Southern Exceptionalism Revisited: Constructing a Myth Through Negotiations and Collaborations

Session Submission Type: Paper Session: Traditional Format

Abstract

This session attempts to re-examine southern exceptionalism focusing on its constructed-ness at different points in history, from the mid-nineteenth century to the twentieth century. We argue that southern exceptionalism was created as a result of negotiations between the region and the nation and of collaborations between Southerners and non-Southerners. That is why, even though southern exceptionalism appears to be a culture of dissent, it is actually a culture of assent/consent.
At the time when the field of southern studies has examined the region from national and transnational perspectives, it may seem regressive to discuss southern exceptionalism through the South (and its history). Recent works, such as The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism (Matthew D. Lassiter and Joseph Crespino, 2009), Our South: Geographic Fantasy and the Rise (Jennifer Rae Greeson, 2011), and Finding Purple America (Jon Smith, 2014), have amply illustrated how southern exceptionalism is indeed constructed, that the notions associated with “southern”—such as school/housing segregation or the civil rights movement—are not really exclusive to the South. Moreover, the idea of the South as the Other, locating the region in opposition to the normative standard or an idealized nation, has been questioned. Drawing on such arguments, we will take a closer look at southern exceptionalism, how it was constructed, how it emerged through negotiations and collaborations, and how it was used to set boundaries. Rather than a simple regional, racial, and class dichotomy, it was a complex construction of a myth.
We begin with the investigation of the wide-ranging social network built around William Gilmore Simms, in which both Southerners and non-Southerners collaborated to invent the fantasy of southern exceptionalism in the mid-nineteenth century. The second paper discusses turn-of-the-century writer James E. McGirt’s endeavors to publish his poems in the exclusive white publishing world while maintaining his journal which served as an outlet for black intellectuals, and shows how the northern publishers’ conception of an imaginary South helped create literary segregation. The third paper discusses how the concepts of “Appalachia” and “hillbilly”, too, were constructed as a result of negotiations. The paper focuses on Harlan Miners Speak and James Dickey’s Deliverance to show the process of exceptionalization.
Southern exceptionalism when argued in a larger context of nation or national, becomes the milieu in itself to understand the term as well as the region. By looking at 19th to 20th century instances of the construction of southern exceptionalism, the ways writers negotiated and collaborated, we hope to expand and further our understanding of the southern myth.

Sub Unit

• American Studies Association Annual Meeting

Chair

• Angela Ards, Boston College

Individual Presentations

• William Gilmore Simms as a Node: Social Network of Antebellum Southern Exceptionalism - Ryoichi Yamane, Tokyo Metropolitan University, Japan

• James E. McGirt and Southern Boundaries: Dialects, Plantation Landscape, and Restricted Uplift - Akiyo Ito Okuda, Keio University, Japan

• Constructing an Exceptional Region: Recurrent Emergence of Appalachia - Hiromi Ochi, Hitotsubashi University, Japan