{"id":23843,"date":"2012-06-19T15:17:35","date_gmt":"2012-06-19T15:17:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=23843"},"modified":"2012-06-19T16:19:48","modified_gmt":"2012-06-19T16:19:48","slug":"terrance-hayes-and-natasha-trethewey-contemporary-black-chroniclers-of-the-imagined-south","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=23843","title":{"rendered":"Terrance Hayes and Natasha Trethewey: Contemporary Black Chroniclers of the Imagined South"},"content":{"rendered":"

Terrance Hayes and Natasha Trethewey: Contemporary Black Chroniclers of the Imagined South<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The Southern Literary Journal<\/a>
\nVolume 44, Number 2<\/a>, Spring 2012
\npages 122-135
\nDOI: 10.1353\/slj.2012.0009<\/a>
\n
\nWilliam M. Ramsey<\/a><\/strong>, Professor of English
\nFrancis Marion University, Florence, South Carolina<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cI Don\u2019t Hate the South.\u201d
\n\u2014 book title by Houston Baker, Jr.<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cThe past is never dead. It\u2019s not even past,\u201d William Faulkner famously wrote in Requiem for a Nun<\/em> (73). His assumption\u2014that the southern writer is a chronicler accessing the essence of a wholly objective place, transparently \u201cexplaining\u201d a history to outsiders who misunderstand it\u2014has been undermined by the theorizing in New Southern Studies. To chronicle the historical South as a special space enacts a social construction positing an ideologically reductive, essentialist regional myth. As Richard Gray<\/a> argues, the invented South is an \u201cimagined community\u201d as well as a real and given space (xix). Diane Roberts<\/a> terms it \u201cthe South of the mind\u201d (371). Faulkner, conflicted and ghost-haunted by memories of the past, saw himself in the grip of a concrete reality so palpable that it could not be wiped away with time. But multiple communities, genders, and races lived in that past, and they stimulate divergent takes on it. Thus Houston Baker, Jr.<\/a>, borrowing from Faulkner\u2019s Quentin Compson in Absalom, Absalom!<\/em>, ambivalently titled a recent book I Don\u2019t Hate the South<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Black writers ghost-haunted by the southern past are highly wary of being possessed by the grip of a mythical mystique that marginalized black experience into historical invisibility. They know, as Martyn Bone<\/a> argues, that the idealized southern geography rested economically on a social geography of slavery and it sequel segregation\u2014realities that were suppressed in definitions of southern. As Bone notes, \u201cthis strategic exclusion is a structural and ideological necessity\u201d for Agrarian-derived myth-making (3). For black writers, then, to perform southern chronicling one must enter history as a self-aware, reconfiguring maker of history. Resourcefully imaginative excavations are required to recover materials deeply buried and long suppressed. The result is an ongoing birthing of a multi-vocal history that presupposes the chronicler engages not in neutral reception but in a constructive act. The past is never past, and yet it must be newly conceived.<\/p>\n

Two contemporary black chroniclers, Terrance Hayes<\/a> and Natasha Trethewey<\/a>, interrogate the nature of the South with highly revealing metaphors of southern space and soil. They diverge from the familiar anxiety that the region is losing distinctiveness and that its culture is coming to an end. Against that fear of dispossession\u2014of being uprooted from one\u2019s communal memory by time and new cultural infusions\u2014they express the need to take possession of the soil, to put roots into it so as to occupy new space instead of a tenuous space apart. Their poetry thus reflects the literary sensibility of black writers born after the civil rights gains of the mid-1960s. Growing up during profound cultural transitions\u2014a social order of change and adaptive adjustments\u2014they came to perceive historical inquiry not as monumentalizing the past into granite fixity but as excavation of pliable materials for revised narratives. Their poems are keen moments of individual consciousness in which the poet feels free to find and reshape the clay sediments of dug-up history.<\/p>\n

In this respect they crack a barrier that confronted earlier black writers, namely the problem of occupying what I term \u201ca space apart,\u201d on the margin, where black life was kept out of history. In the post-bellum era, Charles W. Chesnutt\u2019s<\/a> dialect conjure tales ironically undermined the white nostalgic plantation tradition while tapping into oral black folk traditions. Yet, in adopting the plantation tale convention of a white frame narrator (his publisher Houghton Mifflin not indicating his racial identity due to his request that the work be judged on its merits rather than the author\u2019s social status), Chesnutt subtly marginalized himself. Unfortunately this approach, a tactic of an era of accommodation, enfolded black materials inside the dominant white discourse domain, subtly distancing folk life to a quaint space apart. Zora Neale Hurston\u2019s<\/a> Their Eyes Were Watching God<\/em> reflects<\/a> a new advance born of…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Terrance Hayes and Natasha Trethewey: Contemporary Black Chroniclers of the Imagined South The Southern Literary Journal Volume 44, Number 2, Spring 2012 pages 122-135 DOI: 10.1353\/slj.2012.0009 William M. Ramsey, Professor of English Francis Marion University, Florence, South Carolina \u201cI Don\u2019t Hate the South.\u201d \u2014 book title by Houston Baker, Jr. \u201cThe past is never dead. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1196,8,20],"tags":[1133,10009,11070,3864,3865,3866],"class_list":["post-23843","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","category-usa","tag-natasha-trethewey","tag-southern-literary-journal","tag-terrance-hayes","tag-the-southern-literary-journal","tag-william-m-ramsey","tag-william-ramsey"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23843","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23843"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23843\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23843"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23843"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23843"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}