Browsing by Subject "South"

Following World War II, in the estimate of the Congress of Industrial

Organizations (CIO), one out of every six people in the city of Gadsden, Alabama

belonged to the union, making it the “best organized CIO city in the US.” At

midcentury, as most southern communities were growing more antiunion and more

conservative, workers in this city of 60,000 in northeastern Alabama insisted that they

had the same interests as union workers elsewhere and looked to a liberal Democratic

Party and robust federal government to bolster them. In the late 2010s, little evidence

remains that Gadsden and Etowah County were once so different from the rest of the

South. White people here often vote for Republicans. Unions have all but vanished. Development officials openly brag that 94 percent of

industry in the county operates unorganized.

A visitor to Gadsden today might find it hard to believe that the community was

once perhaps the most pro-CIO city the world has ever known. Yet those who came to

study Gadsden in the late 1940s and early 1950s, to see it as a union town, like the

famous American author John Dos Passos, had to reckon with a transformation even

more difficult to conceive: just a few years before their arrival, the city was perhaps the

most anti-CIO town in the country. In the mid-to-late 1930s, it was dangerous to give

even tacit support to the federation. On more than one occasion, workers joined with

police and civic leaders to literally run organizers out of Alabama. But this antiunionism

represented even yet another sea change: in the late 1910s and early 1920s, Gadsden had

also been something like a union town.

The purpose of this dissertation is to use Gadsden as a case study to come to

terms with the historical forces that have turned its feeling about unions upside down

and inside out. When the residents of Gadsden changed their minds

about unionism, for the most part, they did so as a community. This consensus was not

the result of shared values; neither was it compelled by the dominance of local elites. It

was, to the contrary, an outcome of Gadsden’s relationship to the out-of-town capitalists

who sustained it. For all but a few exceptional years in the twentieth century (when

Gadsden could be a union town), residents here have had to fight for capital against

people from communities like their own. In both of the cases in which this working class

city has forsaken unionism, it was because, and only because, that was what American capitalism demanded of it.

In the United States, poverty has been historically higher and disproportionately concentrated in the American South. Despite this fact, much of the conventional poverty literature in the United States has focused on urban poverty in cities, particularly in the Northeast and Midwest. Relatively less American poverty research has focused on the enduring economic distress in the South, which Wimberley (2008:899) calls “a neglected regional crisis of historic and contemporary urgency.” Accordingly, this dissertation contributes to the inequality literature by focusing much needed attention on poverty in the South.

Each empirical chapter focuses on a different aspect of poverty in the South. Chapter 2 examines why poverty is higher in the South relative to the Non-South. Chapter 3 focuses on poverty predictors within the South and whether there are differences in the sub-regions of the Deep South and Peripheral South. These two chapters compare the roles of family demography, economic structure, racial/ethnic composition and heterogeneity, and power resources in shaping poverty. Chapter 4 examines whether poverty in the South has been shaped by historical racial regimes.

The Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) United States datasets (2000, 2004, 2007, 2010, and 2013) (derived from the U.S. Census Current Population Survey (CPS) Annual Social and Economic Supplement) provide all the individual-level data for this study. The LIS sample of 745,135 individuals is nested in rich economic, political, and racial state-level data compiled from multiple sources (e.g. U.S. Census Bureau, U.S. Department of Agriculture, University of Kentucky Center for Poverty Research, etc.). Analyses involve a combination of techniques including linear probability regression models to predict poverty and binary decomposition of poverty differences.

Chapter 2 results suggest that power resources, followed by economic structure, are most important in explaining the higher poverty in the South. This underscores the salience of political and economic contexts in shaping poverty across place. Chapter 3 results indicate that individual-level economic factors are the largest predictors of poverty within the South, and even more so in the Deep South. Moreover, divergent results between the South, Deep South, and Peripheral South illustrate how the impact of poverty predictors can vary in different contexts. Chapter 4 results show significant bivariate associations between historical race regimes and poverty among Southern states, although regression models fail to yield significant effects. Conversely, historical race regimes do have a small, but significant effect in explaining the Black-White poverty gap. Results also suggest that employment and education are key to understanding poverty among Blacks and the Black-White poverty gap. Collectively, these chapters underscore why place is so important for understanding poverty and inequality. They also illustrate the salience of micro and macro characteristics of place for helping create, maintain, and reproduce systems of inequality across place.

