The Haunting of the South: American Geopolitical Identity and the Burden of Southern History

Abstract The evocative figure of a South haunted by its troubled past is a staple of representations of the region, and such representations not only create a problematic identity for the region but simultaneously produce a privileged national identity through the process of internal orientalism. This article connects internal orientalism with the notion of the double Janus to explain the similarities between America's attitude toward Southern history and its assertion that Japan and Germany bear historical burdens of their own. The inward-looking face of the double Janus is informed by the discourse of internal orientalism and gives Americans an opportunity to judge an internal spatial Other (the South), particularly with regard to the region's history (as a result American geopolitical identity is cleansed from the historical burdens that are construed as Southern). This practice as a righteous judge of the Other serves the US hegemon and its outward-looking face of the double Janus in that the rhetorical practices deployed to discuss Japanese and German history have been honed through the assessment of the burdens of Southern history. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank Colin Flint and Hugh Lawson for their comments on an earlier version of this article, as well as the anonymous reviewers. They are not, of course, responsible for any errors and omissions or for my interpretations. Notes 1. D. Roberts, commentary on Weekend Edition Sunday, National Public Radio (19 May 2002). 2. N. R. Shrestha and W. I. Smith, 'Geographical Imageries and Race Matters', in K. A. Berry and M. L. Henderson (eds.), Geographical Identities of Ethnic America: Race, Space, and Place (Reno: University of Nevada Press 2002) p. 280. 3. A. Walton, Mississippi: An American Journey (New York: Knopf 1996) p. 274. 4. For the best overview of the history of Southern identity and its varied representations, see J. C. Cobb, Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity (New York: Oxford University Press 2005). 5. D. R. Jansson, 'Internal Orientalism in America: W. J. Cash's The Mind of the South and the Spatial Construction of American National Identity', Political Geography 22 (2003) pp. 293–316; D. R. Jansson, 'American National Identity and the Progress of the New South in National Geographic Magazine', Geographical Review 93/3 (2003) pp. 350–369; D. R. Jansson, 'A Geography of Racism': Internal Orientalism and the Construction of American National Identity in the Film Mississippi Burning', National Identities 7/3 (2005) pp. 265–285. 6. Others making a similar argument include H. Zinn, The Southern Mystique (New York: Knopf 1964); C. V. Woodward, American Counterpoint: Slavery and Racism in the North-South Dialogue (Boston: Little, Brown 1971); E. L. Ayers, 'What We Talk About When We Talk About the South', in E. L. Ayers, P. N. Limerick, S. Nissenbaum, and P. S. Onuf, All Over the Map: Rethinking American Regions (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press 1996) pp. 62–82; and J. Winders, 'Imperfectly Imperial: Northern Travel Writers in the Postbellum U.S. South, 1865–1880', Annals of the Association of American Geographers 95/2 (2005) pp. 391–410. 7. P. J. Taylor and C. Flint, Political Geography: World-Economy, Nation-State and Locality, 4th ed. (Harlow, UK: Prentice Hall 2000) p. 234. 8. G. R. Webster and J. I. Leib, 'Whose South is it Anyway? Race and the Confederate Battle Flag in South Carolina', Political Geography 20 (2001) p. 288; J. L. Franklin, 'Black Southerners, Shared Experience, and Place: A Reflection', in L. J. Griffin and D. H. Doyle (eds.), The South as an American Problem (Athens: University of Georgia Press 1995) pp. 210–211; but James Cobb argues that this is changing (J. C. Cobb, Redefining Southern Culture: Mind and Identity in the Modern South (Athens: University of Georgia Press 1999) p. 147). 9. D. Slater, Geopolitics and the Post-Colonial: Rethinking North-South Relations (Malden, MA: Blackwell 2004) p. 234; for many scholars, "America" is racially coded as white (e.g., G. E. Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940 (New York: Pantheon 1998) and A. Kobayashi and L. Peake, 'Racism Out of Place: Thoughts on Whiteness and an Antiracist Geography in the New Millennium', Annals of the Association of American Geographers 90/2 (2000) pp. 392–403). 10. E. Martinez, 'Don't Call This Country "America," Z Magazine 16/7–8 (July/Aug. 2003) pp. 69–72. 11. S. C. Clemons, 'Recovering Japan's Wartime Past – and Ours', New York Times (4 Sep. 2001) p. A27; subsequent quotes are same page. 12. I. Wallerstein, 'The Eagle Has Crash Landed', Foreign Policy (July/Aug. 2002) pp. 60–68. 13. J. Agnew, Hegemony: The New Shape of Global Power (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press 2005) p. 228. 14. On the relationship between the myths of innocence and virtue and the response by George W. Bush to the terror attacks on the US, see D. R. Jansson, 'American Hegemony and the Irony of C. Vann Woodward's "The Irony of Southern History"', Southeastern Geographer 44/1 (2004) pp. 90–114. 15. See, for example, G. Modelski, Long Cycles of World Politics (London: Macmillan 1987); Agnew (note 13). 16. Taylor and Flint (note 7) p. 67. 