{"id":1340,"date":"2017-02-15T17:11:23","date_gmt":"2017-02-15T22:11:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/?p=1340"},"modified":"2017-02-15T17:11:23","modified_gmt":"2017-02-15T22:11:23","slug":"a-south-wind-blowing-from-the-east","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/articles\/a-south-wind-blowing-from-the-east\/","title":{"rendered":"A South Wind Blowing from the East"},"content":{"rendered":"

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An essay from\u00a0boundary 2 online<\/em>:\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

What comes to mind when a writer says that he means to comment upon \u201cthe South\u201d? Anyone sitting in North America is likely to hear that term, if not further specified, as referring to the southern United States, what we might for now call \u201cAlabama etcetera,\u201d though this is hardly the phrase\u2019s only possible designatum. The other region now routinely denominated \u201cthe South\u201d\u2014the other region, I mean, that routinely earns that otherwise ungrammatical capital S\u2014isn\u2019t actually a region at all, but a name for what used to be called \u201cthe Third World\u201d or \u201cthe developing countries\u201d or \u201cthe colonies\u201d: the Global South. The American South, the Global South\u2014as soon as one sees those two terms in the same paragraph, questions start humming. Why does the former Third World bear the same name as Georgia and the Carolinas? Do these have anything to do with one another, conceptually or concretely? Do our perceptions of one bleed into our perceptions of the other? In what sense are they all southern? What are we attributing to a region when we call it southern? Is there such a thing as southness?<\/a><\/p>\n

With these questions in front of us, I\u2019d like to state a few propositions forthrightly\u2014propositions, in the first instance, about the US South, which might or might not open up to include the global South, too. There are two propositions that I suspect I can get a person to agree with directly, without coaxing, and then a third that will in all likelihood require further elaboration and reflection. I\u2019m going to share a few observations about \u201cthe South,\u201d but with the proviso that I mean the phrase and not the place. What I\u2019m wondering is what it means to call<\/em> some expanse of territory \u201cthe South.\u201d<\/p>\n

What I need us to see first is that the word \u201cSouth\u201d is, in the US context and probably most others besides, entirely optional. You might imagine yourself reading these words in Tennessee somewhere, west of the Appalachians. We often refer to that patch of the planet as \u201cthe South,\u201d but we could and do call it other things. A person might for instance, feel a certain attachment to the region marked out in burnt orange here…<\/p>\n

The full essay is here.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An essay from\u00a0boundary 2 online:\u00a0 What comes to mind when a writer says that he means to comment upon \u201cthe South\u201d? Anyone sitting in North America is likely to hear that term, if not further specified, as referring to the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":115,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1340","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1340","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/115"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1340"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1340\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1344,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1340\/revisions\/1344"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1340"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1340"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1340"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}