Introducción

El dramaturgo Abel González Melo nació en 1980 en La Habana, Cuba, mismo año en que el Exodo del Mariel vio a aproximadamente 125,000 personas huir de su país, un evento que dramatiza en su obra de 2018 En ningún lugar del mundo. González Melo estudió Artes Teatrales en la Universidad de las Artes de Cuba. Ha recibido diversos premios y galardones por sus obras literarias y teatrales, entre ellos el Premio Primer Concurso de Dramaturgia de la Embajada de España (2005) por Chamaco, una de las obras más reconocidas de González Melo, y más reciente el prestigioso Premio Literario Casa de las Américas 2020 (enero).

Las obras de González Melo abarcan dos décadas y cubren múltiples temas sociales dentro de la vida cubana. Desde la complicada relación de Cuba con el Exodo del Mariel en En ningún lugar del mundo (2018) hasta la prostitución adolescente a principios de la década de 2000 en La Habana Vieja en su trilogía, Fuga de Invierno (2004–2009), sus obras sumergen al público en las calles que rodean el Capitolio de La Habana, en los parques, callejones y teatros que brindan espacios para la prostitución ilegal, en casas particulares que centran la importancia de la familia para los cubanos. La primera década de la escritura de González Melo problematiza la cultura juvenil cubana de principios de la década de 2000, una cultura a la vez gay y heterosexual, hambrienta y saciada, resistente y complaciente en un país donde la Revolución todavía se lucha a diario en las calles (aunque ahora rodeados por los "WiFi hotspots" aprobados). Mientras González Melo mantiene su identificación sexual privada, sus obras desafían la categorización, preguntan cuestiones de sexualidad y exploran la supervivencia, la mercantilización del cuerpo, el trauma mental intenso, el dolor de la historia y el amor profundo de la familia. Sus personajes se entretejen dentro y fuera de sus obras para demostrar esa complejidad: mientras algunas cosas han cambiado, otras siguen igual de siempre.

La obra más reciente de González Melo pasa a recuperar personajes literarios y episodios de la historia cubana con una perspectiva revisionista. Figuras históricas de la obra de González Melo incluyen la poeta feminista de principios del siglo XX María Luisa Milanés (de Bayamo, Cuba) en Bayamesa (2019), que ganó el premio Casa de las Américas de teatro en enero de 2020. En abordar el tema de la censura en el apogeo de la Revolución en Cuba, la obra más reciente de González Melo presenta personajes históricos cubanos. Fuera del juego dramatiza la experiencia de la figura cultural Heberto Padilla, un poeta venerado cuya obra criticó la Revolución y sus líderes en su momento, 1967–68, resultando en su arresto, tortura y exilio a los Estados Unidos en 1980. Padilla trabajó muchos años en varios puestos en el sistema universitario en los Estados Unidos, como Ohio State University, Bowdoin College y el Instituto de Humanidades de la NYU, antes de morir solo como poeta residente Auburn University en 2000. En su drama más reciente, Cádiz en José Martí (Festival de Teatro Iberoamericano de Cádiz, 2020), González Melo dramatiza al mítico héroe nacional de la isla, el revolucionario José Martí (1853–1895). González Melo lo sitúa en la ciudad española de Cádiz, el primer destino de Martí en su largo exilio y deportación política bajo el régimen colonial.

En esta conversación, González Melo explica su proceso creativo e inspiraciones, la experiencia de la migración cubana como material dramático y la idea de refundir la historia para nuevos públicos y tiempos. Habla de cómo se basó en la experiencia actual en La Habana para crear Fuga de invierno y cómo su obra reciente se sumerge profundamente en las preguntas de la comunidad y la familia durante algunos de los momentos más severos de Cuba. González Melo también reflexiona sobre las ligaduras singulares entre Estados Unidos y Cuba. Uno de estos vínculos es la conexión lingüística español-inglés, ya que muchos cubanoamericanos son bilingües. Por lo tanto, aunque esta conversación se llevó a cabo en español, hemos proporcionado traducciones al inglés. [Read the English translation of this interview here.]

Chamaco : El comienzo de todo, o el trabajo inicial de González Melo

Gunnels: ¿Por qué la dramaturgia? ¿Piensas que el teatro es el mejor vehículo para las historias que quieres contar?

González Melo: El teatro tiene algo maravilloso para un escritor: aleja a la literatura de la soledad. Propone la creación en equipo y el contacto directo con el espectador. Ambas cuestiones me resultan muy atractivas: la idea de que la escritura nunca cesa, siempre es reinterpretada en presente, necesita la comunión del director, los actores, los diseñadores, los técnicos, y precisa, indefectiblemente, la complicidad del público. Me deslumbra esa naturaleza inacabada de la escritura dramática, esa urgencia por impactar de modo inmediato. Disfruto escribir narrativa o ensayo, pero en ambos casos extraño el diálogo real con el ser humano. Será porque, cada vez más, la dramaturgia es en mí un proceso relacionado con un grupo humano concreto, una textura imaginada para gravitar sobre una cuerda floja.

Gunnels: ¿Sientes 'inacabada' esa naturaleza porque necesita de otros artistas para completarse, o porque, cada vez que se representa una obra, hay una nueva audiencia que tendrá reacciones distintas?

González Melo: El teatro lo hacemos entre todos, los artistas y el público. Basta recordar el origen griego de la palabra "teatro", que significa "mirar". Es decir, solo existimos porque alguien nos mira. Es uno de los mayores placeres de escribir dramaturgia: sentir que uno solo ofrece una guía de acotaciones y parlamentos sobre el papel, solo eso, pero que el personaje tendrá el cuerpo, la voz y el alma de quien lo encarne delante del espectador, que es quien terminará de construirlo en su proceso de recepción activa. ¿Por qué seguimos asistiendo una y otra vez a los estrenos de los clásicos? Pues porque su esencia, más que en el argumento, radica en cómo se cuenta hoy esa historia en el ágora pública: quiénes la ejecutan, por qué deciden hacerla, en qué contexto y ante quiénes, qué sentidos nacen de esa experiencia.

Gunnels: Quisiera pintar la escencia de la triología Fugas de invierno para la audiencia antes de que lo comentemos.

Chamaco (Kiddo, 2004, traducción al inglés de William Gregory) es la primera entrega de la trilogía.¹Hay dos traducciones publicadas. William Gregory tradujo los dos Chamaco y Nevada; Yael Prizant tradujo la triología en versión bi-lingual con prensa distinta. Chamaco se ha representado a nivel mundial, desde el Teatro Argos en La Habana hasta Manchester, el Teatro HOME de Inglaterra, hasta la traducción más reciente al checo, con la producción en Praga programada para el otoño de 2021. La trilogía, que incluye Nevada y Talco (la segunda y tercera entrega), cubre un lapso de tres meses en un invierno tropical del descontento, como escribe la crítica de teatro y académica titular Lillian Manzor "the trilogy addresses concerns that are dear to the author and his generation, namely: the complex and contradictory ways in which homosexuality, sex, and migration from the countryside to the capital becomes means of survival in a society that has lost all sense of value."²Lillian Manxor and Austin Webber, "Ground Down to Nothing but Still Fighting." Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics. Accessed March 25, 2021. https://hemisphericinstitute.org/en/emisferica-82/manzor-webbert.html. Chamaco sumerge a los espectadores en la Nochebuena en La Habana, donde una hermana espera con inquietud que su hermano regrese a casa para una cena que nunca comerá, ya que sin saberlo ella, murió en una pelea con cuchillas. Nevada sigue a Lucía y su novio/chulo Rosnay cuando se encuentran con la realidad de vender sus cuerpos en el esfuerzo por salir o escapar, en este caso, al estado de Nevada, donde la prostitución es legal, y los "dulces vienen envueltos en papel de brillo". Talco, la última entrega, retrata una realidad cruda y sucia que se desarrolla principalmente en el baño de un antiguo cine utilizado para el tráfico y la prostitución, donde los caminos de cuatro personajes—Javi, Máshenka, Zuleidy y Álvaro—se entrecruzan en una batalla violenta y tensa de supervivencia. A la trilogía la siguen casi veinte obras más, muchas de las cuales han sido traducidas a varios idiomas y representadas tanto en Estados Unidos como en el extranjero. Abel, esta trilogía realmente centra la experiencia de la juventud cubana. Describe la importancia de dar voz a la gente joven cubana en las obras que has escrito.

