Meetings of the Southern Studies Forum take place in decidely un-Southern places like AN ISLAND IN THE BALTIC SEA, where people with decidely un-Southern accents discuss everything from Kitty Wells to Martin Luther King.
GEORGIA MAGAZINE, JUNE 2003
B Y - J A M E S - C O B B - (A B '6 9, - M A '7 2, - P H. D '7 5)
It may not seem terribly unusual for someone who's supposed to be a specialist in the history and culture of the American South to deliver a paper entitled "We Ain't Trash No More! The Transformation of Southern Identity Since the Civil Rights Movement." It might surprise you to learn, however, that I held forth on this subject not in Atlanta, Memphis, or Birmingham, but on the tiny island of Aerö in the Baltic Sea just off the coast of Denmark. In case you're wondering why the average Dane on the street would give a kroner about this topic, I actually delivered my remarks—including, if I do say so myself, an excellent discussion of the subtle but critical distinctions between a "redneck" and a "good ol' boy"—at the 1997 gathering of the Southern Studies Forum. Composed primarily of European scholars who teach and write about the American South, I was fortunate enough to join this delightful association of people who contemplate Dixie from a distance when they convened in Bonn in 1991, and I was hooked immediately. At my first meeting, I heard two Danes talk about antebellum southern literature and a Dutchman about Mark Twain. An Austrian focused on Walker Percy, an Englishman, a Frenchman and a German tackled Faulkner, and another German discussed Thomas Jefferson.
When the group convened in Vienna in 1999, in recognition of that city's glorious musical history, I gave an opening-night presentation on country music as a window into southern culture, complete with recorded snippets of elegant classics like "The Wreck of Old '97" and "It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels." The latter, I explained as Strauss and Mozart doubtless shattered all previous rpm records for the entombed, was arguably the first feminist country song because Kitty Wells was protesting the sexual double standard when she pointed out that "too many times married men act like they're still single and that's caused many a good girl to go wrong." Moreover, this hit recording clearly paved the way for Loretta Lynn's "Don't Come Home A'Drinkin' With Lovin' On Your Mind," a tune whose title pretty much says it all.
With a vita full of serious writings on the South, Cobb (AB '69, MA'72, PhD'75) isn't afraid to get down-home with his compatriots in the Southern Studies Forum. Asked at Cambridge if different history books are used in the South, the UGA history prof replied, "In our versions, Sherman burns down Cleveland, Ohio, and Willie Nelson is elected president."
Having been raised right, I naturally took a second before my weighty presentation in Vienna to bestow an appropriate gift on my hosts—a can of Vienna sausage, which I was entirely confident they would find preferable to anything available locally. I was even kind enough to instruct them on the preferred pronunciation, at least in the minds of many Georgians, of "Vi-eena." As you might imagine, they were mighty impressed, with my sophisticated tastes in both music and food and with my sensitive effort to help them avoid any future embarrassment about the way they refer to their own city.
They were so smitten, in fact, that they invited me to come back last fall for a three-week stay at the University of Vienna under the auspices of the Fulbright Foundation Visiting Senior Specialist program for scholarly exchange. This visit allowed me to expound further on the South in courses in southern literature and culture and American studies and to talk about the "Southern Roots of Rock and Roll" to students in Vienna and at the University of Innsbruck as well. Fascinated by the interaction between black and white performers in the rock 'n roll era, the students loved hearing clips of Elvis trying to imitate rhythm and blues singer Jackie Wilson's impersonation of Elvis singing "Don't Be Cruel." I also spent a great deal of time advising an astonishing number of graduate students who were writing dissertations in southern literature and culture.
The only drawback was the timing of my visit, which forced me to violate Lewis Grizzard's ironclad rule against being in a foreign country during football season. Thanks to the Internet and Armed Forces TV, my Bulldog lifeline was re-established, and as I described the scene at the SEC championship game with the Georgia fans "woofing" and the Arkansas fans screaming "sooey!" I could see my students beginning to catch on to what I'd been saying about the ferocity of southern attachments to place and community.
or those of us who often take the South's cornucopia of cultural riches for granted, European hunger for a better acquaintance with and understanding of things southern is astounding. In a single academic year, one might, with assistance of a hefty travel budget and a flexible teaching schedule, hear Eudora Welty dissected in Dijon, as well as discussions of "Images of the South" in Seville and "Configuration of Race in the South" in Cambridge.
