Department of English
Writing the Journey: June 1999
"Civilizing the South: Race, Region, and National Identity in Northerners' Postbellum Travel Writing"
Jeremy Wells
University of Michigan
jdwells@umich.edu
Northern travel writers who toured the South immediately after the Civil War tended to represent it as the primitive other of American nationhood, applying such terms as "barbaric," "savage," and "backwards" to the southerners they encountered along the way regardless of race, class, or geographic location. By the early 1870s, however, the representational terms were beginning to shift, and by the advent of the Spanish- American War, northern travel writers were depicting the South in very different ways, celebrating its white citizenry as ideal Americans, disparaging black southerners as irredeemable Africans, and representing the South in general as the center of American civilization. The Pennsylvania congressman William Darrah Kelley would call it "the coming El Dorado of American adventure" in 1886, while the New York businessman Frank Presbrey would proclaim it a veritable "empire" whose "majesty" was "incontrovertible" in 1898.
The paper I propose to present is part of a larger project that examines these changes in the ways that northern travel writers mapped the South in narrative during the thirty years after the Civil War. The larger project surveys these changes in detail, arguing throughout that these texts were instrumental in reforming national notions of "southern-ness" (and hence national notions of "nation-ness") after the ruptures of the mid-century. The portion that I would like to present at the "Writing the Journey" conference explores two specific implications of these representational changes. The first has to do with what I term "national whiteness": the implication that, by labeling the South the center of American civilization, northern travel writers were, in effect, recapitulating an argument set forth by southern white supremacists immediately after the end of the War. The second has to do national history. By reimagining the national bond across regional and along racial lines, northern travel writers found themselves needing to reimagine the recent past as well: to renarrate the War between the States as a "civil," "civilized," even "civilizing" affair whose outcome permitted white Americans from all regions to pursue a shared racial destiny.
I choose to focus on these particular implications because they concern something beyond southern history or late-nineteenth-century American politics. They reveal something as well about the way that travel narrative works. Most contemporary theorists of travel writing (I refer especially to Mary Louise Pratt and Terry Caesar) emphasize the genre's capacities for delineating a difference between "at home" and "abroad." When we read the postbellum travel narratives that survey the South, however, we see these categories upset. We glimpse the genre's capacity for selectively alienating and identifying its readers with the populations it surveys, and we also witness its ability to produce, via the touristic fantasy, new narratives of nationhood and new concepts of national memory. Paying attention to these complexities, we thus learn something more about the cultural work the genre itself is capable of accomplishing.
Jeremy Wells
407 E. Kingsley Street, #4,
Ann Arbor, MI 48104.
(734) 913-0863
jdwells@umich.edu
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