González Melo: Ahora que lo comentas, pienso que los protagonistas de mis obras han ido teniendo mi edad en el momento de escritura, y en cada texto van siendo mayores estos personajes porque crecen conmigo. He querido llenarlos de mis dudas, mis afectos, mis dolores. Son la imagen sublimada de mí mismo en medio del mundo en que he crecido: la Cuba de entresiglos, y desde hace algo más de una década también la España del XXI. Vivo a caballo entre los dos países y los observo a ambos con una mezcla de pasión y extrañeza. No puedo hablar de todos los jóvenes como una masa, eso no sé hacerlo, pero sí de mí en el paso de la adolescencia a la juventud: esas pulsiones son las que habitan mi teatro. Ojalá tengan que ver con las de otras personas.

Gunnels: Dime más sobre eso que llamas 'pasión y entrañeza.'

González Melo: Recuerdo que a principios de los 2000, cuando atravesaba en la noche la Habana Vieja rumbo a mi casa, me despertaban enorme curiosidad las decenas de adolescentes que aguardaban apoyados en las columnas, frente al Capitolio, o rondando el Parque Central, en medio de la zona turística. ¿Qué hacía toda esta gente aquí? ¿Quiénes eran? Poco a poco fui acercándome a ellos, muchos vivían clandestinamente en La Habana, habían emigrado desde el Oriente de la isla. Todos se prostituían, o aspiraban a hacerlo.³Una nota de González Melo: "Aquí estamos hablando, si hay que aclararlo, solo de cisgender masculinos. Yo no soy expert en estudios y terminology de género, pero los trans y las chicas están, como explico, en otras zonas de la ciudad." Supe de historias fascinantes, terribles. Irlos descubriendo a fondo no fue sencillo, ninguno iba a darme una entrevista sin más y contarme su vida. Me convertí en discreto cliente, ahorraba dinero y me iba con alguno de ellos a un cuartico de alquiler. En la fugacidad de ese rato de extraño placer me mantenía alerta: los escuchaba hablar de sus vidas, de sus hijos pequeños a quienes tenían que alimentar, de sus mujeres conscientes de que ellos se dedicaban a la cacería de extranjeros o cubanos que pudieran pagar por sexo. Mi investigación fue ampliándose, una cosa me llevó a la otra, fui componiendo el mapa de la marginalidad nocturna de la Habana Vieja: la zona de las prostitutas estaba en el cruce de las calles Monte y Cienfuegos; los travestis y transexuales aguardaban a sus clientes en el Parque de la Fraternidad; la droga se vendía en un cine abandonado, etc. Me sumergí de lleno. Hice cosas impensables durante aquellos años, cosas que hoy no haría. Pero por suerte me atreví a hacerlo: quería conocer a fondo a estas personas, sus lugares, sus razones, todo ese ambiente que la prensa oficial no publicaba. Tres o cuatro años de inmersión. Tras concluir Chamaco, tenía aún tanto material acumulado que nacieron Nevada y Talco. También en obras como Por gusto y Adentro hay huellas de este universo.

Gunnels: Por mi parte, Lucía de Nevada y María Luisa de Bayamesa me conmuevan por su necesidad de enfrentarse al mundo, al exterior hostil, pero con persistencia y amor por la familia. Son fuertes ejemplos feministas para cualquier generación. Y Lucía, con su vestido rojo, es singular para mí. ¿Hay un ángel en tu obra, un personaje que realmente te conmociona?

González Melo: No suelo partir de la emoción en los procesos de escritura. Soy bastante técnico, algo que aprendí con mi maestra Raquel Carrió (gran autora nuestra, fundadora en 1976 de la carrera de Dramaturgia en la Universidad de las Artes de Cuba): la tríada estructura-personaje-lenguaje es la base de la preparación de mis proyectos. Creo que la emoción llega (o no) en paralelo a (o luego de) la apreciación de la experiencia. La emoción estará entonces en el receptor. Pero para que eso pueda suceder, la construcción misma del texto o del espectáculo ha de ser precisa, nítida, no puede partir del deseo de emocionar, porque se desfigura. A veces siento que la emoción enturbia la objetividad de lo que ocurre: sucede mucho con los actores que actúan "emocionados" y, entonces, sobreactúan; o con los dramaturgos que se sobreemocionan con lo que están haciendo y pierden el rumbo de la acción, pierden síntesis.

Sí es verdad que alguna vez he tenido experiencias singulares, yo diría que místicas, durante la escritura misma, como me sucedió con Chamaco, que sentí que alguien me la dictaba al oído. Estaba muy reciente la violenta muerte de mi padre y el monólogo de Silvia, cuando se entera de que han asesinado a su hermano, lo escribí deshecho en llanto. Siempre he creído que Chamaco es mi padre que se convirtió en ángel para dictarme esta obra y que me acompaña desde entonces.

La historia se repite

Sobre todo en sus dramas más recientes, Abel González Melo ha cambiado de describir experiencias personales en su trabajo a referenciar y dramatizar puntos de contacto históricos cubanos (como el Éxodo Mariel, los UMAP (Unidades Militares de Ayuda a la Producción), el Quinquenio Gris y el Período Especial. El Éxodo Mariel constituye la migración masiva más grande de Cuba en su historia. De abril a octubre de 1980, se estima que ~125.000 cubanos salieron del Puerto Mariel para los Estados Unidos. La historia fue bien cubierta en los medios de comunicación: un pequeño grupo de cubanos tropezó un autobús urbano hasta las puertas de la Embajada peruana en La Habana en un intento de pisar tierra allí y solicitar asilo político (y eventualmente salir de la isla). Se les concedió asilo y, después, más de 10,000 personas se acercaron a la embajada con las mismas esperanzas. Al ver esta situación desarrollarse desde los Estados Unidos, el presidente Jimmy Carter emitió una invitación abierta a cualquier persona de Cuba que huyera del régimen de Castro, evitando en parte la política y el procedimiento de inmigración de los Estados Unidos. Siguió un giro típico de Castro: después de un discurso muy público el primer de mayo, el Día del Trabajador, en la Plaza de la Revolución de La Habana, vació las cárceles y hospitales de Cuba de criminales condenados y enfermos y requirió cualquier embarcación estadounidense que fuera a recoger a familiares o seres queridos para llevar del Puerto Mariel también consigo un barco lleno de otros 'indeseables', en los que incluía hombres homosexuales y personas con problemas psiquiátricos. Como señala González Melo en nuestra conversación a continuación, la historia de Cuba con los hombres homosexuales está marcada por una trágica discriminación, tortura y muerte. Los históricos campos de trabajo de la UMAP (en español, Unidades Militares de Ayuda de la Producción) que sirvieron como un tipo de prisión laboral de 1965 a 1968 en Camagüey, Cuba, fueron politizados como campos agrícolas para "objetores de conciencia", pero fueron más una especie de "purga" social de cualquier persona que fuera considerada anticastrista o antirrevolucionaria, afirma el historiador Abel Sierra Madero.⁴Abel Sierra Madero, "Academies to Produce Macho-Men in Cuba." Translated by Alicia Barraqué Ellison. Translating Cuba. February 19, 2016. https://translatingcuba.com/academies-to-produce-macho-men-in-cuba-abel-sierra-madero/. Esto incluyó a los acusados ​​de homosexualidad.

