By Douglas Reichert Powell
[The University of North Carolina Press, 2007. 280 pages, $59.95 hardcover, $24.95 paperback]
Reviewed by Con Buckley
“Critical regionalism requires thinking about texts geographically, discerning the connections they draw among often disparate and far-flung places.”
Douglas Reichert Powell analyzes film, literature, academia, and even real life to encourage (well, demand) the implementation of “critical regionalism” as the lens through which people are taught “how to reconceive their own local spaces in terms that comprehend their social construction, understand the rhetorical force of social inventions of place, and recognize the possibilities for social action to change them.”
Powell contends that “articulating our ‘sense’ of what is unique about a particular spot on the landscape” must be done within the context of a “critical awareness of how that spot is part of broader configurations of history, politics, and culture.” His work is most useful in the discussion of real-life situations that show the debilitating effects of not making those connections between physical place and social constructs. In nonfiction venues, the possibility of confronting and rejecting stereotypes, recognizing the viewpoint of the locals, acknowledging agency, and admitting connections between region and the broader, global community is real.
Powell has particular qualms with the treatment of “ex-urban” spaces, particularly the treatment of his own Appalachian region. He criticizes the films Deliverance, Cape Fear, and Apocalypse Now within the framework of illiteracy, which he describes as “one particular synecdoche of American popular film’s ‘landscape narrative’ of regional life.” He concludes that these films “are not really concerned with the problems of Appalachian people, of women, blacks, Latinos, queers, or working people at all. Instead they are addressed almost entirely to the anxieties, neuroses, and hysteria of a relatively small section of their audience: prosperous, straight, cosmopolitan white men.”
In the chapter “Toward a Critical Regionalist Literature,” both John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. fail to meet the standards of critical regionalism because, although they “sought to develop new representational tactics that challenged readers’ perceptions of the spatial, political, historical, and cultural relationships among local sites on broader landscapes,” as Powell explains, “they seemed unable to conceive of local spaces as valid or useful sites of cultural politics and production and, instead, created ‘landscape narratives’ on a national scale, in which local cultures function as obstacles to change.”
It is unrealistic to expect existing fiction—particularly works created when the national landscape narrative mentioned was a new and exciting method of strategizing and presentation—to conform to current academic sensibilities. And, in the case of popular movies, the profit potential of targeting “the anxieties, neuroses, and hysteria of . . . cosmopolitan white men” is particularly obvious compared to the thoughtful creation of “local spaces as valid or useful sites of cultural politics.” Current and future writers of fictional text and movies will have the tools of critical regionalism available and could implement those strategies in their work.
Non-fiction—both writing and real-life experiences—lends itself much more successfully to the notion of critical regionalism, which “must search for the kinds of texts that can facilitate the most expansive possible thinking … in which circumstances challenge people’s ability to make sense of the places’ interconnections, even (especially) when those connection run counter to the assumptions underlying ‘commonsense’ versions of local and regional landscapes.”
