E3W Literature | University of Texas

James L. Peacock
Grounded Globalism: How The US South Embraces The World
The University of Georgia Press, 2007
294 pages
$26.95

Reviewed by Noah Mass

The US South has long occupied a paradoxical place in the American imagination. For many Americans who live outside the South, the region is often reduced to stereotype as benighted and retrograde, suffused with racial anxiety and class antagonism. At the same time, the South functions as a “remedy” to the nation for the ills of modernity, as a repository of folk culture and “traditional values.” White (and many black) southerners themselves have long had an equally complex relationship to the larger American nation, seeing themselves as defenders of local “authenticity” against the homogenizing encroachments of modernity, while also believing that the place that they call home possesses essential qualities of cultural richness that their northern neighbors could benefit from.

However, the region has undergone massive changes since the Second World War, both in terms of growing urban- and suburban-ization and a changing racial landscape. The black-white racial dyad of the South has become complicated, in recent years, by the influx of immigrants from Sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, and South and Central America. A new generation of scholars, among them Patricia Yeagar, Tara McPherson, Martyn Bone, and Leigh Anne Duck, have been working to analyze the increasing fragmentation of southern identity in a more and more interconnected world. The combined questions of the complex role historically played by the South in American culture, the forces of globalization and their influence on southerners’ self-perception, together with national and international perspectives on the South, have become central to the dialogue of American Studies.

James L. Peacock, Kenan Professor of Anthropology at The University of North Carolina, makes his own contribution to this developing conversation about the role of the US South in a global era with Grounded Globalism: How The US South Embraces The World. Peacock, who acknowledges his own southern roots at various points in the text, puts forward two theses here: first, that the people who call themselves southerners have been traditionally suffused with “a culture of oppositionality expressed in spatial boundaries,” an inward-looking parochialism which is expressed in both racial segregation and local cultural affirmation. Second, this oppositional identity is changing under the impact of increasing global connectivity and immigration, leading to a condition in which local southern self-conception is being replaced by a new “grounded globalism.”

Peacock’s key term reflects a broader international trend, one in which the frame of reference for formerly “oppositional” cultures shifts “from nation to world.” This is not to say that those groundings themselves in a local identity “exchange” it for a “global” one, but that “a minority background may infuse a global identity with special meanings.” In other words, southerners become global citizens by infusing a sense of “being in the world” with a particular sense of “being at home,” and an examination of what is happening to southern identity under the pressure of global influence can help us to better understand the negotiation that takes place when other formerly inward looking societies begin to open themselves to change.

For Peacock, this shift in southern self-perception crosses racial and class lines, and the text is replete with anecdotal accounts of the ways that the experiences of individual southerners are being transformed under the impact of larger, more expansive global influences. Most of these are difficult for the author to chart, however, and the text moves forward as a jumble of encounters, examples, and occasional counter-examples: non-white ethnics becoming new players in an already complex black-white racial history, some integrating into the southern landscape, some not; interplays of commercial and intellectual exchange between southern businesses and universities, sometimes with major local cultural impact, at others leaving only superficial legacies; religious inter-relationships between southern Protestants and conservative Anglican churches located in “the Global South”; military servicemen and women serving in the American armed forces, returning to local communities with a new sense of the nation’s global reach (and local impact).

Peacock is the first to acknowledge that he is not sure what all this means, only that it means something: a way that formerly “closed” communities identify with the larger global context by infusing that context with a sense of “being at home.” In fleshing out this concept, he shifts repeatedly between the notions of “grounded globalism” as descriptive of the way he sees southerners negotiating their regional and global identities, and prescriptive for what he believes may happen in the future. It is here that the book becomes more difficult to follow, as we are not always sure if Peacock wants the South and its current global negotiations to serve as a model for a new form of global identity, or as an example of a region struggling to come to terms with that identity, one still not clearly framed. We can see this ambivalence in Peacock’s often hesitant language: “the larger tendency would seem to be for increasing diversity ‘on the ground’ in life and in work to dispose southerners to a more global-oriented identity, an identity with the wider world”; “Maybe the global intrusions will be swallowed up like the cars and trucks that dot the countryside and are covered with kudzu (itself a global intrusion); maybe the new South will turn out to be just like the old South. But the global aspect will be at least as important as air conditioning and the loss of the front porch.”

It is understandable that the author would have difficulty making more specific assertions and conclusions, though, because “grounded globalism,” as he sees it, is less an ideology than it is an “orientation,” and Peacock is often ambivalent about how it will be manifested. Southern identity, here, serves as a “force field,” one that “interweaves conservative and liberal strands spurred by global forces that are grounded in the regional context and other localized contexts around the world. Such a perspective affirms global forces and needs but grounds globalism in awareness of local realities, which include poverty, racism, custom, tradition, place and family, while affirming innovation, justice and peace.” “Awareness,” perhaps, but to what end? As utopian as Peacock sometimes sounds, he is, at other times, unsure of whether an identity that is “grounded globally” will be subversive to empire or in the service of it. All he is certain of, in the end, is that the South is reversing its “oppositional” character in favor of one more globally integrative, but still somehow “southern.”

Uncertainty, ambivalence, and hesitancy in the face of such sweeping change—change which Peacock documents admirably—is certainly understandable, but this study, while exciting and insightful, is often clearer in its sketching of theory than it is in its documentation of practice. The “model” of “grounded globalism” that Peacock lays out here is a powerful one, and Grounded Globalism helps us document the ways that the shift in southern identity that he depicts is taking place. It remains to be seen, however, whether the South will “embrace the world” in a mutual romance, or will seek to treat the world as a new conquest.