the south as foreign

[Hugh Lawson]

Read this short book review to the end.

http://tinyurl.com/9brfbez

Note the concluding sentence:

"The upshot, revealed in this uncommonly effective marriage of
photographs and text, is a place at once deeply southern and more than a
bit foreign."

Notice the effortless semantic drift from "deeply southern" to
"foreign".


This linkage of "southern" and "foreign", is for the most part not the
result of an evil conspiracy to defame southerners and to make them feel
unwanted in their own country, or to make them feel like inhabitants of
a colonial possession. It is a habit of speech.

As Jennifer Rae Greeson shows in her recent book, _Our South_, this
linkage of "south" and "foreign" is a very old tradition in the writing
of non-southerners about the south, going back to the foundation of the
United States. You can see a summary of her book here:

http://tinyurl.com/3r98nfp

The habit has lasted so long that for writers like that reviewer, it just
seems "natural" to do two things:

First, to pick out some place in the south, here Mobile, and to make it
representative of "the South".

Secondly, having done this, then to represent that place as both
southern and foreign.

hl

[slotrot]

Maybe the south was a bit foreign perhaps because if its French roots. Still there in Cajun country. Plus, a large swath of land was purchased from Napoleon.

[Hugh Lawson]

slotrot <rtau...@rogers.com> writes:


> Maybe the south was a bit foreign perhaps because if its French roots.
> Still there in Cajun country. Plus, a large swath of land was
> purchased from Napoleon.

Alabama at US independence was part of Georgia, one of the founding 13,
as was Mississippi. The territory of those states was deeded over to
the US by Georgia, just as much of the midwest, the old Northwest
Territory, was deeded over to the US by other states.

Every place in the US formerly belonged to somebody else, whether
Spanish, French, Dutch, native American, Mexican, or whatever.

HL

[slotrot]

On Thursday, 23 August 2012 11:24:43 UTC-4, Hugh Lawson wrote:

The only "others" you didn't refer to were the original owners, native americans. I'm sure they wish they had had a better immigration policy "in the day".

[MITO MINISTER]

On Aug 24, 9:36 pm, Hugh Lawson <hu.law...@gmail.com> wrote:

The Mid-West was deeded to the US by other states? WTF?