At the University of Vienna, my host, Waldemar Zacharasiewicz, is director of the American Studies Program and an authority on southern literature. Southern hospitality has nothing on Viennese hospitality as it is practiced by the soft-spoken (always in impeccable English), courtly and sophisticated Waldemar, this despite a speaking, teaching, and writing schedule that would overwhelm anyone less committed to what he does. The South has long been a big part of the curriculum in the North American Studies Program at the University of Bonn and at the University of Genoa as well. At Cambridge, Mellon Professor of American History Anthony Badger is an expert on southern politics who was drawn to the subject because stories of the hijinks of sometimes corrupt but always colorful figures like Huey Long "seemed very, very different from the gray world of British politics" in the 1950s.
The South's history of tragedy, poverty, and defeat resonates with people like Cambridge University historian Michael O'Brien, whose hometown of Plymouth, England, was flattened by the Luftwaffe during World War II
In March, I listened in awe as Tony pulled no punches in an analysis of gubernatorial leadership in Civil Rights era-South Carolina so brilliant, balanced, and informed that, seated on the platform beside him, the gubernatorial leaders in question, Senator Fritz Hollings and former governor John West, could find no fault in anything he had to say. When the occasion calls for it, Badger can sound every bit the distinguished Cambridge Don that he is, but off-duty he is a disarmingly downhome, diehard Braves fan who prefers Budweiser to Guinness. Tony mentors doctoral students in many aspects of recent southern history. One of his many protégés, Stephen Tuck, has written a first-rate book, published by the University of Georgia Press, on the Civil Rights movement in rural Georgia, and he now oversees the Research Seminar in American History at Oxford. Blond and boyish, Steve grew up in what he describes as "a supposed marginal region" in England, and, save for the chicken livers and grits that he swears he was once served for breakfast, he found much that seemed culturally familiar and appealing in the year and a half that he spent researching his way across the Georgia countryside.
Students in Austria were relentlessly curious about all things southern. Bluesmen like Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters were popular in Europe long before most white Americans had heard of them, and I spent quite a bit of time talking with a young woman about the symbolism of the Mississippi River in well-known blues songs. Another favorite topic was the death penalty. "Why are so many more people executed in the South?" they asked. My suggestion that perhaps it was because so many of us Southerners simply needed killing didn't suffice, of course, and we were soon off and running on a conversation on race, class, and violence that on one evening carried over into a great dinner discussion fueled by liters of beer and a platter of fried chicken. For all its genuine sophistication, I soon discovered Vienna is also a redneck's paradise—plenty of fried food and not a low-fat menu or a light beer in sight.
Not surprisingly, some European perceptions of the South tend to lag reality. Many students and some faculty still see the South as the land of slavery and Jim Crow and seem startled to learn that its schools and suburbs are the nation's most integrated and that more African Americans now seem intent on moving into the region than out of it. At Cambridge, a gentlemen asked if we used different U.S. history textbooks in the South. I explained that this was actually once the case, but not anymore, except that in our versions General Sherman burns down Cleveland, Ohio, and Willie Nelson is elected president. My stiff-lipped questioner laughed, but it took him a minute.
uropean students who visit the South firsthand prove to be quick studies, however. When we visited the University of Innsbruck, one of our hosts was Claudia Schwarz, an effervescent young research assistant, whose jeans, work shoes, and wire-rimmed specs suggested that, be it Innsbruck or Athens, the grad student dress code doesn't vary much. She had been part of a group of Austrian South-watchers who came over on a "field trip" in 2001. The junket proved to be a stereotype-shattering experience for Claudia, who confessed to me that she had never been "particularly interested in the South" before her visit. She had cringed at the thought of "huge plantations with rich people sitting lazily on their terraces in the evening sun," but she wound up liking the "real people" she met very much and came away impressed both by the sincerity of their hospitality and their reverence for the past. She "absolutely fell in love" with Charleston, because of its beauty and its saturation in history but found Atlanta something of a paradox. Although it was "burdened by strong racial tensions," she recorded in her journal of the visit, it had developed a thriving "black business district . . . along Auburn Avenue . . . " and in 1973 had become "the first major city in the South to elect a black mayor, Maynard Jackson." Here, she mused, was a "city too busy to hate," but also "a city where Martin Luther King, Jr., was jailed." As their visit came to an end, Claudia and her friends surveyed the skyline from atop the Peachtree Plaza and agreed that their day and a half in Atlanta had offered far too little time to get a handle on the complexities and contradictions of "the pulsating center of the South."