Siguiente de los años de la UMAP hay un período de poco más de cinco años (1971–1977) conocido como el quinquenio gris en el que el gobierno cubano controlaba rígidamente las producciones culturales y artísticas de la isla. Esto período limitó severamente la expresión y la publicación artísticas. Varios de los dramaturgos más destacados de Cuba, como Virgilio Piñera (1912–1979), Abelardo Estorino (1925–2013) y Antón Arrufat (1935–), sufrieron tremendamente bajo esta censura, tanto por su insistencia en la libertad creativa como por su homosexualidad. Rodeados de un ambiente hostil, los tres utilizaron la metáfora como forma de expresión, siempre tratando de evitar la censura. La obra de Piñera preguntó en términos amplios conceptos de identidad nacional y la parte del escritor como resistor. Un prolífico escritor de ensayos, cuentos y teatro, las colecciones de Piñera como Cold Tales (1956) y Little Maneuvers (1963) fueron acreditadas por inspirar a generaciones de escritores que vendrán después, incluso el autor conocido del Mariel, Reinaldo Arenas. Abelardo Estorino, que antes fue censurado con su obra Los mangos de Caín (1965), solo escribió un texto en los años 70 y en cambio se dedicó a la dirección de clásicos en la Compañía Teatro Estudio. Antón Arrufat recibió altos honores de la UNEAC por Los siete contra Tebas en 1968, pero esa institución publicó el libro con una nota que acusaba al escritor de ser un contrarrevolucionario; Arrufat fue condenado, y no publicó más por una década.

Finalmente, la inmigración hacia y desde La Habana varió drásticamente desde la década de 1960 hasta la actualidad, y las leyes que prohíben el reingreso, así como la relación política y acre entre los Estados Unidos y el régimen de Castro, crearon una forma estratificada de entender el hogar, la comunidad, y exilio. A principios de la década de 1960 se produjo un éxodo de las clases media y alta, que en su mayor parte aterrizaron en el sur de Florida y se quedaron. Después del Éxodo Mariel, la política de inmigración estadounidense de mediados de la década 90 llevó a un aumento de la inmigración de la isla, ya que 'pie mojado, pie seco' permitió acelerar los procedimientos de inmigración de EE.UU. para cubanos. El aumento de balseros es notable durante este Período Especial. De estas grandes olas de inmigración, Mariel se distingue por la demografía de la población, así como por el giro politizado en ambos lados: ese grupo fue menos aceptado por los cubanos en la isla y experimentó una integración más dura en su nueva comunidad del sur de Florida.⁵Aviva Chomsky, A History of the Cuban Revolution, 2nd ed. (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015), 75.

González Melo es descendiente de estos primeros dramaturgos cubanos así como heredero de esta historia enredada. En la conversación que sigue, González Melo reflexiona sobre la realidad del hombre "gay" en Cuba antes y después de Mariel, y cómo esta faceta de la historia cubana encuentra su camino en sus obras dramáticas. En particular, su obra Fuera del juego revisa el Caso Padilla y la UMAP, destacando la censura subversiva y la tortura psicológica de los artistas en los primeros años de la Revolución. Su obra Bayamesa se remonta a lo más lejano de la historia cubana, para abordar temas de la tradición colonialista, los roles de género y el feminismo en Cuba.

Gunnels: Describe los cambios, si los hubiera, en la realidad del hombre gay en Cuba desde que escribiste Chamaco (2004) hasta En ningún lugar del mundo (2018).

González Melo: El lapso que dices comprende poco más de una década y no creo que los cambios hayan sido muy apreciables. La Revolución no se ha comportado de modo precisamente bondadoso con los homosexuales, quienes fueron considerados durante mucho tiempo lacras sociales y enviados entre 1965 y 1968 a campos de trabajo llamados UMAP (Unidades Militares de Ayuda a la Producción). Todo ese proceso acrecentó el machismo y la homofobia en nuestra sociedad. En la obra de grandes dramaturgos cubanos, que además eran homosexuales (pienso en Virgilio Piñera, Abelardo Estorino o Antón Arrufat), el tema no aparece o aparece muy escamoteado, quizás a causa de la autocensura: después de las UMAP vinieron los terribles años 70 y sus políticas de marginación a homosexuales artistas. A mi generación le ha tocado una etapa un poco más amable, aunque la homofobia persiste y ha encontrado vías soterradas para manifestarse. En lo personal he podido abordar el tema gay en textos que se han publicado y estrenado dentro de la isla, han aparecido antologías de poesía y narrativa homoeróticas, etc. Se ha intentado incluir, en la enmienda a la Constitución, la noción del matrimonio igualitario que ya es una realidad en tantos países del mundo: pero durante demasiados años el propio gobierno ha sembrado el odio hacia los homosexuales, y la mentalidad del pueblo no puede cambiarse de un día para otro.

Gunnels: ¿Puede el teatro cambiar a un pueblo? ¿El poder del arte o interrogación?

González Melo: Ni el teatro ni ninguna otra manifestación artística pueden cambiar una sociedad. Sería demasiado pretencioso pensar que sí. He escuchado frases como "el arte cambia el mundo" y siempre siento que tienen un sentido figurado, metafórico. El teatro no es un partido político, no es un ejército, no es una bomba atómica ni una pandemia: no tiene ese poder de cambio brusco, inmediato, contundente. Lo que sí puede el teatro, confío en que sí, es tocar la mente y el corazón de una persona, de un espectador que asiste a una función y descubre otro modo de mirar, se identifica en ese espejo, encuentra algo que le lastima en lo profundo. El teatro transforma, en ese sentido, al individuo y no a la masa, aunque la experiencia de nuestro arte la tengamos en colectivo. El teatro trabaja siempre (en su ejecución, en su recepción) el comportamiento particular, no la generalidad. Tocamos a una persona, y esa persona tendrá en alguna ocasión, quizás, la oportunidad de tocar las cosas que mueven el mundo. Esa es la sencilla y hermosa condición de nuestro arte.

Gunnels: Su obra de 2018 En ningún lugar del mundo (Nowhere in the World) aborda el silencio en torno a la identidad sexual en Cuba (desde los años 80 hasta la actualidad), tanto como temas de visibilidad gay y el trauma del servicio militar, a través del protagonista Ángel se aprecia el dolor agudo del Mariel tanto para los que se fueron como para los que se quedaron. Cuba tiene una historia de trece años en África (1975–1988), con fuerzas militares cubanas sobre el terreno en nombre de la liberación de Sudáfrica durante ese tiempo. La asociación militar terminó con la independencia de Namibia y, según algunos, el comienzo de la retirada del apartheid en la zona. No obstante, las fuerzas cubanas regresaron con problemas psicológicos, y el drama de En ningún lugar del mundo vuelve a visitar esa época, así como el trauma inminente del Mariel. Ángel, como protagonista, sale de Cuba con el éxodo del 1980, y el drama comienza con su regreso a Cuba después del Mariel, solo para descubrir que el trauma entre familias es profundo e implacable. ¿Cómo entiendes el legado de la generación del Mariel a otros artistas cubanos que han escrito en exilio, forzado o no?

González Melo: El protagonista de En ningún lugar del mundo fue forzado a abandonar Cuba en 1980 por el Mariel, debido a problemas psiquiátricos (sí, algo despiadado: los enfermos mentales eran considerados directamente escoria), cuando en realidad la familia se lo quería "quitar de encima" por sus violentos testimonios de la dura experiencia de tres años como soldado en la Guerra de Angola. La historia de nuestros exilios está llena de gente anónima que no ha dado su testimonio porque aún sigue traumatizada. El Mariel es un entorno demasiado amplio y diverso que escapa a catalogaciones homogéneas. Lo más importante, pienso, es lo que significó como fenómeno, y los miles de cubanos que pudieron (que se vieron en la obligación de) integrarse a la cultura norteamericana y, al mismo tiempo, enriquecerla con su acción directa. No puede entenderse la cultura y la sociedad de Miami hoy sin sumar las capas de exilios que esa ciudad ha asumido. En lo personal admiro mucho la voluntad y la resistencia de las generaciones de cubanos exiliados que han reinventado el concepto de patria.