17. Agnew (note 13). 18. A. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers 1971); see also P. J. Taylor, Modernities: A Geohistorical Interpretation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1999) pp. 29–31. 19. Taylor and Flint (note 7) p. 67. 20. Taylor (note 18) p. 31. 21. I. Wallerstein, 'America and the World: The Twin Towers as Metaphor', in C. Calhoun, P. Price, and A. Timmer (eds.), Understanding September 11 (New York: New Press 2002) p. 352. 22. S. B. Cohen, Geopolitics of the World System (Lanham, MD: Rowman see also L. Schein for a different theorisation of internal orientalism ('Gender and Internal Orientalism in China', Modern China 23/1 (1997) pp. 69–98). 39. D. W. Grantham, The South in Modern America: A Region at Odds (New York: HarperPerennial 1995) p. 333. 40. K. M. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Antebellum South (New York: Vintage Books 1956). 41. When I ask my students to enumerate the "former slave states," the vast majority of them list the Southern states but omit the Northern states which, of course, also gave slavery a home. As Brent Staples puts it, "Americans typically grow up believing that slavery was confined to the cotton fields of the Southand that the North was always made up of free states. The fact that slavery was practiced all over the early United States often comes as a shock to people in places like New York, where the myth of the free North has been surprisingly durable" ('A Convenient Amnesia about Slavery', New York Times (15 Dec. 2005) p. A34). 42. They are also sometimes treated as the byproduct of Southern intrusions into an otherwise healthy American body politic: "Many assessments of the popular politics of race in the Midwest have been premised on the assumption that pro-slavery and anti-black values were the product of white migration from the South" (L. A. Schwalm, 'Overrun with Free Negroes: Emancipation and Wartime Migration in the Upper Midwest,' Civil War History 50 (March 2004) p. 151n). 43. E. R. Wolf, Europe and the People Without History (Berkeley: University of California Press 1982). 44. Woodward, Burden of Southern History (note 34) p. 16. 45. Ibid., p. 19. 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid., p. 21. 49. Ibid. 50. J. A. Agnew and J. P. Sharp, 'America, Frontier Nation: From Abstract Space to Worldly Place', in J. A. Agnew and J. M. Smith (eds.), American Space/American Place: Geographies of the Contemporary United States (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 2002) p. 83. 51. G. Wills, John Wayne's America (New York: Simon after all, Woodward was a Southerner. 68. Goldfield (note 55) p. xv. 69 Agnew and Sharp (note 50) p. 83. 70. D. Georgakas, 'Series Foreword', in D. Roediger and M. H. Blatt (eds.), The Meaning of Slavery in the North, (New York: Garland Publishing 1998) p. iii. 71. A. Farrow, J. Lang, and J. Frank, Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery (New York: Ballantine Books 2005) p. xxv. 72. R. Bailey, ''Those Valuable People, the Africans': The Economic Impact of the Slave(ry) Trade on Textile Industrialization in New England', in D. Roediger and M. H. Blatt (eds.), The Meaning of Slavery in the North, (New York: Garland Publishing 1998) p. 19. 73. J. P. Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and "Race" in New England, 1780–1860 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 1998) p. xiii. 74. Loewen (note 25) p. 135. 75. Melish (note 73) p. 6. 76. Ibid., pp. 7–8. 77. Ibid., p. 3. 78. P. Nora, 'Between Memory and History: Les Lieux des Memoire', Representations (Spring 1989) p. 9. 79. L. Litwack, North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790–1860 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press 1961) p. vii, emphasis added. 80. To say nothing of what should be considered the severe historical burden that should rest upon Americans for the mass murder and forced relocation of the indigenous population, however much it may have been dressed up in that horrific nationalist euphemism, "manifest destiny." 81. Interestingly, Susan-Mary Grant shows that during the antebellum period, many Northerners recognised slavery as a national problem, though this did not impede the othering of the South. "Paradoxically, the recognition that slavery was a national and not a sectional issue actually encouraged the development of a northern, predominantly sectional critique of the South" (North Over South: Northern Nationalism and American Identity in the Antebellum Era (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas 2000) p. 49). 82. Z. Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 2000) p. xii. 83. This is not to say that there are no exceptions to this tendency produced by this discourse; there have been and will continue to be people like Litwack and Melish and others who see through the fog of internal orientalism. 84. D. L. Madsen, American Exceptionalism (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi 1998). 85. E. Alterman, 'And the Beat Goes On … ', The Nation (8 Jan. 2007), available at 86. See, for example, C. V. Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, 2nd rev. ed. (London: Oxford University Press 1966). 87. U. C. Lehner, 'Fifty Years Later, Pearl Harbor Still Divides U.S., Japan', Wall Street Journal (6 Dec. 1991) p. A1. 