UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO Plantation States: Region, Race, and Sexuality in the Cultural Memory of the U.S. South, 1900-1945 A Dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the Requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Literature by Elizabeth Anna Steeby Committee in charge: Professor Shelley Streeby, Chair Professor Michael Davidson Professor Sara Johnson Professor Rachel Klein Professor Lisa Lowe 2008 Copyright © Elizabeth Anna Steeby, 2008 All rights reserved The Dissertation of Elizabeth Anna Steeby is approved, and it is acceptable in quality and form for publication on microfilm: Chair University of California, San Diego 2008 iii DEDICATION To all my families. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Signature Page.................................................................................................... iii Dedication.......................................................................................................... iv Table of Contents............................................................................................... v Acknowledgments............................................................................................. vi Vita..................................................................................................................... vii Abstract.............................................................................................................. viii Introduction........................................................................................................ 1 Chapter 1: Staging Terror: The Performance of Thomas Dixon's The Clansman and the Atlanta White Riot of 1906.................................................................... 35 Chapter 2: (Almost) Black, (Almost) Queer: The U.S. Occupation of the Haiti and the Shifting of Southern Boundaries................................................. 102 Chapter 3: The Carceral and the Conjugal: Neoplantation Prison Resistance Literature and the Problem of Sexuality........................................................... 179 Epilogue........................................................................................................... 261 Bibliography..................................................................................................... 273 v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I had no notion that I'd be returning to the South when I came to graduate school in Southern California. I though I'd landed in some other south where places like Mississippi didn't matter so much any more. I want to thank more than a few people for convincing me otherwise. When this project was in its early stages, Professors Michael Davidson and Winnie Woodhull offered their generous support and provided sophisticated approaches to the study of “regional” literatures that profoundly affected how this project took shape. The culture of the Literature Department, as well as that of the faculty doing cultural studies work in other departments, was such that I was continually being challenged to complicate what I thought I knew and to deepen my understanding of the literature of the U.S. South through comparative and transnational frameworks. I truly appreciate how much I was encouraged to seek out diverse resources for knowledge and meaning. Early on, for example, George Lipsitz taught me how think about culture that matters and moves and reminded me a that a good song can say it all in just a few verses. Likewise Rachel Klein encouraged me to mine the foundational texts of Southern Studies to learn from and build on “the archives.” I would still be staring at blinking cursor if it were not for my amazing colleagues in graduate school. Kyla Schuller inspired me with her ethics, her intellect, and her slash- and-burn humor from our first days at T.A.s together and has been not only a model for me as a critical thinker but as an incredibly dependable friend. Along with Kyla, Neel Ahuja and Aimee Bahng made for an astute and enviable writing group and made sure to enforce levity (which I took to heart) and encourage brevity (which I ignored). A big thank you to Aimee for your tenderheartedness, your rooms in Clairemont Mesa and Brooklyn, and your vi sane, reassuring perspective. Thanks to Neel for introducing me to The Coup and good vegan desserts and for insisting we not take ourselves too seriously. I was lucky enough to be schooled and mentored as well by Clarissa Clò, Tania Triana, and Jinah Kim throughout the years. They've each taught me in different ways that we can and should always expect more from the institutions that we're a part of, and that communities happen because you create them, and because you make time for “productive distractions”! Thank you to my peerless peers, Brandon Best, professor of much that isn't fit to footnote and the most thorough archivist that I'll probably ever know, and to Jasmine Meyer, a true comrade and lover of all things good. Shelley Streeby, I'm convinced, is fueled by some otherworldly power. Her support as a mentor, an advisor, and an editor have been invaluable throughout my process and those of countless other students. Her work as a scholar and her devotion to her students suggest not only her gifts but her deep commitments to critical engagement and activist scholarship. Never heavy-handed, Shelley fosters intellectual inquiry by suggestion and by example. Thank you for being such an understanding source of support. In addition, Sara Johnson's candor and attention to detail made the writing process and the professional process that much easier. Always available, she was generous with her time and advice. Along with Lisa Lowe, these mentors have provided the means and the models for this dissertation. Thank you to Lisa for being an amazing teaching mentor, an inspiring intellectual, and an empathetic advisor. I hope to someday teach and write in the kind of spirit cultivated by this group. Elyse Montague's artistic practice and compassionate presence have not only afforded creative inspiration but the contentment that comes when the work is done. Thank vii you for showing me how to be thoughtful and restful, for making this possible, for doing the dirty work, for humoring me and for reminding me to push the limits of what can be imagined. My parents, Ellen and Jim Steeby, have seen me through so many stages of my life and education with patience, love, and humor. You taught me not only the value of coming home but the value of using one's resources to the fullest. I continue to be grateful for your influence and generosity. viii VITA EDUCATION 2000 Bachelor of Arts, University of Mississippi 2006 Master of Arts, University of California, San Diego 2008 Doctor of Philosophy, University of California, San Diego RESEARCH AND TEACHING INTERESTS Late Nineteenth and Twentieth-century Multiethnic U.S. Literatures and Culture; U.S. Southern Studies in a Transnational Context; Histories of Social Movements; Critical Gender Studies and Queer Theory; U.S. Modernisms and Critical Perspectives on Modernity PUBLICATIONS “Almost Feminine, Almost Brother, Almost Southern: The Queer, Transnational Figure of Charles Bon in Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!” Global Faulkner: University of Mississippi Press, forthcoming 2008 FELLOWSHIPS AND AWARDS University of California's President's Dissertation Fellowship, UC San Diego, 2007-2008 TEACHING EXPERIENCE Instructor, UC San Diego, “Race and Terror: Imagining U.S. Communities in the Early 20th Century,” Muir College Writing Program, Spring 2005 Instructor, “Youth Culture and Rhetorical Analysis,” Muir College Writing Program, Fall 2003 -Winter 2005 Teaching Assistant, UC San Diego, Multiethnic Literature Series, Department of Literature, Fall 2006- Spring 2007 Teaching Assistant, UC San Diego, “Introduction to Poetry Writing,” Department of Literature, Spring 2006-2007 Teaching Assistant, UC San Diego, “The African Diaspora in Film,” Department of Literature, Spring 2005 Teaching Assistant, UC San Diego, Thurgood Marshall College, Dimensions of Culture Program, Fall 2002- Spring 2003 ix ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Plantation States: Region, Race, and Sexuality in the Cultural Memory of the U.S. South, 1900-1945 by Elizabeth Anna Steeby Doctor of Philosophy in Literature University of California, San Diego, 2008 Professor Shelley Streeby, Chair In “Plantation States,” I analyze cultural representations of plantation formations from the first half of the twentieth century, a period when “the South” operated as an imagined social landscape that galvanized post-Civil War national reconciliation and expansion as well as resistant social movements. I argue that the plantation, and the region it often symbolizes, served as a powerful site of identification that animated collective memories and provoked competing visions of progress. Consequently, I consider how imagined plantation pasts inevitably invoked a “neoplantation” present and a cultural geography that had both temporal and spatial mobility. To reconstruct how the neoplantation served as a contested cultural landscape, I necessarily draw from a wide x range of cultural texts, including turn-of-the-century Atlanta newspapers, unpublished playscripts, canonical modernist novels, and prisoner-produced journalism. Throughout I am concerned with cultural texts that represent continuities and ruptures in the transition from plantation slave cultures to emergent cultures of empire and incarceration. I look at three different contexts in which the plantation is re-imagined and adapted for the twentieth century in