Gunnels: ¿Qué piensas sobre los dramaturgos que vivieron la época del éxodo del Mariel en Cuba pero permanecieron? Pienso particularmente en Ulises Rodríguez Febles y su obra Huevos. Ya hablamos sobre la idea de salir, ¿pero qué pasa con los que se quedan?

González Melo: El Mariel ha sido relatado brillantemente por dramaturgos que se mantienen creando en la isla, como el propio Ulises en Huevos o Carlos Celdrán en Diez millones. Los dos eran muy jóvenes en 1980 pero han logrado imprimir a sus textos, llenos de matices autobiográficos, un carácter que supera la reconstrucción histórica. Me gusta eso, que podamos sacudirnos el polvo de la cotidianidad, que tanta energía nos roba, y mirar nuestra historia y nuestro porvenir con altura. Ellos viven en Cuba, sí, pero poseen una reconocida carrera internacional: Ulises ha triunfado recientemente en México con una obra que curiosamente reconstruye la trayectoria de otro artista exiliado, Dámaso Pérez Prado, y Celdrán ha paseado sus Diez millones por importantes festivales del mundo. Cada vez la frontera entre el afuera y el adentro, entre irse y quedarse, es más permeable y menos estricta. Por suerte.

El teatro disecado: El proyecto persistente de González Melo

Gunnels: ¿Cómo afectó crecer durante el Período Especial a la trayectoria o temario de tu obra, y la influencia de otros poderes mundiales (como Rusia) en tu país?

González Melo: Es inevitable la influencia. Mi niñez estuvo colmada del imaginario ruso y soviético: esa huella es evidente, por ejemplo, en mi obra Talco, pero también en parte de mis cuentos y en mi pasión por esa cultura. Estudié el bachillerato en una escuela vocacional llamada precisamente "Lenin": fue entre los años 1994 y 1997, en régimen interno. Allí padecí la escasez (de alimentos, de luz eléctrica, de recursos sanitarios) pero también descubrí la solidaridad. Allí sufrí acoso escolar pero pude formarme como alguien independiente. De esa experiencia llena de contrastes nació mi primer libro: Memorias de cera. Y esa etapa, en pleno Período Especial, marcó mi interés por la paradoja en que hemos vivido los cubanos: gritar consignas heroicas en la Plaza de la Revolución durante los desfiles, y al mismo tiempo estar muriéndonos de hambre en casa y susurrando por los rincones nuestra miseria de vida. El Período Especial ajustó el nivel de vida de la sociedad y acrecentó las diferencias de clase, el clientelismo, el mercado negro, la corrupción en todos los ámbitos. Esa doble moral atraviesa mi literatura: personajes que precisan, a toda costa, ponerse máscaras para seguir sobreviviendo.

Gunnels: En Nevada, un tema primordial es el deseo de salir. ¿Cómo ves este sentimiento a través de otras obras que has escrito, y de dónde viene? ¿Puedes profundizar un poco en la naturaleza de la relación Cuba/Estados Unidos y este deseo de salir de la isla, especialmente en esta época de inestabilidad inmigratoria?

González Melo: Nacer en una isla condiciona el deseo de ir más allá de las fronteras inmediatas que el mar impone. Ya Virgilio Piñera lo resumía en una imagen: "La maldita circunstancia del agua por todas partes". La isla es encierro y anhelo de partir para, en mi caso, tener la oportunidad de volver. Ha sido una constante cubana la necesidad de huir de la isla, acrecentada por factores políticos y económicos en la etapa de la Revolución. Mi propio padre tuvo que exiliarse en México con el fin de garantizarnos una mejor vida: no hablo de lujos, sino de tener dinero para comer, para asearnos, para transportarnos… Como la mayor diáspora se ha dado hacia Estados Unidos, tenemos con ese país una relación muy estrecha. En mi tesis doctoral estudio precisamente los vínculos entre familia y exilio en la dramaturgia de la Gran Cuba, entendida como la generada tanto en la isla como en el extranjero: me gusta esa idea de patria expandida, no sujeta a límites físicos, sino más bien a sensaciones y ámbitos en común. Esa intención recorre gran parte de mi obra como elemento de nuestra idiosincrasia: partir y regresar. Nevada y Adentro hablan del viaje clandestino por mar y los riesgos que ello supone. En Sistema, la tensión se halla justamente en que el protagonista es atrapado en Miami y no puede volver. Epopeya, Intemperie o En ningún lugar del mundo diseñan el arco que va desde el destierro hasta el regreso al paso de los años, y todo lo que ese reencuentro comporta.

Gunnels: Pero para los Marielitos, a quienes se les aseguró que una vez salieran de Cuba no podrían volver a ella jamás, el exilio ha sido y es especialmente doloroso. ¿Te interesa con En ningún lugar del mundo diseccionar el impacto que ha tenido en esa comunidad el dolor ante el regreso a la isla, que finalmente fue posible?

González Melo: Por supuesto. El Mariel y la Guerra de Angola son asuntos que apenas hemos tratado en la escritura nacional pero sus huellas siguen ahí: son heridas no cerradas, y algo de ello he intentado tocar con En ningún lugar del mundo. La estructura familiar ha sido, en la tradición de la dramaturgia cubana, el núcleo a través del cual observar los grandes temas sociales y políticos. Esto tiene que ver con lo que antes te comentaba: el teatro solo funciona desde lo particular y no desde lo general. Los procesos históricos se analizan en libros, artículos, entrevistas, en amplios fondos bibliográficos y documentales. Una obra de teatro no puede contener todo ese proceso, todas las vidas malgastadas en el intento de construir determinado proyecto político-social. Lo que sí puede una obra es aguzar la mirada, focalizar un pequeño grupo humano y aplicarle el escalpelo. Utilizas el verbo adecuado: diseccionar. Como dramaturgo me siento exactamente así: Cuba es mi quirófano, esa familia destrozada es el cuerpo que yace sobre la camilla, y he de aplicar el bisturí con precaución, con suma responsabilidad, intentando llegar a la raíz del dolor.

Gunnels: Es verdad lo que antes decías, que hay una relación muy estrecha entre Cuba y Estados Unidos. ¿Dirías que las experiencias que has tenido en Estados Unidos como dramaturgo cubano hayan sido particularmente reveladores en cuanto a entender esta relación?

González Melo: Han sido experiencias muy diversas. En Chicago, por ejemplo, Aguijón Theater ha estrenado Adentro y Epopeya; a pesar de ser textos de marcadas referencias nacionales y de que un cubano (Sándor Menéndez) los dirigió, en ambos casos se produjo un rico diálogo con una comunidad latina más amplia, gracias también a las excelentes traducciones de Marcela Muñoz: actores, equipo artístico y espectadores asumían como suyos los temas del desarraigo y la frustración política. Algo similar sentí con el estreno de Por gusto en Repertorio Español de New York, y eso que también era cubana Leyma López, la directora: la desilusión incesante de la juventud y la monotonía de la existencia circular resultaban cuestiones afines a un elenco multinacional. Cuando Ohio Northern University produjo Nevada, recuerdo que les interesaba mucho el estudio minucioso del contexto: parte del equipo visitó la isla y el montaje contó con proyecciones documentales, que contrastaban deliciosamente con la dramatización del texto en inglés, a cargo del mexicano Otto Minera y con traducción de Yael Prizant. En Miami, donde la comunidad hispana es también amplia y variada, la confrontación esencial ha sido con el público cubano, que lógicamente resulta el más interesado, por experiencia directa o por referencia, en ficciones sobre La Habana marginal de Chamaco, Talco y Nevada, obras que Alberto Sarraín dirigió. Siento que el estreno de En ningún lugar del mundo en el XXXIII Festival Internacional de Teatro Hispano, en producción de Teatro Avante, dirigido por Mario Ernesto Sánchez y con traducción de Marian Prío, ha dimensionado aún más el debate sobre la tensión Cuba/Estados Unidos, que es el conflicto entre quienes se quedaron y quienes se fueron. Menciono siempre a las traductoras pues considero esencial su labor y su dedicación: ellas, y mi traductor británico William Gregory, han sido los responsables de que mis textos queden tan bien reescritos en esa lengua.

