| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Look Away! The U.S. South in New World Studies. Ed. by Jon Smith and Deborah Cohn. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. xii, 521 pp. Cloth, $89.95, ISBN 0-8223-3304-X. Paper, $26.95, ISBN 0-8223-3316-3.)

Locating the American South has frequently proceeded by historical or social analogy. Thomas Dew once pointed to the loose confederations of Germany; Basil Gildersleeve imagined southerners to have fought a Peloponnesian War; Edgar Knight rummaged among the Danes for rural communities; many, by way of indicating a parallel with Ireland, used to quote Stephen Dedalus on the need to awake from history's nightmare; Peter Kolchin likes Russia; and, of late, the Italian Mezzogiorno has been popular, in studies by Don Doyle, Enrico dal Lago, Rick Halpern, and Michael Kreyling. On the whole, these intellectual gambits, which wished to leap free of the stale counterpoint of North and South, Charleston and Boston, presumed that what was southern was homogeneous enough to bear comparison with what was elsewhere, but also homogeneous. We seem now to be playing a new game, because the postmodern imagination presumes the heterogeneous, the "contingent and performative" (as Jon Smith and Deborah Cohn have it, p. 15) and therefore comparative study becomes very complicated. At best, we are advised to look in a given direction, even if one's gaze falls upon the unfixed, and we contemplate only a bundle of fragments, occasioned by what Stephanie Merrim summarizes as "multiculturalism, identity politics, speaking from the margins, contestation, subversion, transgression, border-crossing" (p. 327).

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