Racialization and “Southern” Identities of Resistance: A Psychogeography of Internal Orientalism in the United States

Abstract

This article examines the “voices of the Others” of internal orientalism in the United States. Internal orientalism creates a binary of the imagined spaces of “America” and “the South,” simultaneously racializing both spaces as white spaces. The article explores the extent to which this discourse informs a “Southern” resistance identity among members of the white “Southern” nationalist organization the League of the South, and African American residents of Lynchburg, Virginia. An analysis of interviews shows that for the League members, internal orientalism produces a psychogeography wherein “Southerners” feel that they are considered an inferior part of the “American” nation, which they might experience as hatred and demonization. To combat a colonial mentality, the League advances a positive notion of “Southern” identity that emphasizes the theme of resistance. The essentialist version of “Southern” identity they espouse is ultimately a derivative discourse in that it does not unsettle the internal orientalist assumption that “the South” is fundamentally different from “the North” and “America.” Those African Americans in the study who embrace “Southern” identity resist the internal orientalist racialization of “Southern” as referring to white people, although to the extent they associate “Southern” identity with racism and segregation they partly reinforce the discourse. Some who do not embrace “Southern” identity cannot overcome its negative connotations. The study shows that articulations of “the South” and “Southern” identity are best understood from an interscalar perspective and not by considering “Southernness” as something produced solely in “the South.”

Este artículo examina las “voces de los Otros” del orientalismo interno en los Estados Unidos. El orientalismo interno crea un binario de los espacios imaginados de “América” y “el Sur,” racializando simultáneamente ambos espacios como espacios blancos. El artículo explora la extensión con la que este discurso informa una identidad de resitencia “sureña” entre miembros de la organización nacionalista “sureña” blanca, la Liga del Sur, y residentes afroamericanos de Lynchburg, Virginia. El análisis de la entrevistas muestra que para los miembros de la Liga, el orientalismo interno produce una psicogeografía dentro de la cual los “sureños” sienten que a ellos se les considera como una parte inferior de la nación “americana,” que ellos bien podrían experimentar como odio y demonización. Para combatir una mentalidad colonial, La Liga propone una noción positiva de la identidad “sureña” que resalta el tema de la resistencia. La versión esencialista de la identidad “sureña” por la que ellos abogan en últimas es un discurso derivado en el cual no se desmonta el supuesto orientalista interno de que “el Sur” es fundamentalmente diferente de “el Norte” y “América.” Aquellos afroamericanos del estudio que admiten la identidad “sureña” resisten la racialización orientalista interna de lo “sureño” en lo que se refiere a la gente blanca, aunque hasta donde ellos asocian identidad “sureña” con racismo y segregación en parte, al menos, refuerzan el discurso. Algunos de quienes no admiten la identidad “sureña” no pueden superar sus connotaciones negativas. El estudio muestra que las articulaciones de “el Sur” y la identidad “sureña” son mejor entendidas desde una perspectiva interescalar y no considerando la “suridad” como algo producido solamente en “el Sur.”

Key Words:

• internal orientalism
• psychogeography
• racism
• resistance
• U.S. South

关键词:

• 内部东方主义
• 心里地理学
• 种族主义
• 抵抗
• 美国南方

Palabras clave:

• orientalismo interno
• psicogeografía
• racismo
• resistencia
• el Sur de EE.UU

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and Audrey Kobayashi for her patience and guidance. Thanks are also due to Joe Nevins for providing the inspiration that led to this article, Jason Dittmer for helping me to sort out my argument, and Hugh Lawson for his sharp eye and unending stream of insights. This research was supported by the Hughes Fund of the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences and the Ruby Miller Fund of the Department of Geography at Pennsylvania State University, as well as the Watson-Brown Foundation. Special thanks to Colin Flint for being the best mentor anyone could want.

Notes

1. The Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology recently published an article (Vandello, Cohen, and Ransom 2008) about the differences in the perceptions of norms about aggression between “Northerners” and “Southerners” wherein the authors did not find it necessary to qualify these labels with the adjective “white” anywhere in the article, even though they excluded African Americans completely from the study.

2. This is an important difference with Said's Orientalism, where the spatial Other was subjected to a racialized differentiation. This difference is attenuated, though, to the extent that white “Southerners” are seen as ethnically different from other white “Americans” (Faust 1988; Reed 1993a).

