“The South is a place…the North is just a direction out of the South” – Roy Blount Jr.

The political orientation of the US South as a region has undergone systemic changes over the course of its existence. Prior to the US Civil War the South was a global trading hub that supported colonial endeavors of European nation-states, most notably Great Britain. The political environment contributed to the expansion of this identity by: promoting the policy of slavery, which effectively divided the population into a distinct two-class system based on race, allowing a plantation-style agricultural system to flourish, and promoting an export-oriented trade system. The various effects of these will be discussed later. However, this system and US Southern identity underwent drastic changes around the time of the Civil War when the South politically redefined itself in direct opposition to the industrializing North of the United States. This became a time of ‘nationalism from below’ for the US South. Southerners rallied around their sense of what was Southern and objectified anything from the North, creating a sense of “other” which led to an even stronger sense of “Southern-ness”. After the war “historical experiences of regional identity, defeat, and resentment were elaborated into ‘the myth of the Lost Cause’ ” which “helped keep resentments fresh and left Southerners with a chip on their collective shoulder” (Peacock, 11). These resentments were directed outwardly towards the North and within the region, as seen in the formation and implementation of Jim Crow laws and segregation policies sponsored by Southern governments.  These laws were enforced on varying scales (local, state and regional) with differing degrees of severity and expressed in governmental institutions such as education and social institutions such as religion. The distinct geographies of these laws will be touched on later but it is worth noting that these laws fueled the already racially dualistic part of Southern identity.  

What Constitutes the US South?

1)      What is the South?

Geographically it is usually considered to be those states east of the Mississippi and south of the Mason-Dixon Line. However, trying to tap into what it means to be a Southerner, a citizen of the US South, is a complex process that involves unraveling hundreds of years of history and the culture and identity that grew out of that history and then examining the forces, both internal and external, that spark change presently in this great region.

2)       THE MODEL

James Peacock (Grounded Globalism, 4) has derived a seven-step system for interpreting Southern identity from before the Civil War through the present:

1.      Regional Identity
2.      Opposition to National Identity
3.      Rebellion
4.      Defeat
5.      Resentment and Oppression
6.      Transmutation by Global Identity
7.      Grounding of that Identity in Sustained Regional Identity

 
This is a basic model around which we can situate smaller movements within Southern culture to examine in more detail the actual events, movements, ideas and images that have promoted and morphed Southern identity and sense of place.

 
3)      THE SOUTH AND GLOBALIZING FORCES – Immigration and Business

Today more than ever before, Southern identity and sense of place are being challenged. Immigration has changed the formerly dualistic black-white racial and economic divide into a pluralistic landscape that includes Asians and Latin Americans employed by local and trans-national enterprises. However, inequities abound as “ghettoization” occurs when these new immigrants are forced into certain neighborhoods (Laws, 93). These neighborhoods become part of the existing landscape and change the makeup of space in many ways, including school districts, voting districts and commercial planning enterprises. They also change conceptions of the South as a place for both the newly arrived immigrants and the tenured residents. This can be seen in job loss for rural whites as Latin American immigrants flood farming areas in search of a better life which has repercussions for both the immigrants, who are now despised by the tenured residents, and the residents who get marginalized even more by government policies that lend themselves to immigrants’ rights. The crux of this argument is that Southern culture and identity is not lost, but transmuted into something new. Dualism seems to have been replaced by pluralism in some places, but we will see that reversion to the old dualism may be present in some governmental decisions today.      

Immigration is not the only change taking place in the South. The trade policies taken up by governments in the South can be seen to represent a break from the former stance of oppositionality towards the North. Increasingly Southerners identify themselves with the world rather than in opposition to the North. This can be seen in the results of the Southern Focus Poll (Peacock, 58-59). Southern identity is changing as state, city and county governments look to expand economically in order to thrive in an increasingly competitive world market. Among other things, this means luring large multi-national companies into areas that were formerly undeveloped or disconnected from the world market. These companies change what we think of as Southern as companies like BMW and Toyota move manufacturing nodes into Southern towns that were largely built on agriculture. 

 
4)      CONNECTING PAST AND PRESENT – Space, place and landscapes

Taking the storied past of the South and the constructed identity that emerges from events like the Civil War and Civil Rights Movement and coupling it with globalizing forces such as immigration and the influx of multi-national corporations, how do we define Southern identity and sense of place today?

In examining this question, it’s necessary to clarify the distinction between space and place in this context and to mention landscapes. Space is a geographical locale (Jones et al., 3), while place is “imbued with history and memory, community and experience” (Peacock, 102). To add to these terms, landscape is “the physical environment but also the meaning and values that are ascribed to it by individuals or communities…at both a conceptual and more empirical level” (Jones et al., 92). So while space is relatively unmoving, place is ever-changing, morphing to fit the values, ideals and beliefs of the people that inhabit it.

Government and politics represents one lens through which place is established and changed. Politics affects the social realm in numerous ways through formal avenues such as trade policies, law-making and judicial decisions, but also more subtly in realms such as religion and architecture. Politics is not the lone shaper in this relationship either. It must also react to the sentiments and values of the people, creating a feedback relationship where cause and effect can work in both directions simultaneously.

This means that currently Southern identity is an imagined sense of place that is central to all Southerners but is different for each citizen of the South. Each Southerner is shaped by his or her own set of experiences as well as the histories, legends and lore gleaned from the past. The “myth of the Lost Cause” and the American Civil Rights Movement carries very different meanings for Southern blacks and whites, and new Latin American immigrants. What we hope to unveil here is just how complex the landscape of Southern sense of place is by shedding light on education, religion, architecture and trade. In looking at their histories and present day situations some trends begin to emerge that could have bearing on a regional mentality and culture.