32 - Southern Modernism

Summary

Southern modernism, including later incarnations precipitously labeled postmodern, has been broadly characterized by two often contradictory streams: the pastoral, beginning with the plantation fiction of Joel Chandler Harris and Thomas Nelson Page, and the racial surreal, beginning with Charles Chesnutt’s sly ripostes in his conjure tales. Both respond to the region’s long history of racialized labor exploitation, running from the plantation through Walmart and FedEx, from Parchman through the nation’s current carceral system. As labor sociologists, the new historians of capitalism, and literary scholars such as Michael North have shown, these literary traditions and the history to which they respond do not constitute some quaint exception within ongoing American modernism and modernity but remain central to it, from the plantation house to the Westin Bonaventure and from Pound, Eliot, Faulkner, Du Bois, Hurston, and Welty to William Styron, Toni Morrison, Jesmyn Ward, Natasha Trethewey, and Jericho Brown.