On memorial day 2006, I take a taxi from Raleigh-Durham airport after flying in from Dothan, in South Alabama. The driver has a trainee with him. “Where are you guys from?” I ask. “Guess,” answers the trainee. “Eritrea,” I suggest, succeeding after two wrong tries. “Where’s he from?” the trainee asks, referring to the driver. “Ethiopia,” I guess immediately. I then ask, “How can this be? You are supposed to be enemies!” (In 1998 I had flown out of the Eritrea airport just before it was bombed by Ethiopia.) They explain that they are friends, that it’s only the politicians...

James mcbride dabbs once wrote: “Of all the Americans, the Southerner is the most at home in the world. Or at least in the South, which, because of his very at-homeness, he is apt to confuse with the world.”¹ Dabbs used the word “world” in the first sentence to refer to the southerner’s immediate surroundings, as in “worldly,” “of this world,” “the world around us,” what German philosophers, with whom Dabbs was familiar, term Umwelt. Dabbs’s southerner is “at home” where he is and is not driven to change it. Dabbs contrasts this southerner with the Puritan New Englander, who...

Dabbs, we recall, characterized southerners as at home in the world, which they think of as the South. It seems that southerners are now broadening their awareness of the world while retaining an identity with the region, and in so doing they are burying their sense of opposing the nation, especially the North. More frequent relations with the world away from home (which then becomes part of home by extension) create a notion in southerners of being world citizens, global human beings, in contrast to a regional and oppositional identity. Far away penetrates deep within. Such a shift entails change—...

Global identity is expressed locally by diversity, or pluralism. In the American South, the impact of globally derived immigration and cultural influences has a special character. The South’s complex history of diverse peoples and cultures—ranging from Native American groups of great variety and complexity to ethnically diverse migrants from Europe, Africa, Latin America, and Asia—has been overlaid by one dominant theme: dualism, stereotyped as black against white. While the range and complexity of the early South remained, evolved, and differed by locale, an overriding black-white dualism became pervasive during slavery and segregation continuing through the twentieth century. New...

The phrase “sense of place” suggests the perception of a locale as more than just a physical space, as a territory but also as a psychological space, a place imbued with history and memory, community and experience. In short, “space” becomes “place.” The South, it is said, has a sense of place. As Roy Blount Jr. put it, “the South is a place,” and, he added disparagingly, “the North is just a direction out of the South.”

Blount captures in a phrase a long history of imagining the South as a place. The land of cotton is not forgotten and...

Time, place, preservation, tourism, memory, spirituality, horror movies and Halloween, retirement homes, commemorations, reenactments, community legends, Sigmund Freud and William Faulkner, funerals, cemeteries, monuments: the members of this list share a focus on the past. “The past is not past,” proclaimed both Faulkner and Freud. (Faulkner’s character was thinking of society and its remembering; Freud was thinking of the individual and how repressed memories determine behavior.) Not surprisingly, as globalization presses and change happens, a countermovement seeks past as well as place, a way of connecting to something larger and older than immediate circumstance.

My first three hypotheses all address...

Subjective experience is the subject of this chapter, expressed in such areas as dreams, spiritualism, and the arts. How do such expressions reflect global influences? Does globalism penetrate only economics, politics, and public spheres, such as commemorations of race relations, institutional worship, and architecture and city planning? Or do global influences reach into private spheres, into the inner life, as in dreams and spiritual quests, and efforts at popular expression of experience, such as the arts? If so, how, in what forms and contexts? And how may subjective expressions enrich and shape global identities?

These questions are at once revealing...

Asserting that the South is orienting itself around the global brings to mind two assumptions we often take as givens: that the South as a region is a bastion of conservatism and that to orient around the global means to become more liberal. We need to examine these assumptions in light of the actual contours of the globalizing South. Obviously, given the South’s influence on the nation and, partly through the nation, the rest of the world, the policies the South favors will matter. I want to suggest that the assumptions I have just brought up are problematic for examining...