ABSTRACT
Michel Foucault has argued that history has excluded too readily ‘particular, local, regional knowledge . . . incapable of unanimity’, in favour of ‘systematising thought’, or the official version (Foucault 1980: 82). He calls for the ‘subjugated knowledges’ ‘buried’ below to be redis - covered and injected into our perceptions of culture. He calls for a ‘genealogy’ – a ‘painstaking rediscovery of struggles together with the rude memory of their conflicts’ – which would combine erudite know - ledge and ‘local memories’ (ibid.: 83) in the understanding of the cultural process. Rather than assume a ‘unitary’ version of American regions like the West or South, this method insists upon the inclusion of multiple stories of local and regional significance and relates them to a wider interor transnational perspective. Such a method takes note of the struggles for power that have marked the burial of certain stories and the elevation of others, and builds them into the analysis. It questions the notion that a particular place or region has a unique or settled set of qualities, and instead argues that stories which have been written about such places have often been written from a perspective that is partial and selective and may even downgrade or omit groups or interests whose experiences or values do not fit with the received version. This is a reminder that we need to take care when we examine the way in which the supposed identity of a place interacts with its history. Generalisations about the character of the South or West may depend upon assumptions about their ‘past’, which themselves contain untested judgements. This section argues, therefore, for a form of Critical Regionalism, a term evolved from the architectural work of Lefaivre and Tzonis and Kenneth Frampton, suggesting a sense of regionalism ‘infused with . . . relativity’, critical of both imposed universalism and naïve localism, and in a ‘constant process of negotiation between local and global’ (Lefaivre and Tzonis 2003: 34). The recognition of alternative stories in the form of regional variety and difference asserts diversity and pluralism against any totalising impulse, showing an awareness of complex issues of race, gender and ethnicity, balking against assumptions of some common identity, and preferring
instead the assertion of difference. In this spirit, we would concur with Stephanie Foote’s comment:
The local knowledges that regionalism first helped publicize fracture any monolithic narrative of American literature and . . . identity. Because it held open the meaning of America and Americanness, regional writing helped to create a way to understand and value social differences, and helped to establish a way of imagining communities that interrupted even as they sustained a national culture.
