Postsouthern Melancholia: Revising the Region in the Twenty-First Century Matthew Dischinger Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College
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Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 2015 Postsouthern Melancholia: Revising the Region in the Twenty-First Century Matthew Dischinger Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Dischinger, Matthew, "Postsouthern Melancholia: Revising the Region in the Twenty-First Century" (2015). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 3591. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/3591 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized graduate school editor of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please [email protected]. POSTSOUTHERN MELANCHOLIA: REVISING THE REGION IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of English by Matthew Charles Dischinger B.S., Auburn University, 2007 M.A., University of Alabama, 2010 August 2015 For Marybeth ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I have been the grateful recipient of the LSU Graduate School’s Dissertation Fellowship this year, without which the completion of this project would have been much more difficult. Thank you, too, to Virginia Quarterly Review for allowing me to include my interview with Percival Everett in these pages. This project is indebted to the scholarly contributions of many brilliant scholars, and I owe just as great a debt to a community of people at LSU and beyond. I could not have finished without the constant help and guidance of my co-directors, Pallavi Rastogi and Brannon Costello. You each have given a considerable amount of time every step of the way, and your friendship and support has made me eternally thankful. It has been a privilege to learn from you as mentors and friends. I am grateful to Rick Moreland, my third committee member, who has always been available to help me through the particularly rough patches of thinking and writing as well as meet me for lunch—at Inga’s, of course. I would also like to thank many friends and colleagues from LSU for help of all types: Conor Picken, Kevin Casper, Adam Atkinson, Ben Pelhan, Sean Green, Alyson Pomerantz, Ryan Gibbs, Jordan Stone, Emily Frank, and Will and Liz Torrey. Many members of the faculty offered all measures of help without hesitation, but Chris Barrett, Michael Bibler, Elsie Michie, Phil Maciak, Bill Boelhower, and Dan Novak have each done more than I could have ever hoped for or expected. This project would have likely never progressed without the help of my writing group: Josef Horáček, Monica Miller, and Madoka Kishi. Your careful attention and elegant critiques gave me many necessary nudges—five pages at a time. iii My family has offered unwavering support throughout. To my parents, Portia and Charles Dischinger, as well as my brother, Josh: thank you. Most importantly, my work at LSU would have felt solitary without the love and support of my partner and best friend, Marybeth. You have stood with me through the highs and lows of graduate school and made the last few years the best of my life. I love you. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS……………………………………………………………….…...iii ABSTRACT..…………………………………………………………………………….......vi INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………………………….…........1 SECTION ONE: THE SOUTH IN THE WORLD…………………………………………..25 CHAPTER 1 DIXIECRATS AND DISNEYCRATS: MELANCHOLIC MOVEMENTS AROUND BRAD VICE’S THE BEAR BRYANT FUNERAL TRAIN……………...………..………….....29 2 WE HAVE NEVER BEEN SOUTHERN: GLOBAL NETWORKS IN CYNTHIA SHEARER’S (UN)FAMILIAR SOUTH………………………….……………………......60 SECTION TWO: THE NATION IN THE SOUTH……………………………………........94 CHAPTER 3 MELANCHOLIC REVISION IN PERCIVAL EVERETT’S I AM NOT SIDNEY POITIER………………………………...……..............100 4 “YOU THINK YOU PUSH BUT YOU ARE BEING PUSHED”: MYTH AND HISTORIOGRAPHY IN COLSON WHITEHEAD’S JOHN HENRY DAYS………………………………...………………...…...121 CONCLUSION: POSTSOUTHERN OPTIMISM…………...………………...…………..161 WORKS CITED……………………………………………………………………………173 APPENDIX: AN INTERVIEW WITH PERCIVAL EVERETT…………..………..…......180 VITA…………………………………………………………………………………...