Gunnels: ¿Cómo escoges los motivos que vas a revisar en el teatro? En Bayamesa (2019) se ve la representación directa de la Cuba tradicional de principios del siglo XX, donde la protagonista María Milanés lucha por encajar a Cuba tradicional con sus propios sueños y ambiciones feministas. En ella, tú alteras tiempo y espacio en el escenario para generar en la obra un diálogo tenso entre el pasado y el presente, y con un suicidio desgarrador que deja a la audiencia destrozada. Nos encontramos a la mujer auténtica que nos anima a todos, pero también aflora la idea de suicidio como tema social, cuando hoy día hay más y más suicidios de gente joven. Como terminas Fuera del juego: "la historia se repite, y se repite".

González Melo: La motivación de la escritura es múltiple y cambia de un proyecto a otro. Lo esencial siempre es que el material de partida resuene en mí, que me parezca urgente compartirlo en escena. En el caso de Bayamesa le debo mucho a mi madre, que es filóloga y escritora, y que me habló por primera vez de María Luisa Milanés (1893–1919). Leí sus poemas. Leí su sorprendente autobiografía, que es posiblemente el primer manifiesto feminista escrito en Cuba y uno de los primeros de Latinoamérica. Me impactó su simbólico suicidio: un disparo en el vientre, con la pistola de su padre militar. Un alma libre como ella prefirió escapar de ese modo, antes que continuar sometida al machismo imperante. Supe que la obra debía ser un réquiem que la devolviera a la vida, mediante una ficción que intentase acompañarla, darle voz, siquiera durante la hora y media que dura la puesta en escena. Se cumplió en 2019 un siglo justo de su muerte y, como dices, sigue siendo por desgracia un drama tan vigente…

Gunnels: ¿En qué anda tu trabajo ahora, después del éxito tremendo de Bayamesa?

González Melo: Me estoy sumergiendo cada vez más en la historia de Cuba. Creo que nuestra historia se ha abordado muy poco en la dramaturgia, a veces con una mirada muy superficial, y confío en que el teatro tiene la posibilidad de arrojar una luz nítida sobre sucesos del pasado que nos permitan situarnos en la complejidad del presente. ¿Cómo podemos vivir, cómo podemos entender el país que somos si no analizamos lo que nos ha traído hasta aquí? Durante años trabajé temas y conflictos del presente inmediato, desde los ambientes marginales hasta el lujo de los nuevos ricos. Pero ahora mismo eso se me ha agotado. Imagínate un país cada vez más desabastecido, con un pésimo transporte público, un país donde la gente tiene que pasar horas y horas en horrorosas colas para conseguir una libra de carne de cerdo, una bolsita de detergente, un litro de aceite, todo ello a precios astronómicos. El panorama actual es desolador, no sabría en qué tono dramático abordarlo. Quizás únicamente desde la farsa o el esperpento. Por eso me refugio en el pasado, porque siento que sin memoria no hay densidad de tradición. Hay mucho donde escarbar. El teatro no ha entrado a fondo, por ejemplo, en los graves casos de censura propiciados por las políticas culturales de la Revolución. La censura me interesa mucho: la tenemos demasiado cerca, a menudo sin percatarnos. Me interesa mucho la revisión histórica, siempre que tenga un matiz particular que pueda hablar de una tensión global.

Gunnels: La censura sigue siendo, en efecto, un problema pernicioso en el mundo, ahora con 'caras' diferentes. Al abordar el caso Padilla en tu obra Fuera del juego, te preocupas por problematizar el rol del artista.⁶En esta obra, González Melo re-visualiza el infame Caso Padilla, en el que el célebre poeta Heberto Padilla es arrestado, encarcelado, tortuado y finalmente exiliado por su trabajo contrarrevolucionaria que cuestionaba la Revolución, el Comandante (Fidel Castro) y el papel de los escritores en general. Utilizada como ilustración clásica de la traumática censura de finales de los 60 y principios de los 70 en La Habana, González Melo cuenta la historia desde la voz del propio poeta como protagonista principal. ¿Es que te interesa "complicar la cosa", para decirlo con palabras de tu propio personaje de Heberto Padilla?

González Melo: Dicen que uno escribe la misma obra a lo largo de toda la vida. El tema de la censura y la autocensura me ha interesado siempre, quizá porque desde muy joven tuve que negociar con ella. Mi libro Memorias de cera por poco no ve la luz, ya que, aunque ganó un premio nacional que consistía en su publicación, contaba mi descubrimiento de la sexualidad en la escuela Lenin, y eso a los funcionarios de la editorial no les gustaba nada. Chamaco, de hecho, puede entenderse como una obra sobre el miedo a la libre expresión dentro de la familia Depás, donde cada uno teme sincerarse ante el otro y todos viven en una espiral de mentiras. Epopeya obtuvo en 2014 el Premio Nacional de Dramaturgia y se publicó por Ediciones Alarcos, pero tuvo una fugaz presentación de solo cincuenta ejemplares, no se distribuyó en librerías, el libro no puede encontrarse en ningún sitio y la obra no puede estrenarse en Cuba (es un texto donde utilizo la metáfora de la Guerra de Troya y el hipotexto de Hécuba de Eurípides para debatir, una vez más, sobre el regreso a la isla de los cubanos exiliados, una vez que Príamo ha caído en combate).

Es cierto que en años recientes me he acercado mucho a la relación entre arte y censura. En 2017 dirigí en Argos Teatro, en La Habana, Cartas de amor a Stalin del dramaturgo español Juan Mayorga, que para mí es una obra que habla sobre la misma situación que padecemos muchos artistas, periodistas y cubanos en general: el terror a decir la verdad, a hablar libremente. Es también uno de los temas de Bayamesa: la censura a la libertad creativa, la plasmación del dolor mediante la poesía, la necesidad de ser independiente. El padre, el marido y la madre de María Luisa Milanés no admitieron ese espíritu rebelde, y eso desencadenó el conflicto y trajo el fatal desenclace. Con Heberto Padilla ocurre lo mismo: fue un hombre muy cercano a la Revolución cubana a inicios de los años 60, incluso fue diplomático, pero lentamente se fue desencantando y su poesía fue haciéndose cada vez más inadmisible para un régimen que terminó asfixiándolo. No quiero "complicar la cosa", más bien intento lo contrario: visibilizar estos asuntos convirtiéndolos en dramaturgia y lenguaje.

Sobre la entrevistadora y el entrevistado

Bridgette W. Gunnels is Associate Professor of Spanish at Emory University and a scholar in Latin American literature from the twentieth century, in all forms, with special emphasis in the short story.

Abel González Melo is a Cuban dramatist, writer, teacher, and theater director. González Melo studied Theater Arts at the Universidad de las Artes de Cuba and is the recipient of various prizes and awards for his literary and theater works, including the Premio Primer Concurso de Dramaturgia de la Embajada de España (2005) for Chamaco [Kiddo]. Most recently, in January 2020, he won the prestigious Casa de las Américas prize for his work, Bayamesa.

Introduction

Playwright Abel González Melo was born in 1980 in Havana, Cuba, the year the Mariel Boatlift saw approximately 125,000 people flee his country, an event he dramatizes in his 2018 play Nowhere in the World (En ningún lugar del mundo). González Melo studied Theater Arts at the Universidad de las Artes de Cuba. He is the recipient of various prizes and awards for his literary and theater works, including the Premio Primer Concurso de Dramaturgia de la Embajada de España (2005) for Chamaco [Kiddo], one of González Melo's most recognized works. Most recently, in January 2020, he won the prestigious Casa de las Américas prize for his work, Bayamesa.

