. But unlike black regionalists like Charles Chesnutt and Paul Dunbar (to whom she was married from 1898 to 1902), she did not draw upon the rural South's plantation idiom, something linked to stasis and slavebased epistemologies. Instead, her writing is an occasion for examining the ways region functioned as a sort of open cell, a cultural landscape shot through with links to external histories.
As an author of regional fiction, Dunbar-Nelson is unique for the ways she used textual experimentation to open the scope and boundaries of regional writing. She conceived of region not according to its more immobile features, its architecture, monuments and fixed structural scales. Rather, she was attracted to what contemporary cultural geographers would refer to as the "process geographies" of the local. Process geographies consider place in relation to movement, to something geographers Mike Crang and Nigel Thrift call "space as process and in process" (3). Process geography provides a way to interpret region not as something fixed according to set traits of habitat, but rather as something dialectical that is always caught up in states of becoming. It is a way to think of region in terms more frequently accorded to sites of globalization--its connectedness to more mobile scales like immigration and the mobilization of capital, as well as information and idea exchanges. (3)
In Dunbar-Nelson's Creole fiction, places are identified by their connections to conflicts and to the forms of organization that yield motion like trade and migration. In her stories, local scales mediate wider, transnational movements, ranging from the turnofthe-century fruit trade with Central America--which, in turn, polarized African-American and Irish labor within the New Orleans shipping industry--to the codification of Southern Louisiana Vodou practices in Creole culture. Moreover, what sustained the cultural replication of folk life in her writing was actually something typically not associated with the category of regionalism at all. Instead, inherent in her depiction of region is what can perhaps best be identified...
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