88. K. Maclear, Beclouded Visions: Hiroshima-Nagasaki and the Art of Witness (Albany: State University of New York Press 1999); see also V. L. Zolberg, 'Museums as Contested Sites of Remembrance: The Enola Gay Affair', in S. Macdonald and G. Fyfe (eds.), Theorizing Museums: Representing Identity and Diversity in a Changing World (Oxford: Blackwell/The Sociological Review 1996) pp. 70–82, and V. L. Zolberg, 'Contested Remembrance: The Hiroshima Exhibit Controversy', Theory and Society 27/4 (1998) pp. 565–590. 89. In fact, in 1991 President George H. W. Bush declared: "War is hell, and it's a terrible thing, but there should be no apology requested." Bush added that Truman's decision to drop the bombs was justified because it ended the war, and he recycled the dubious claim that the bombs saved "millions" of American lives (S. R. Weisman, 'Japanese Apology Over War Unlikely After Bush's Stand', New York Times (6 Dec. 1991) p. A1). Of course it is not true thateveryone in the US shared this view, but it was a dominant viewpoint and one informed by a particular vision of American identity. 90. S. R. Weisman, 'Pearl Harbor Remembered', New York Times (8 Dec. 1991) section 1, p. 26. 91. R. J. Lifton and G. Mitchell, Hiroshima in America: A Half Century of Denial (New York: Avon Books 1996) p. xiv. As just one example of such divisions, in 1991 the Socialist opposition rebuked the Japanese government for "turning its back on the historical truth" by declining to "sincerely apologize" for its aggressive actions in World War II (S. R. Weisman, 'Japan's Socialists Reproach Rulers for Refusal to Apologize for War', New York Times (9 Dec. 1991) p. A7). 92. For a discussion of such attitudes, see N. Chomsky, Year 501: The Conquest Continues (Boston: South End Press 1993) pp. 246–251. 93. J. Brooke, 'Japan Must Show 'Deep Remorse' for Wartime Actions, Official Says', New York Times (8 Dec. 2005) p. A16. 94. See Woodward, Future of the Past (note 31) p. xi. As Karen Till has described, the act of confronting the Nazi past within Germany is sometimes displaced from West Germans to East Germans, the suggestion being that West Germany did not inherit the Nazi legacy in the same way the East Germany did, a view Till finds problematic ('Reimagining National Identity: 'Chapters of Life' at the German Historical Museum in Berlin', in P.C. Adams, S. Hoelscher and K. E. Till (eds.), Textures of Place: Exploring Humanist Geographies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2001) p. 292). 95. C. Burress, 'Japan and the German Sackcloth', San Francisco Chronicle (17 July 2005) p. B3. 96. T. U. Berger, Cultures of Antimilitarism: National Security in Germany and Japan (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press 1998) p. 29. 97. H. Williamson, 'Germany 'Will Keep Alive War Memories'', Financial Times (9 May 2005) p. 8. 98. G. Grass, 'The U.S. Betrays Its Core Values' (7 April 2003), available at . 99. Grass's comments take on an added poignancy (and perhaps irony) given his admission in August 2006 that he was drafted by the Waffen SS and served in a tank division. 100. Berger (note 96) p. 25. 101. Ibid., p. 27. 102. For Woodward, though, the South during Reconstruction was treated similarly to Japan and Germany: "A terrible burden of guilt was incurred in all this, but the guilt was conveniently regionalized… . The South was the theater of the Negro's sufferings and betrayals, and the South therefore bore the responsibility and the guilt. the to – and were and between – were at the of the the South" of Southern History (note 34) p. W. R. American Foreign Policy and How the World (New York: Knopf 2001) p. argues that for the American the of for Germany and Japan to their places in the of and and were not Cobb, Redefining Southern Culture (note p. view of the Civil War an between the actions of the US at the and national all the that the Civil War the result was the of much to with the of the Nazi Germany and Japan, a conflict which in to the for the of the and and Southern (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press p. 106. quotes from Woodward, Strange Career of Jim (note p. (note p. to Colin Flint for this to my See, for example, C. the in The and the of Race for U.S. Foreign History (2000) pp. J. and in a Southern NY: p. and T. The War and the American Race Relations in the Global MA: University Press 2001) p. 3. Cobb, for the (note p. 9. A. 'The South and in (ed.), The South and the The Reconstruction (New York: & p. (note p. C. (note M. B. The (New York: 1991) pp. In President of Cohen, of were by They have their from the We have G. The Holocaust (New York: 2001) p. The of which are the of the not the and no or are E. The of (New York: 2000) p. Ibid. M. The The and the Politics of (Berkeley: University of California Press 1997) p. 29. J. M. Smith, 'American Geographical A in J. A. Agnew and J. M. Smith (eds.), American Space/American Place: Geographies of the Contemporary United States UK: Edinburgh University Press 2002) pp. 119. (note p. is one would that in the South are of Civil War and for that in any way the of it to the of of slavery in the Northern This is in of his claim that in … is by what and by the to A of and in (Boston: Books 1999) p. Quoted in F. New York Times (19 2006) section p. 62.