“The Dirty South” Questions Popular Conceptions of the South https://ift.tt/w4eFnuJ
The Dirty South is a lot at once. On its face, it’s an interrogation of the fantasized portrayals of the South through media produced in the period between 1970 and 2020. But more substantially, The Dirty South is a corrective book of Southern Studies. It’s an exploration of what portrayals of the South say about both what we feel and attempt not to feel about that place and an attempt to differentiate the parts of those portrayals that are valuable and those that are harmful.
The author, James A. Crank, a professor of American literature and culture, explicitly identifies his intentions of offering an alternative to the exploitative and misleading nature of our popular and academic understanding of the South and how our fantasies and media often obscure and empower ongoing subjugation, racial violence, and extractive appropriation. Crank is deeply concerned with the power that narrative and aesthetics have over our attitudes in everyday life, particularly how it can lead to prejudice, oppression, and violence.
To this end, Crank covers a lot of different ground: the podcast S-Town, the murder of Treyvon Martin, the popularization of Outlaw Country and Southern Hip Hop, Deliverance (both the novel and film), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), Get Out (2017), the comic properties Swamp Thing and Bloodthirsty, the branding of white Southern celebrity chefs like Paula Deen and Sean Brock, and more. Such a broad range of subjects would make it difficult for any author to build a unifying thesis around them. Instead, Crank examines each for their particular baggage and attempts to create a unifying metaphor for this examination in their dirtiness.
This metaphor isn’t always clarifying. Crank builds a terminology of dirt and trash as an expression of the devaluation of cultural objects by structures of power but it’s often difficult to track what is seen as dirty from the perspective of power and what is seen as dirty from his own perspective. As he explains in his introduction, “in the rhetorical act of claiming a thing dirty, one makes an immediate claim about value — of both the thing being described and ejected (dirty) and of the thing doing the describing and ejecting (clean).” While discussing Deliverance and what he (Crank, not James Dickey) claims as an Appalachian dissonance between loyalty to systems of community and loyalty to broader systems of ethics, he writes: “That dissonance reveals a special value, a dirty one predicated on the privileging of a local (regional, familial) structure of beliefs over a more universal [sic] shared system (ethical, social), especially the policing of the former through violence.”
You get the sense when reading that Crank sees Appalachia as just as backwards and grotesque as the way it’s portrayed in Deliverance. It’s odd to read passages, in such a generally progressive analysis, that seem so dismissive of any cultural value in such a large and diverse region. Crank uses the word “hillbilly” far more liberally than I’ve ever heard and he occasionally includes odd jabs in his writing, like this short parenthetical aside that seems to dismiss the history of Appalachian folk music: “Lewis praises the hillbilly’s cultural achievements (the dulcimer and the folk song) not necessarily because they are masterfully written works of art (they aren’t) but because they are likely never to be heard again.”
In a book written by an academic, these notes of personal perspective do make the writing feel distinct, sometimes abrasive, but they also make clear another of Crank’s intentions. He writes in his prologue, “I hope I can write a book that can be heard by those who need to hear it… And I recognize that audience as a community constantly pushing against conceptions that devalue them.” Crank is writing this book for an audience who may feel like an object of Southern history rather than a participant, and he seems to build many of his arguments as an expression of allyship. This gives much of his analysis a sense of deliberate bias as an antidote to the problematic biases that our culture and academia already contain.
Crank makes his anger and disappointment with scholars very clear. As he puts it, “I inherited a field from a bunch of bros who were largely sharing fantasies of white masculinity with each other —some kind of horrific neo-Confederacy fanboy book group.” Rather than dismantling the scholarship he wants to subvert, he’s chosen to look outside of it. Serious analyzation of popular media isn’t anything particularly new, although it is good to see such a heartfelt argument for it in the face of such a terrifying political moment.
A book with so many different interests feels like an experiment by an author genuinely trying to use his position and privilege to expand the conversations we have about ourselves. Sometimes he seems to oversimplify and overgeneralize his subjects, to ends that feel problematic and unoriginal, coming from an academic, but sometimes the writing can be deeply clarifying. His discussion of Michael W. Twitty’s criticism of cultural appropriation in “Southern” cooking by white chefs was especially illuminating and detailed, and his discussion of the new horror perspectives opened up by Jordan Peele’s Get Out is valuable. I hope more writers follow his intentions.
The Dirty South
By James A. Crank
LSU Press
Published November 15, 2023
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