3. The film Mississippi Burning is an excellent example (Jansson 2005a), where the black residents are more or less just part of the scenery, although an essential part.

4. Cobb (2005, 5) notes the irony of the segregationists' defining a “Southern” identity that “effectively excluded the South's black residents in much the same way that both black and white southerners had been ‘othered’ out of the construction of American identity.”

5. This is something that the League is not hesitant to point out (League of the South 2004, 76).

6. I have changed the names of the study participants. When a quote comes from a questionnaire instead of an interview, I specify that.

7. This recalls Johnston's (1994) observation that “numerous quotidian molestations [can be] easily interpreted in the context of national subordination” (277).

8. This echoes the desire of a Confederate preacher that “Southerners” gain “mental independence” from “the North” (Roland 1982, 10).

9. It is interesting to note in this context that League president Michael Hill has confessed to finding in Gramsci “a goldmine of ideas” (Roberts 1997, 20).

10. As a way to “decolonize” the language of “Southerners,” the League recommends the usage of British spelling. The SPLC writes of Kibler: “His main contribution to the neo-Confederate movement … has been in persuading many of its leaders to adopt British orthography … to reflect the “Anglo-Celtic” origins of white Southerners” (http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?pid=845 [last accessed 25 October 2008]).

11. Others have mentioned the use of the battle flag outside the southeastern states, and as Horwitz (1998, 78) showed, even New Englanders can identify with the flag: “For me, the flag's mainly a symbol of resistance against government control, not a symbol of the South.” In 2004 I personally saw the flag displayed prominently in a bar in Tallinn, Estonia, called, of all things, “Woodstock.”

11. One of the key texts here is McWhiney (1988), in which he writes that the

• fundamental and lasting divisions between Southerners and Northerners began in colonial America when migrants from the Celtic regions of the British Isles—Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and Cornwall—and from the English uplands managed to implant their traditional customs in the Old South. From a solid eighteenth-century base in the southern backcountry, these people and their descendents swept westward decade after decade throughout the antebellum period until they had established themselves and their anti-English values and practices across the Old South. By 1860 they far outnumbered the combined total of all other white Southerners and their culture dominated the region. The antebellum North, on the other hand, was settled and influenced principally by people who had migrated from the English lowlands. (McWhiney 1988, xiii)

For critiques see Current (1983) and Berthoff (1986).

13. Current (1983) has written of the attempts to “Northernize the South.” He discussed the proposal of writer Tannenbaum in the 1920s that the federal government seek to increase European immigration to the southeastern states. “The ‘incoming of large masses of foreigners with their varied racial strains, their different religious faiths,’ he argued, would eventually destroy the Southern whites' ‘morbid pride of race’ and ‘bitter sense of religious righteousness’” (Current 1983, 102).

14. Blee (2004, 49) found a similar fear among white supremacist groups that whites are facing extinction, although in their case it is multiculturalism and intermarriage that pose the threat.

15. Occasionally Native Americans were included in this more racially diverse notion of “Southerner.”

16. As further evidence that the Celtic thesis is not universally embraced within the “Southern” nationalist movement, consider the following from the Florida League of the South's newsletter: “The Southern people, unusually mixed in their ancestry, can claim major influences from the English, Irish, Scottish, French, German, African, Spanish, and native Cherokee, Seminole and Creek tribes. All of these peoples have suffered under some type of slavery and all Southerners have a longing to be free” (D. Jones 2007). Of course, one cannot rule out that such public statements are a calculated response to the allegations that the League promotes a racist view of “Southern” identity.

17. Compare this to the polls from 1991 through 2001 that showed that 78 percent of African Americans in the region identified as “Southerners,” as opposed to 75 percent of whites (Reeves 2005).

18. Interestingly, Richardson (2007, 215) noted that the term is reminiscent of “the historical status of the South as an ‘abject’ and ‘excluded’ geography in the United States,” drawing on psychoanalysis; the parallels to internal orientalism are clear. The “dirty South” of black “Southerners” is certainly not the same abject “South” of their white neighbors, however.

19. As Cobb (1999) notes, some “Northern” blacks would refer derisively to “Southern” blacks as “'Bamas,” a term now embraced by some African Americans in the southeastern states (206–7).

20. I discuss this dilemma in detail in Jansson (2005b).