PLACE: The Southern Experience

Contemporary political trends associated with the rise of Donald Trump seem to confound traditional regional designations in the United States. Yet the concept of region remains salient in popular discourse. This is especially true with respect to “the South,” which appears in several recent nonacademic works as the source of troubling social and political currents. More surprising, given decades of critique of “Southern exceptionalism,” has been the reappearance of the South as a focus of analysis in the scholarly literature on immigration. This scholarly literature works to deessentialize the South by highlighting the vagaries and instabilities of Southern identities, institutions, and landscapes. It can, however, subtly and inadvertently reinforce Southern exceptionalism by identifying the South as a place marked by uniquely fraught histories of racial exclusion. This article critically assesses how the South as a regional concept has located the problem of race in the United States in a specific time and place. This leads to a broader discussion of the persistence of regional imaginaries in the discipline of geography and the need for more deliberate consideration of the geographical concepts that guide our analyses of societal change.

The notion of American Exceptionalism has received quite a drubbing since the heyday of the exceptionalist thesis among the consensus school of historians in the 1950s. Interpreters of the American experience then argued that something special about the American experience—whether it was abundance, free land on the frontier, the absence of a feudal past, exceptional mobility and the relative lack of class conict, or the pragmatic and consensual liberalism of our politics—set the American people apart from the rest of mankind. Historians writing since the 1950s, by contrast, have demonstrated the existence of class and class conict, ideological politics, land speculation, and patterns of economic and industrial development similar to those of Western Europe that placed the United States in the mainstream of modern North Atlantic history, not on a special and privileged fringe.

This special issue of The Global South encourages power-conscious readings of place that challenge nation-based models of the Global North (First World) and the Global South (Third World) by suggesting that one may exist within the other. The political clout of a nation, its fiscal soundness or disrepair, the availability of education and the accessibility of health care, obviously do not consistently characterize the experiences of all of its residents, and this issue explores that gap. We sought out essays that focus on blurring political demarcations of space, as well as those that transgress disciplinary lines. Questions guiding our thinking and the issue’s theme include these: where do we find evidence of the Global South within the Global North, particularly within countries resolutely classified as First World? Might we find the Global North similarly pocketed into the Global South? What might be gained by revamping traditional nation-based classifications of how power is allotted? Beyond disallowing grand narratives by insisting on individual agency, what are the pragmatic advantages to reading place in a granular way? In other words, what might be revealed by situating seemingly disparate locations along a spectrum that accounts for the distribution of power as fundamentally connected to the characteristics of individualized spaces? What case studies most clearly illustrate the complications in traditional Global South/Global North hierarchies? And finally, how is interdisciplinary study particularly well-suited to grapple with the exigencies of place-based analysis?