Although contemporary critical discourse fragmented monolithic, essentialist assumptions of southern place, the southern literary imagination is still fascinated by its possible declinations. Scholars like Martyn Bone and Scott Romine have considered place as a discursive entity and an identitarian simulacrum. Precisely because of its textual and psychological connotations, and in spite of the necessary desecration it endured, the traditional conception of place can’t really be pronounced dead. On the other hand, since the hegemonic post-agrarian construction of space has often effaced other possible spatial dimensions upon which it has been forcefully superimposed, the South is also composed of “dead” places—some quite literally so. The southern landscape is loaded with trauma. As Patricia Yaeger writes, “the depths of southern ‘place’ yield the remains of foundation-bearing black folks who lie beneath the earth”: there is a macabre geography right beneath the southern pastoral delusion. As in a palimpsest, some texts are erased, but their ghostly traces survive and haunt the agrarian chronotope. Southern literature has often reacted to the postmodern condition by going back to the myth of place, but some writers set instead to investigate these deathscapes in an attempt to unearth the silenced dimensions of southern place and restore it to its rightful complexity. Among these, there is Natasha Trethewey, whose poetry collection Native Guard encompasses family and society, remembrance and history in order to reconstruct her experience as a biracial woman in the post-segregation South. As a response to the obliteration of memory and the dispossessing powers of the hegemonic spatial-identitarian discourse, Trethewey’s poems goes deep into her native Mississippi’s soil, conjuring forgotten ghosts and giving them a voice. Situated at the intersection of hauntology and the spatial analysis of literature, this essay analyzes the finely intertwined threads of place, time and identity in Native Guard.
A Theory of Southern Time and Space: Memory, Place, and Identity in Natasha Trethewey's Native Guard
Marco Petrelli
2021-01-01
Abstract
Although contemporary critical discourse fragmented monolithic, essentialist assumptions of southern place, the southern literary imagination is still fascinated by its possible declinations. Scholars like Martyn Bone and Scott Romine have considered place as a discursive entity and an identitarian simulacrum. Precisely because of its textual and psychological connotations, and in spite of the necessary desecration it endured, the traditional conception of place can’t really be pronounced dead. On the other hand, since the hegemonic post-agrarian construction of space has often effaced other possible spatial dimensions upon which it has been forcefully superimposed, the South is also composed of “dead” places—some quite literally so. The southern landscape is loaded with trauma. As Patricia Yaeger writes, “the depths of southern ‘place’ yield the remains of foundation-bearing black folks who lie beneath the earth”: there is a macabre geography right beneath the southern pastoral delusion. As in a palimpsest, some texts are erased, but their ghostly traces survive and haunt the agrarian chronotope. Southern literature has often reacted to the postmodern condition by going back to the myth of place, but some writers set instead to investigate these deathscapes in an attempt to unearth the silenced dimensions of southern place and restore it to its rightful complexity. Among these, there is Natasha Trethewey, whose poetry collection Native Guard encompasses family and society, remembrance and history in order to reconstruct her experience as a biracial woman in the post-segregation South. As a response to the obliteration of memory and the dispossessing powers of the hegemonic spatial-identitarian discourse, Trethewey’s poems goes deep into her native Mississippi’s soil, conjuring forgotten ghosts and giving them a voice. Situated at the intersection of hauntology and the spatial analysis of literature, this essay analyzes the finely intertwined threads of place, time and identity in Native Guard.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
