| This project examines a pervasive legacy of human quantification descending from the logic of chattel slavery in U.S. Southern fiction from the 1920s to the present. Southerners' attempts to soften the reality of slavery's commodification of human beings led them to suppress numerical determinations of personal value. I draw on the postcolonial concept of the "narcissism of mastery" in order to characterize the fundamental interdependence of personal and economic value. With the emancipation of their slaves, elite white southerners lost their primary source of self-appreciation; Reconstruction exacerbated this dispossession by placing them under the North's political and industrial control, a condition of "economic colonialism" that lasted well into the twentieth century. Variously impoverished and oppressed, a range of modern Southerners developed common textual strategies of personal quantification to represent and remedy their dispossession. In the first chapter, I suggest that the region's privileged white males (e.g., William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, and William Alexander Percy) write narratives of compensation that depend narcissistically on "debiting" racial and sexual others in order to "credit" themselves. Chapter Two juxtaposes the African-American writers James Weldon Johnson and Richard Wright with the female authors Frances Newman and Katherine Anne Porter in their compensatory struggles to locate personal value beyond the needs and abuses of the dominant group; these writers seek reparation themselves by repeating the language of narcissistic desire and calculation. After decades of such collusion, the contemporary authors Walker Percy, Alice Walker, and Dorothy Allison detail the impoverishment of the individual ego; the Self---white or black, male or female---has depended too heavily on the debasement of the Other in order to rise, leaving both in isolation and despair. Chapter Four resurrects perhaps the most understudied group of southerners, Native Americans, reading works by Marilou Awiakta (Cherokee-Appalachian) and Louis Owens (Choctaw-Cherokee-Appalachian), whose affirmations of hybridity challenge the biracial economy of the region and its disturbing calculations of identity. |