…...196 v ABSTRACT Postsouthern Melancholia offers a new way of conceptualizing the elusive concept of melancholia through contemporary fiction, particularly fiction of or about the American South. Critics have long discussed national literature through the lens of melancholia: an unceasing attachment to a lost object or ideal that a subject or culture internalizes. My project positions melancholia as a literary strategy—one that contemporary southern fiction frequently contests and critiques. I read fiction that has been called “postsouthern,” a term applied to texts that reassess the bedrock concepts of southern literature such as community, storytelling, and sense of place. While much scholarship has focused on a set of texts notable for lamenting the turn from a seemingly essential South to a simulated post-South—from real to fake—my project argues that this once typical lament is a cover story for familiar reactionary politics situating the region against global modernity at large. I examine melancholic responses to globalization in the stories of Alabama writer Brad Vice (The Bear Bryant Funeral Train, 2007) as well as Cynthia Shearer’s transnational take on the Mississippi novel, The Celestial Jukebox (2005). I then examine fiction thought of as American rather than southern—Percival Everett’s absurdist comedy, I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2009), and Colson Whitehead’s encyclopedic historiography, John Henry Days (2001)—to demonstrate the ways merely setting fiction in the South activates discourses about melancholia in wider American fiction. I conclude by positioning optimism as an emerging affective strategy within contemporary postsouthern poetics. It is precisely because twenty-first century literature traces a genealogy of melancholia, I argue, that it is uniquely capable of offering optimism as a counterweight to melancholia in the present. vi INTRODUCTION So I dont imagine you will ever come back here and settle down as a country lawyer in a little town like Jefferson since Northern people have already seen to it that there is little left in the South for a young man. So maybe you will enter the literary profession as so many Southern gentlemen and gentlewomen too are doing now and maybe some day you will remember this and write about it. — William Faulkner / Absalom, Absalom! / 1936 She meant to stand on that platform in August with the General sitting in his wheel chair on the stage behind her and she meant to hold her head very high as if she were saying, “See him! See him! My kin, all you upstarts! Glorious upright old man standing for the old traditions! Dignity! Honor! Courage! See him!” — Flannery O’Connor / “A Late Encounter with the Enemy” / 1955 His suit, an old-fashioned seersucker with a broad stripe, gave off a fresh cotton-and-ironing- board smell that pierced the engineer’s memory. … The iron-washpot smell. No machine in the world had ever put it there and nobody either but a colored washwoman working in her own backyard and sprinkling starch with a pine switch. — Walker Percy / The Last Gentleman / 1966 This project began in earnest when I read Paul Gilroy’s Postcolonial Melancholia (2005) on a train, of all nostalgic places. Gilroy focuses on the dismantling of political initiatives ushered in by twentieth-century multiculturalism in the early twenty-first century European political landscape. Much of this dismantling occurred amid resurgent xenophobia and nationalism necessary for the “war on terror” underway in virtually all Western nations. Gilroy writes that the twenty-first century deemed multiculturalism an abject failure while emphasizing that the conflict between monolithic nationalism and dynamic multiculturalism might better be understood “to exist firmly in the context supplied by imperial and colonial history” (2). In his home nation of England, furthermore, Gilroy argues that the rejection of long-in-the-works efforts to come to terms with colonial history are directly undercut by melancholic attachments to cultures of imperialism, of which he finds evidence in the 1 renewed interest in heavy militarization and chants at football matches that try to recapture the boyish charm of World War II films.1 Although much of Gilroy’s book seemed to correspond to the way I have long thought about the South of my youth—which, if T-shirts and bumper stickers are to be believed, is on the verge of rising again—his call for a complete reckoning with colonial history was particularly familiar: [B]efore the British people can adjust to the horrors of their own modern history and start to build a new national identity from the debris of their broken narcissism, they will have to learn to appreciate the brutalities of colonial rule enacted in their name and to their benefit, to understand the damage it did to the political culture at home and abroad, and to consider the extent of their country’s complex investments in the ethnic absolutism that has sustained it. The multilayered trauma—economic and cultural as well as political and psychological—involved in accepting the loss of the empire would therefore be compounded by a number