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| Vol. 19, No. 6 | Oct. 7, 1999 |
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| Vol. 19, No. 6 | Oct. 7, 1999 |
The South in Black and White: Race, Sex and Literature in the 1940s by McKay Jenkins, English, examines a time and place where issues of race played a huge role-spoken or implied-in even the smallest details of everyday life.
By exploring the works of white Southern writers Lillian Smith, William Alexander Percy, Carson McCullers and Wilbur J. Cash, Jenkins looks for the "cracks in the structure of white Southern identity" and ponders how these authors were able to construct images of race and race relations in narratives that professed to have little, if anything, to do with race.
"In what ways did images of race bubble to the surface in these texts, even those with apparently few, if any, black characters?" he asks.
All four, controversial best-selling authors in their day considered themselves outside the cultural mainstream, he said, "and while their views on race varied tremendously...all were and still are largely considered to have been racially progressive, especially when their particular period and region is taken into consideration."
Additionally, Jenkins contends that all four of these writers shared an ambivalence about their own sexuality that may have influenced their sympathetic views of the black race and helped them empathize with others who were culturally disempowered. Smith was a lesbian; Percy was effeminate and cast himself, in public, as essentially sexless; McCullers was androgynous; and Cash struggled for much of his adult life with impotence. Jenkins maintains that this sense of sexual isolation allowed all four to "occupy a space between their own privileged whiteness and the alienation of blackness."
Jenkins, amused by the northern notion that the South is "one vast homogenous place," notes that regional differences are important to southern perceptions of race-as seen in the works of these four geographically different writers.
"Place defines writers as much as time, and in each chapter I try to mark the influence of geography on the writerly imagination," he said.
The larger hope of the book, he said, is to "discover the roots of white racialized foundation upon which a generation built its often dehumanizing racial rhetoric" and to pick apart a cultural discourse that Jenkins said "accrued over a period of decades for a precise purpose: to replace physical shackles with rhetorical ones."
Jenkins said he thinks of the 1940s as a "between place," an often-neglected period overshadowed by the important events of Reconstruction and the civil rights movement.
"Contemporary writers of racial history have tended to pay attention to the more dramatic 1860s and 1960s and leave what came between untouched," he said. "I hope to prove that the cultural soil of the late 1930s and 1940s is fertile indeed for the study of southern literary history."
The book also attempts to take the ambivalences and anxieties of the 1940s and project them forward to examine how contemporary writers and scholars of race continue to digest and rework perceptions of race even as they unfold.
It also argues for the notion that understanding whiteness is as valid an intellectual endeavor as understanding blackness, a field of study that has been received much more scholarly attention in the last 20 years.
Jenkins, raised in New York, said he first real awareness of the influence of race came during the four years he spent as a reporter for the Atlanta Journal and Constitution.
Published by the University of North Carolina Press, The South In Black and White grew out of his dissertation at Princeton and is just the first of three books that Jenkins will have published in the next three months.
The second, The White Death: Tragedy and Heroism in An Avalanche Zone, will be published by Random House in December and excerpted in Outside magazine in February. The book uses the story of a famous climbing accident in Glacier National Park in 1969 to explore questions about man and nature, snow science, the history of mountaineering and cultural perceptions of mountains.
His third book, The Peter Matthiessen Reader, to be published in January by Vintage Press, is a compilation of writings by the famous nature writer.
Jenkins, an accomplished outdoorsman himself, said Matthiessen has been a mentor for years.
All three books share the common theme of man and his desire for power, Jenkins said, be it the power of the white race to suppress blacks or the power of man to conquer nature.
"I'm fascinated by trying to figure out why we think the way we do. Why do white people exploit the wilderness or suppress blacks? Why do we mistreat people and things? Why don't we want to share the power? These are the questions I want to ask-the questions I hope to help answer through the lens of my writing."
-Beth Thomas