All this European interest in the American South is not that hard to understand. In fact, many Europeans find it easier to relate to the South than to the rest of the United States. After all, in global rather than national perspective, it is not the South's history of tragedy, poverty, and defeat, but the North's record of relative affluence and accomplishment and its faith in the superiority of its ways and the certainty of its success that stands out as distinctive or exceptional. Cambridge historian Michael O'Brien, who grew up in Plymouth, which had been "flattened by the Luftwaffe," explained that ". . . war, failure, prejudice, these are European things. Europeans can see themselves in southern writing and history."
Some people mistakenly think Faulkner was referring only to the South when he wrote "The past is never dead, It's not even past." If anything, this observation is even more relevant to Europe
Some people mistakenly think Faulkner was referring only to the South when he wrote "The past is never dead, it's not even past." If anything, this observation is even more relevant to Europe. White Southerners who are still fighting the Civil War hardly seem unusual to people in Ireland who speak of "King Billy's" great victory on "the green, grassy slopes of the Boyne" in 1690 as if it happened last week, and the folks in Serbia who are clearly still steamed about the outcome of the Battle of Kosovo in 1389 could surely teach our "fergit hell" crowd a thing or two about holding grudges. Like some Southerners, there are Europeans who prefer remembering the wrongs done to them rather than acknowledge those they did to others. The continuing struggle to define the responsibilities of the current generation of white Southerners for the racial transgressions of their ancestors clearly resonates in Germany, where a ban on the Swastika has led neo-Nazis and skinheads to wave the Confederate flag instead. In some cases, the Confederacy seems to have been separated from its racial foundation. Not only does its flag hang as a symbol of the struggle of liberation in some of the pubs of Belfast, but a friend of mine tells of a visitor from the then-Soviet Republic of Georgia who clutched a Confederate flag and vowed with no hint of irony, "Some day this will fly over a free Georgia!" In his new book comparing the North-South divisions in Italy to those in the United States (also published by UGA Press), Vanderbilt historian Don Doyle notes that the people of southern Italy sport Confederate flag bumper stickers and wave the banner at soccer games. When he asked if the people of the Italian South knew what the flag meant, a professor from the University of Naples assured him, "Oh, yes, we know what it means. . . . we too are a defeated people. Once we were a rich and independent country, and they came from the North and conquered us and took our wealth and power away to Rome."
Italy's North-South antagonisms are even sharper than they are here, and pro-secession outfits like our "League of the South," which seems to have adopted the motto, "If at first you don't secede, try again," seem a little less weird in a country where it is actually disgruntled Northerners who have been threatening to take a hike. Regional distinctions still matter throughout Europe, and while more and more people in this country claim that the South is now indistinguishable from the rest of the U.S., from their more detached perspective, Europeans can still see the differences, and these differences are precisely what makes the South so fascinating to many of them. Both the inexorable process of globalization and the ongoing efforts of the European Union to shape Europe into what is effectively a single nation (and, some think, a single culture as well) make the South's long-standing resistance to total immersion in the American mainstream seem not just relevant but, in many ways, admirable.
nternational interest in the South is hardly confined to Europe. Southerners struggling to deny their past or throw off its burdens have nothing on the Japanese, where Faulkner's popularity is second only to Shakespeare's. My friend Anne Jones, who, to my great dismay, teaches southern literature at the University of Florida, spent a year teaching at Chiba University near Tokyo. She immediately saw parallels:
"Like Atlanta, but so much more recently, Japan's old cities were burned and flattened. . . . Stories of ordinary people's experiences of war and poverty that I had inherited from a privileged white Southern family and an American popular culture—burying the silver, living in slave quarters, eating weeds, drinking parched corn coffee, wearing feedsacks or draperies—were more than matched by the stories I read and heard about in Japan, of people whose lives burned up, of hunger that bent and shortened a generation's bones."
Southerners' attachment to place and family also resonates throughout the world. Georgia novelist Terry Kay's To Dance with the White Dog has been a huge hit in Japan. Another Georgia-born writer, Alice Walker, noted that, in China, readers find her treatment of her family and the South "very Chinese."
Foreign interest in the South has contributed to greater internationalization of many southern campuses, and we get our share of international Dixie-ologists. Last fall, UGA hosted students and faculty from the University of Heidelberg, all of them interested in southern history. Students from the University of Dundee will be with us this summer. And before long, my gracious hosts from Vienna will be coming over on another field trip. I want them to see Athens, of course, but my real hope is that their visit will coincide with the annual "Big Pig Jig" barbecue festival in Vienna, Georgia. A trip there should definitely reinforce my efforts to educate their palates and improve their pronunciation skills.
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James Cobb is the Spalding Distinguished Professor of History at UGA, and author of Redefining Southern Culture: Mind and Identity in the Modern South (University of Georgia Press, 1999).
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