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Our South: Geographic Fantasy and the Rise of National Literature. By Jennifer Rae Greeson. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010. 368 pages. $39.95 (cloth).
American Mediterranean: Southern Slaveholders in the Age of Emancipation. By Matthew Pratt Guterl. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008. 250 pages. $41.50 (cloth).
Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South. By Andrew Zimmerman. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010. 416 pages. $35.00 (cloth).
The United States, Jennifer Greeson suggests, has always been preoccupied with the distinctiveness of its South. According to Greeson, this long-standing preoccupation has given rise to questions ("Why have the southern states lagged behind the mainstream?" or "Has the South become just like the rest of the country?") that are circular insofar as they evaluate the southern states according to norms of national development that were deduced, in the first place, in opposition to the assumption of southern backwardness. In her provocative first book, Greeson offers a cultural history of this common assumption, describing the evolution of southern exceptionalism to the end of the nineteenth century.1
Greeson maintains that the South was already being represented monolithically in the earliest attempts at national self-definition. Writers from Paine to Webster dispensed with European conventions for portraying the North American colonies, not by rejecting these conventions outright, but by projecting them onto the southern states. Differentiated by a tropical climate and the predominance of slavery, the South gave these writers a way to contain and reflect on the nation's colonial past without compromising its present claims to singularity in world history. The South, in other words, was the necessary supplement to nationalization, and it has served ever since as a stable point of contrast against which to measure the representative progress of the nation's political and economic institutions.
There are two major transitions in Greeson's argument, each marking a transformation in the iconography associated with the southern states. The first transformation comes with the rise of radical abolitionism in the 1830s, a movement that depicted slavery as a social problem whose excesses are analogous to the lurid vices of contemporary urban living. In his polemics, William Lloyd Garrison made the slave states seem dystopically modern by transposing scenes from northern cities onto...
