Imagining Southern Spaces

This book investigates spatialization processes through analyses of spatial imaginations about the US South as these imaginations are discerned in proslavery and abolitionist US American writings of the period. To this end, primarily the following five antebellum US American texts, which are written from different ideological stances on the issue of slavery, are examined. These texts are William Gilmore 's Southward Ho!, Lucy Holcombe Pickens's The Free Flag of Cuba, William Wells 's St. Domingo: Its Revolutions and Its Patriots, Elizabeth D. Zoë, or the Quadroon's Triumph, and Martin R. 's Blake; or the Huts of America. The antebellum US is identified in this book as a transitional spatio-temporal setting under both globalization processes experienced in the long-nineteenth century and national consolidation processes accompanied by expansionist movements in the US. In addition to these conditions characterizing the antebellum US in general, the slaveholding southern region of the country underwent a particularly intense period of (re)spatialization due to the intensifying debates on the abolition of slavery. Diverse US American actors with proslavery or abolitionist opinions (re)imagined the US South according to their ideologies and interests reaffirming or challenging the existing and dominant spatial configurations and spatialization patterns surrounding them. In doing so, these actors positioned the South within or outside of different (trans)regional, (trans)national, or imperial spaces. These spaces pointed to various economic, political, and cultural entanglements in hemispheric, circumcaribbean, and circumatlantic contexts. The primary texts studied in this book are selected to reflect different positionings of the US South in the spatial imaginations that they generate.