González Melo's work spans two decades and covers multiple social issues of Cuban life. From Cuba's tangled relationship with the Mariel Boatlift in the aforementioned Nowhere in the World (En ningún lugar del mundo, 2018) to teenage prostitution during the early 2000s in Old Havana in his trilogy, Winter Escapes (Fugas de Invierno, 2004–2009), his plays immerse audiences into the streets that surround Havana's Capitolio, to the parks, alleys, and theaters that provide spaces for illegal prostitution, to private homes centering the importance of family to Cubans. The first decade of González Melo's writing centers the Cuban youth culture of the early 2000s, a culture both gay and straight, hungry and sated, resistant and complacent in a country where the Revolution is still fought daily in the streets (although now around the government approved Wifi hotspots). While González Melo maintains his private identification, his plays challenge categorization, interrogate questions of sexuality, and explore survival, the commodification of the body, intense mental trauma, the pain of history, and the deep love of family. His characters weave in and out of his plays to demonstrate with such complexity that as some things have changed others have remained the same.

González Melo's most recent work shifts to recovering figures and episodes from Cuban history with a revisionist eye. Such figures include the early twentieth-century feminist poet María Luisa Milanés (from Bayamo, Cuba) in Bayamesa (2019), which was awarded the Casa de las Américas prize for theater in January of 2020. Tackling the topic of censure at the height of the Revolution in Cuba, González Melo's recent work features Cuban historical figures. Fuera del juego (Outside the Game), dramatizes the experience of Cuban cultural figure Heberto Padilla, an award-winning poet whose work critiqued the Revolution and its leaders in his moment, 1967–68, leading to his arrest, torture, and subsequent exile to the United States in 1980. Padilla worked many years in various positions in higher education in the US, namely Ohio State University, Bowdoin College, and NYU's Institute for the Humanities, before he died alone as a poet in residence at Auburn University, in 2000. In González Melo's most recent drama, Cádiz en José Martí (Festival de Teatro Iberoamericano de Cádiz, 2020), he dramatizes the mythic national hero of the island, revolutionary figure José Martí (1853–1895), by situating him in the Spanish city of Cádiz, his first destination in his long exile and political deportation under the colonial regime.

In this conversation, González Melo explains his creative process and inspirations, the Cuban migration experience as dramatic material, and the idea of recasting history for new audiences and times. He discusses how he drew from lived experience in Havana to craft Winter Escapes as well as how his recent work dives deeply into questions of community and family during some of Cuba's grimmest moments. González Melo also reflects on the unique ligatures between the United States and Cuba. One of these ties is the Spanish-English linguistic connection, as many Cuban-Americans are bilingual. Our conversation, originally conducted in Spanish, has been translated into English here. [Se puede leer la versión en español aquí.]

Kiddo: One Playwright's Beginnings, or González Melo's Early Work

Gunnels: You have written poetry, narrative, non-fiction. Why theater? Do you think that playwriting suits your stories more than other avenues of creation?

González Melo: Theater has something wonderful for a writer: it moves literature away from loneliness. It proposes creation in a team and in direct contact with the spectator. Both questions are very attractive to me. The idea that writing never ceases, is always reinterpreted in the present, needs the communion between the director, the actors, the designers, the technicians, and precisely, inevitably, the complicity of the audience. I am dazzled by that unfinished nature of dramatic writing, that urge to feel the impact immediately. I enjoy writing narrative or essay, but in both cases I miss the real dialogue with the human being. Probably because, more and more, playwriting for me is a process directly related to a very particular human group; it must have an imagined texture that has to walk on a tightrope for success.

Gunnels: Does it feel 'unfinished' to you because it needs other artists, actors to complete it? Or more because of the constant flow of new audiences that are always distinct?

González Melo: Theater is something we do among us all, both the artists and the public. Remember the Greek origin of the word theater: "to watch or look at." Put another way, we only exist because someone looks at us. That is one of the greatest pleasures of writing dramas: feeling that one only offers a guide of stage directions and dialogues on paper, but that the character will have the body, voice, and soul of whoever embodies it in front of the viewer, and that this person will finish building it, in its process of active reception. Why do we keep reviving and repremiering the classics? Because their essence, rather than the argument, lies in how the specific story is told today in the public agora: who executes it, why they decide to do it, in what context and before whom, what senses are born from that experience.

Gunnels: I want to give readers a sense of your Winter Escapes trilogy before we discuss it.

Chamaco ([Kiddo], 2004 English translation by William Gregory) is the first installment of the trilogy. It was first published in Spanish from Ediciones Alarcos and then translated into English by Yael Prizant (University of Miami Press, 2010).¹There are two different translations. William Gregory translated both Kiddo and Nevada; Yael Prizant translated the trilogy in a bilingual version with a different press in 2010. Kiddo has been staged globally, from the Argos Theater in Havana to Manchester, England's HOME Theater, to the most recent translation to Czech, with production in Prague set for fall 2021. The trilogy, including Nevada and Talco [Talc] (the second and third installments), covers a span of three months in a tropical winter of discontent. Miami-based academic and theater critic Lillian Manzor writes that "the trilogy addresses concerns that are dear to the author and his generation, namely: the complex and contradictory ways in which homosexuality, sex, and migration from the countryside to the capital becomes means of survival in a society that has lost all sense of value."²Lillian Manxor and Austin Webber, "Ground Down to Nothing but Still Fighting." Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics. Accessed March 25, 2021. https://hemisphericinstitute.org/en/emisferica-82/manzor-webbert.html. Kiddo immerses viewers into Christmas Eve in Havana, where a sister uneasily waits for her brother to come home for a dinner that he will never eat, as unbeknownst to her he has died in a knife fight. Nevada follows Lucía and her boyfriend/pimp Rosnay as they encounter the reality of selling their bodies in the effort to get out or escape, in this case, to the state of Nevada, where prostitution is legal, and the "candies come in brilliant gold wrappers." Talc, the final installment, portrays a crude and dirty reality that takes place mainly in the bathroom of an old cinema used for trafficking and prostitution, where the paths of four characters—Javi, Mashenka, Zuleidy, and Alvaro—crisscross in a violent and tense battle for survival. The trilogy was followed by nearly twenty other plays.

Abel, this trilogy really centers the experience of Cuban youth. Describe the importance of giving voice to Cuban youth in many of the works you've written.

González Melo: Now that you mention it, I think that the protagonists of all my plays reflect my age at the time of writing, and in each text these characters are getting older because they grow with me. I wanted to fill them with my doubts, my foibles, my pains. They are like an undercover image of myself in the midst of the world in which I grew up: the Cuba between decades of wars and shortages, and now for a bit more than a decade in Spain in the twenty-first century. I live on the margin between the two countries, and I watch them both with a mixture of passion and strangeness. I cannot speak of all the young people en masse, I do not know how to do it, but I can tell my story of the transition from adolescence to youth. Those impulses are the ones that haunt my work in theater. Hopefully they have to do with the same impulses and emotions of other people.

Gunnels: "Passion and strangeness"—tell me more.

González Melo: I remember that in the early 2000s, when I was walking through Old Havana at night towards my house, I was very curious about the dozens of teenagers who waited leaning on the columns in front of the Capitol, or hanging around Central Park in the middle of the tourist area. What were all these people doing here? Who were they? Little by little, I got closer to them. Many lived clandestinely in Havana; they had emigrated from the East of the island. All of these cisgender boys prostituted themselves, or aspired to do so.³Note from González Melo: "Here we're speaking of, if one must clarify, only cisgender males. I'm no expert in gender studies nor related terminology, but trans populations and women, as I've explained, were in other zones of the city." I learned of many fascinating, terrible stories. The process of discovering them thoroughly was not easy. None were going to give me an interview and tell me about their lives. I became a discreet client. I saved money and went with one of them to a rental room. In the fleetingness of that moment of strange pleasure, I kept myself alert. I listened to them talk about their lives, about their young children whom they had to feed, about their partners who were aware that they were hunting foreigners or Cubans who could pay for sex. My research expanded. One thing led me to another, and I composed a map of the nocturnal marginality of Old Havana. The female prostitute area was at the intersection of Monte and Cienfuegos streets; transvestites and transsexuals were waiting for their clients in the Parque de la Fraternidad; drugs were sold in an abandoned cinema, etc. I fully immersed myself. I did unthinkable things during those years, things that I would not do today. But luckily I dared to do it: I wanted to get to know these people, their places, their reasons, all that environment that the official press did not publish. Three or four years of immersion. After Kiddo finished, I still had so much material that Nevada and Talc were born. Also in my plays Por gusto and Within there are traces of this universe.