Even in our contemporary moment, the word plantation evokes a distinctly Southern and rural image in which slavery is well hidden within an idyllic botanical scene. And yet, from the very beginning of industrialization in the United States, plantation agriculture and enslavement were thoroughly embedded in the circuits of Northern capital and urbanization. "Shackled in the Garden" begins from the premise that the plantation is not an archaic institution that withered away in the nineteenth century, but rather is an enduring site of production and reproduction in the U.S. and throughout the Global South. Historically, the plantation has played a central role in organizing racialized bodies, technologies and environments in the South. In the wake of widespread ecological and social disaster across global Southern geographies, I insist that it behooves us to take another view of the plantation.

"Shackled in the Garden" rethinks the plantation as an ecological space: a space of dynamic relations in which racialized bodies and technologies are aggregated and disaggregated by a powerfully tropical environment. In the midst of ongoing crises over the sustainability of the plantation complex in the mid-eighteenth century, the plantation metamorphosized from an idyllic geography of botanical bounty and pure soil to a "toxic paradise": a tainted space that enclosed usable bodies and usable lands to be put in the service of increasingly experimental purposes. This peculiar conjoining of racialized subjects and the environment transformed the plantation into a privileged site for investigations into natural history, which sought to catalog and organize the natural world. Understandings of natural history as an innocent and feminine pursuit based on non-intervention and simple observation of the environment hid rampant experimentation on all kinds of "specimen" on the plantation including botanical species, agricultural crops, livestock, and enslaved persons.

While emergent biological models in the mid-nineteenth century began to understand race and identity as being rooted in the body, climatic or environmental determinations of identity continued to hold rhetorical power. Biology may have achieved a hegemonic position with the increasingly legitimated theories of Darwinian evolution, but natural history did not wither into oblivion. While individuation, mechanization, and biology flourished in the North, the plantation South continued to be figured as a natural ecology, a geography where identity refused its disentanglement from a dangerously miasmic and tropical environment. This project emerges out of both literary studies and science studies. Moving from James Grainger and Thomas Jefferson through Thomas Wentworth Higginson to Booker T. Washington, I explore how a literary imaginary of the plantation pastoral, which continued to represent the plantation as an unenclosed, pre-industrial and green geography in the face of extensive industrialization and environmental degradation, contributed to an understanding of the plantation as a "natural" space of scientific experimentation. The second half of the project considers a perhaps surprising genealogy of plantation fiction from authors such as Martin Delany and Jean Toomer who defamiliarized pastoral naturalizations of plantation space at the same time as they played on the heterotopic spatiality of the plantation to imagine a different, more global plantation South.

This project traces the seemingly improbable intersections between performances of blackness and the development and traces of an American liberalism defined by Gunnar Myrdal's overwhelmingly influential, sociological text, An American Dilemma. I argue that when Myrdal determined in his 1944 study on the "Negro problem" that the messy inconsistencies between how the United States articulated its laudable egalitarianism and the violent histories of oppression defining the lives of African Americans was a matter resting in the "hearts and minds of white America" rather than entrenched structural inequalities, he enabled a radicalized version of sentimentality that would structure how liberalism attempted to rectify this racial paradox right into the 21st century - to walk in someone else's skin rather than their shoes. While American liberalism is a notoriously contested and slippery set of ideologies, the texts I study provide a performative logic of American liberalism that deconstructs and historicizes its own ideological impulses around notions of racial difference.

The project situates the discursive legacies of Myrdal's study alongside a series of spectacularized narratives of what I call "racial im/posture" - adventures in racial impersonation authorized by American liberalism and reliant on the logics of both blackface minstrelsy and racial passing. I consider these narratives of racial im/posture in the literary genres of memoir, autobiography, fiction, and speculative fiction, along with the legal brief, the film, and the photograph. Although I read these seemingly disparate texts from my own epistemological disciplining of literary studies, the methodology employed here is an interdisciplinary one indebted to performance and visual studies, race and queer theory, as well as new Southern studies. The project intervenes in the conventional thinking around racial masquerade by reframing the temporality of what has largely been considered an issue of the 19th and early 20th centuries as well as by considering these texts through the anxieties, ironies, and contentions of the discursive legacies of American liberalism. In five chapters that satellite around the ideological apparatuses of our sociopolitical and cultural landscape including social and literary fictions, the law, and transnational capital, I think through issues of authenticity, belonging, community, appropriation, and performance.