Post-World War II American Regionalism
Session Coordinator: Jason Arthur
Department of English, University of Missouri
107 Tate Hall, Columbia, MO 65211
jga8r8@missouri.edu

Kentucky Woman: Redefining Regional Identities in Harriet Arnow’s The Dollmaker and Gayl Jones’s Corregidora

Regional literature is conventionally valued for its depictions of kinder, gentler characters whose folk wisdom compensates for their lack of awareness of the world “out there.” Stephanie Foote notes that while this appraisal of “authentic” regional identities “generates a new national value for the local,” it also hegemonically “creates the region as leisure space and its folk as collectibles.” Judith Fetterly and Marjorie Pryse call for a more sophisticated approach to regional literature written by women, citing narrative innovations. Yet this feminist revision reinstantiates regional settings and identities as discrete from society at large and ironically reinscribes traditional self/other identity configurations.

This presentation will discuss two works by Kentucky authors. The Dollmaker, which charts the assimilation of the Nevels family in Detroit, has often been read as an exemplary representation of the superiority of rural values and folkways. Conversely, Corregidora, featuring Lexington-based blues singer Ursa Corregidora, is rarely discussed as “regional,” instead is situated within African American literary tradition. Yet both texts examine home as an historically informed psychic space that simultaneously produces commensurability and disavowal, which problematizes the notion of “authentic,” coherent regional identities. Furthermore, the trope of performance in both novels undercuts critical valorizations of “authenticity”: Gertie Nevels’s and Ursa Corregidora’s strategic assumptions of various personas are their attempts to ameliorate, rather than celebrate, the circumscribed situations in which each woman finds herself. Thus I discuss how these novels critique nostalgic American configurations of region and identity, and elucidate the dynamic of identification and estrangement that is perhaps one of the undertheorized characteristics of all regional literature.

Katherine Lee
Indiana State University
klee@bridgew.edu

Subterranean Homesick Blues: Appalachian Landscapes and National Anxieties in Pinckney Benedict's Dogs of God

The decade approaching the turn of the twenty-first century has seen a renewed interest in Appalachia that qualifies as the latest link in the chain of reinventions. I will examine one of the key tropes that characterizes this latest version of the region. From the Eric Rudolph saga to the Blair Witch Project, the Appalachian landscape has persistently re-emerged in American popular and public discourse as a site of conflict, anxiety, even menace. It's not surprising, then, to see similar themes in literary representations as well. I'll examine Pinckney Benedict's Dogs of God (1994) as a representative example of this trend, with special attention to the novel's controversial, hallucinatory ending. 

In the novel's conclusion, the bottom literally drops out on the plot and the characters, many of whom fall through holes that open in the earth. This image of the hollow earth is, I suggest, key to understanding the distinctiveness of the new discourse about Appalachia.  The image of the earth itself as restive, porous, and brittle underwrites an idea of the region as a site that opens onto "subterranean" problems of American culture.  In some ways this is consistent with the region's previous uses as an occluded space of American culture's shortcomings.  But in this view the problem is with the earth itself, not the people who inhabit it.  This revision to the idea of Appalachia not only connects the region to a sense of environmental crisis, but goes further: it uses the Appalachian landscape to critique the American cultural landscape.  Benedict's novel helps develop a representational vocabulary of the region that raises serious questions and anxieties not just about the "strange land" but about the terrain of rest of the nation-and what lies beneath it.

Douglas Reichert Powell
Duke University
drpowell@duke.edu

Domestic Disturbance on the Southeast Side

In response to Martha Nussbaum’s essay “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism,” I offer a meditation on the notion of cosmopolitanism, using the history of Chicago’s Trumbull Park (a Southeast side public housing project) and Frank London Brown’s novel Trumbull Park as examples of its limits. I provide a micro-level view of the tension between cosmopolitanism and anti-cosmopolitanism as the battle is waged in the arenas of history and fiction. Trumbull Park is a coordinate at which history and literature intersect and it is at this point that the failings of Nussbaum’s cosmopolitanism are fully realized.

Both social history and novel illustrate that broader connections suit the goals of one group and not the other. The novel’s African American characters seek safety and a clean environment—and cosmopolitan ideology becomes, in part, a justification for their efforts. The established (white) population of Trumbull Park wants to maintain their property values, and fear “social problems.” In both respects, either cosmopolitan or anti-cosmopolitan is embraced, yet what is also apparent and fueling these actions/reactions are material concerns. This is perhaps what makes the argument most applicable to Trumbull Park—that the battle is often less ideological than material, and cosmopolitanism is an available justification for material and political actions (on both sides) whose motivations are much more complicated.

Patrick Naick
University of Iowa
patrick-naick@uiowa.edu

The Ambiguous Pleasures of Regionalist Nostalgia in Robert Altman's Kansas City

The case could be made for Robert Altman as a 'regionalist' filmmaker. His films tend to take the rhythms of a historicized social environment as their subject. Yet despite his remarkable ability to render the texture of lived experience, it would be a mistake to read Altman's films as (relatively commercial) Hollywood approximations of sociological or ethnographic document. Instead, I argue that Altman is not so much an artist concerned with expressing the "essence" of his milieu, as one attuned to the ambiguous nature of "place" as such. His Kansas City (1995) is an exemplary case: the socio-political complexity of Altman's hometown and childhood in the 1930s is invoked as a marker of authenticity, only to be compromised by the failure of its characters (and to a certain extent the deliberately attenuated narrative) to "convince." Altman posits the founding moment of 1930s Kansas City jazz as locus of "authentic" performance exalted to the level of myth-- yet undercuts this fantasy by demonstrating that this utopian space is always underwritten and circumscribed by networks of power. Thus the film both critiques and participates in the contemporary embalming of jazz, and reminds us of the commodity value of safely passed 'regionalist' events.

James Andrew Miller
University of Missouri-Columbia
jam189@mizzou.edu