Gunnels: Lucía from Nevada and María Luisa from Bayamesa really move me because of the way they confront their worlds, hostile worlds, but always with persistence and love of family front and center. They are strong feminist cross-generational characterizations. For you, is there one character or "angel" from your work that really moves you?

González Melo: I don't usually start from emotion in my writing process. I am quite technical, something I learned with my teacher Raquel Carrió (a great Cuban author, founder in 1976 of the Dramaturgy Department at the University of the Arts of Cuba). the structure-character-language triad is the basis of the preparation of my projects. I believe that emotion comes (or does not come) in parallel with (or after) appreciation of experience. The emotion will then be in the viewer. But for this to happen, the construction of the text or the show itself must be precise, clear; it cannot start from the desire to move emotionally, because the work becomes disfigured. Sometimes I feel that emotion clouds the objectivity of what happens. This happens a lot with actors who act "excited" and then, they overact; or with the dramatists who are over-excited with what they are doing and lose the course of the action, they lose the written synthesis.

It is true that I have had some unique experiences—I would say mystical—during writing itself. It happened while writing Kiddo, in that I felt like someone was dictating it to me directly, right over my shoulder into my ear. The violent death of my father was very recent and the monologue of Silvia, when she found out that her brother had been murdered, I wrote that in tears. I have always believed that Kiddo is my father who became an angel to dictate this work to me and has accompanied me ever since.

History Repeating Itself

Especially in his more recent dramas, Abel González Melo has shifted from describing personal experiences in his work to referencing and dramatizing Cuban historical touchpoints (such as the Mariel Boatlift, the UMAPs work camps, the Grey Period, and the Special Period of Peace). The Mariel Boatlift consitutes the single largest mass migration from Cuba in its history. From April to October 1980, an estimated 125,000 Cubans left the Mariel Port for the United States. The story was well-covered in the media. A small group of Cubans ran a city bus into the gates of the Peruvian Embassy in Havana in an attempt to gain access to the grounds to request political asylum (and eventually leave the island). They were granted asylum, and afterwards, an estimated 10,000 people approached the embassy with the same hopes. Watching this situation unfold from the US, then President Jimmy Carter issued an open invitation to anyone from Cuba who was fleeing the Castro regime, bypassing in part US immigration policy and procedure. A typical Castro pivot followed: after a very public speech on May 1, the Day of the Worker, in Havana's Revolution Plaza, he emptied Cuban's prisons and hospitals of convicted criminals and ill patients and required any American vessel that was picking up family or loved ones at Mariel Port to also take with them a boatload of other 'undesirables,' in which he included homosexual men and those with severe psychiatric problems. As González Melo notes in our conversation below, Cuba's history with gay males is marked by tragic discrimination, torture, and death. The storied UMAP work camps (in Spanish, Unidades Militares de Ayuda de la Producción) that served as a type of work-based prison from 1965–68 in Camagüey, Cuba, were politicized as agricultural camps for "conscientious objectors," but were more a type of social "purge" of any person who was deemed to be anti-Castro or anti-revolutionary, according to historian Abel Sierra Madero.⁴Abel Sierra Madero, "Academies to Produce Macho-Men in Cuba." Translated by Alicia Barraqué Ellison. Translating Cuba. February 19, 2016. https://translatingcuba.com/academies-to-produce-macho-men-in-cuba-abel-sierra-madero/. This included those accused of homosexuality.

Following the years of the UMAP work camps is a period of a little more than five years (1971–1977) known as the Grey Period (El quinquenio gris in Spanish) in which the Cuban government controlled rigidly the cultural and artistic productions of the island, severly limiting artistic expression and publication. Several of Cuba's most noted dramatists, like Virgilio Piñera (1912–1979), Abelardo Estorino (1925–2013), and Antón Arrufat (1935–) suffered tremendously under this censure, as much for their insistence on creative freedom as for their homosexuality. Surrounded by a hostile environment, all three utilized metaphor as a form of expression, always trying to avoid censure. Piñera's work questioned in broad terms concepts of national identity and the role of the writer as resistor. A prolific writer of essay, short story and theater, Piñera's collections Cold Tales (1956) and Little Maneuvers (1963) were credited with inspiring generations of writers after him, including noted Mariel author Reinaldo Arenas. Abelardo Estorino, who was censured earlier with his work Los mangos de Caín (1965), only wrote one text in the 70s and instead dedicated himself to directing classics in the Company Teatro Estudio. Antón Arrufat was awarded high honors from the National Union of Writers and Artists (UNEAC, in Spanish) for Los siete contra Tebas in 1968, but that institution published the book with a note that accused the writer of being a counter-revolucionary; Arrufat was condemned and ostracized, and didn't publish for more than a decade.

Finally, immigration to and from Havana varied drastically from the 1960s to the present day, and the laws prohibiting re-entry, as well as the acrid political relationship between the US and the Castro regime, created a layered way of understanding home, community, and exile. The early 1960s saw an exodus of the upper and middle classes, who for the most part landed in south Florida and remained. After the Mariel Boatlift, US immigration policy of the mid-90s led to some increased immigration from the island, as "wet foot, dry foot" allowed for fast-tracking of US immigration procedures for Cubans, and the increase of rafters (balseros, in Spanish) is notable during this Special Period of Peace. Of these major immigration waves, Mariel is distinctive due to the population demographics as well as the politicized spin on both sides. That group was both maligned by Cubans on the island and experienced a rougher integration into their new south Florida community.⁵Aviva Chomsky, A History of the Cuban Revolution, 2nd ed. (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015), 75.

González Melo is a descendent of these early Cuban playwrights as well as an inheritor of this tangled history. In the conversation below he reflects on the reality of the gay male in Cuba before and after Mariel, and how this facet of Cuban history finds its way into his work. In particular, his play Outside the Game revisits the Padilla Case and the UMAPs, highlighting the subversive censure and psychological torture of artists in the early days of the Revolution. His play Bayamesa reaches back the farthest in Cuban history to tackle issues of colonialist tradition, gender roles, and feminism in Cuba.

Gunnels: How have you seen the Cuban life change for the gay man from writing Kiddo (2004) to Nowhere in the World (2018)?

González Melo: The time period you're referring to is about a decade long, and I don't think that we have seen noted change with regard to the day-to-day life of the gay man in Cuba. The Revolution wasn't too friendly with homosexuals, as they were considered during much of that time as the equivalent of social filth and outcasts; indeed many homosexuals were sent to work camps during the years of 1965–68 (UMAPS, Military Units for Help in Production). This entire process accentuated and encouraged intense machismo and homophobia in Cuban society. In the work of some of the best Cuban dramatists, who additionally were homosexual (I'm thinking of Virgilio Piñera, Abelardo Estorino, or Antón Arrufat), the topic is absent or appears hidden mostly due to self-censure/autocensure. After the horrible experience with the UMAP came the equally traumatic decade of the 1970s, which is historically noted for its strong politics based in marginalization of homosexual artists. My generation hasn't felt as much pain, as today's Cuban artist deals with a more or less 'friendly' public, although homophobia definitely persists and has found more pernicious ways to manifest. In my work personally I've been able to take on the topic of homosexuality in works that I have published and performed on the island; additionally, anthologies of homoerotic poetry and narrative have recently been published. We are trying to include in an amendment to the national Constitution the idea of gay marriage rights, an idea that is presently accepted in many other countries in the world. The problem is that for so many years, too many years, our own government has planted seeds of hate towards homosexuals, and the mentality of a country can't be changed from one day to the next.

Gunnels: But can theater change a country? The power of art or interrogation?

González Melo: I don't believe either theater or any other artistic manifestation can change a society. It would be too pretentious to think so. I have heard phrases like "art changes the world," and I always feel that they have a figurative, metaphorical meaning. Theater is not a political party; it is not an army; it is not an atomic bomb or a pandemic. It does not have that power of abrupt, immediate, forceful change. What theater can do, and I believe this to be true, is to touch the mind and heart of a person, of a spectator who attends a show and discovers another way of looking, of identifying himself/herself in that mirror, of finding something that hurts them deeply. Theater transforms, in this sense, the individual and not the masses, although we share the experience of our art collectively, together. Theater always works at (in its execution, in its reception) particular behaviors, not general ones. We touch one person, and that person will have, on occasion perhaps, the opportunity to touch the things that move the world. That is the simple and beautiful condition of our art.

Gunnels: Your 2018 play Nowhere in the World (En ningún lugar del mundo) addresses silence around sexual identity in Cuba (from the 80s to present day), as well as issues of gay visibility and the trauma of military service, as the lead Ángel negotiates the acute pain of the Mariel Boatlift for those that left as well as for those that remained. Cuba has a thirteen-year history in Africa (1975–1988), with Cuban forces on the ground in the name of liberation from South Africa during that time. Their association ended with Namibian independence and, some say, the beginning of the retreat of apartheid in the area. Regardless, Cuban forces returned with psychological issues, and the drama of Nowhere in the World revisits that time, as well as the impending trauma of Mariel. Ángel leaves the island with the boatlift, and the drama picks up with his return to Cuba after Mariel, to find that family trauma is deep and unforgiving. How do you understand the legacy of the Mariel Generation in comparison to other Cuban artists that have written in exile, either forced or by choice?

González Melo: The protagonist of Nowhere in the World was forced to leave Cuba in 1980 during the Mariel Boatlift, due to psychiatric problems (yes, a ruthless detail of Cuban history: the mentally ill were directly considered scum, unwanted by society, alongside homosexuals and convicts), although the truth of the matter was that the family wanted to get rid of him due to his frequent and violent testimonies of the hard experience of three years as a soldier in the Angolan War as you describe in your synopsis. The history of our exiles is full of anonymous people who have not given their testimony because they are still traumatized. Mariel as a historical moment is very broad and diverse in its interpretation; it often escapes homogeneous cataloging. The most important thing is what it meant as a phenomenon, and the thousands of Cubans who could (who were forced to) integrate themselves into the North American culture and, at the same time, enrich it with their direct action. The culture and society of Miami cannot be understood today without adding the layers of exiles that that city has assumed. Personally, I admire the will and the resistance of the generations of Cuban exiles who have reinvented the concept of homeland.

Gunnels: What do you think about other playwrights who experienced Mariel on the island and stayed? I'm thinking of the play Eggs, by Ulises Rodríguez Febles. We spoke already about the idea of getting out, but what of those who stay?

González Melo: The Mariel story has been told brilliantly by playwrights who keep creating on the island, as Ulises himself in Eggs or Carlos Celdrán in Ten Million. Both were very young in 1980 but have managed to print their texts, full of autobiographical nuances, and this quality surpasses historical reconstruction. I like that: that we can shake off the dust of daily life, that steals so much of our daily energy, and look at our history and our future with a different perspective. Those authors live in Cuba, yes, but they have recognized international careers. Ulises was tremendously successful in Mexico with a work that curiously reconstructs the trajectory of another exiled artist, Dámaso Pérez Prado, and Celdrán has premiered Ten Million at important festivals all over the world. More and more the border between the outside and the inside, between going and staying, is more permeable and less strict. Fortunately.

Drama as Dissection: One Playwright's Persistent Project

From the 1970s to the late 80s, Cuba's economy was nearly solely supported by the Soviet Union, who imported Cuban sugar and other products and exported massive amounts of petroleum to the island to fuel agriculture and transportation. The external effects of the dissolution of the Comecon were immediate: Cuba lost nearly 80% of its imports, and with a heavy trade embargo from the US already in place, the country was left without a major import/export partner. The island entered a period of years (from 1991–1995, although some say it hasn't ended) that later became known as the Special Period of Peace (Período especial), marked by extreme food scarcity (borderline famine), nationwide blackouts to conserve energy (apagones), sometimes for twelve to fourteen hours daily, and a complete dry up of tourism. González Melo was a teenager during this time at the Lenin School in Havana.

Gunnels: Describe how growing up during the Special Period impacted your view of Cuban life vis-à-vis foreign powers.

González Melo: The influence is inevitable. My childhood was full of the Russian and Soviet imaginary: that trace is evident, for example, in my work Talc, but also in part of my stories and in my passion for that culture. I studied in a boarding school called, very precisely, "Lenin." I was there between years 1994 and 1997. There I suffered intense shortages (food, electricity, health resources), but I also discovered solidarity. At that school I suffered bullying, but I was able to become an independent person. From that experience full of contrasts, my first book was born: Wax Memoirs. And that stage, the Special Period, marked my interest in the paradox in which we Cubans have lived. We all shout heroic slogans in the Plaza de la Revolución during the parades, and at the same time we starve to death at home and whisper in the corners the details of our misery. The Special Period adjusted the standard of living of society and increased class differences, clientelism, the black market, corruption in all areas. That double-edged moral crisscrosses my literature: characters who need, at all costs, to put on masks to continue surviving.

Gunnels: In Nevada, a salient theme is the Cuban desire to get out or escape. How do you see that imagined community elsewhere juxtaposed against what is often a very different reality (as in the case of Mariel, for example, or the present-day immigratory reality in the USA)?

González Melo: Being born on an island foments the desire to go beyond the immediate borders that the sea imposes. Virgilio Piñera summed it up in an image: "The damn circumstance of having water everywhere." The island is a prison and the longing to leave is constant alongside, in my case, having the opportunity to return. The need to flee the island has been a consistent facet of Cuban identity, increased by political and economic factors experienced in various stages of the Revolution. My own father had to go into exile in Mexico in order to guarantee us a better life: I am not talking about luxuries, but about having money to eat, to dress and take care of ourselves, to move about the island. The United States is the destination for a great many Cuban migrations; we have a very close relationship. In my doctoral thesis I study precisely the links between family and exile in the dramaturgy of Greater Cuba, understood here as a Cuba generated both on the island and abroad. I like that idea of ​​an expanded homeland, not subject to physical limits, but rather to feelings and areas that both share in common. This issue is found in a large part of my work as an element of our idiosyncrasy: the idea of leaving and returning. Both Nevada and Within talk about the undercover, dangerous trip by sea and the risks undertaken there. In Sistema, the tension is precisely in that the protagonist is trapped in Miami and cannot return. Epopeya, Weathered, Nowhere in the World illustrate the arc that starts at exile only to return after some time, and then most critically, everything that that particular reunion involves and drags out into the present.

Gunnels: But for the Marielitos, precisely, who were told upon leaving that they would never be allowed to return, exile is (was?) painful in different ways. How does this pain of return change the "community" of Greater Cuba that you mention earlier? Is that something that Nowhere in the World wants to dissect?

González Melo: Of course. Mariel and the Angolan War are matters that we have barely dealt with in the Cuban national tradition of writing, but their traces are still there. They are wounds that have not been closed, and I have tried to touch some of it with Nowhere in the World. The family structure has been, in the tradition of Cuban dramaturgy, the nucleus through which to observe perennial social and political issues. This has to do with what I was saying before: theater only works from the particular and not from the general. Historical processes are analyzed in books, articles, interviews, in extensive bibliographic and documentary collections. A play cannot contain all of that process, all of the lives wasted in the attempt to build a certain political-social project. What a play can do is sharpen the gaze, focus on a small human group and apply the scalpel to it. You use the correct verb: dissect. As a playwright I feel exactly like this: Cuba is my operating room, that broken family is the body that lies on the table, and I have to apply the scalpel with caution, with great responsibility, trying to get to the root of the pain.

Gunnels: It's true, as you mention before, there is a very different, distinct type of relationship with the US. Would you say that your experiences in the US as a Cuban-born artist have been particularly revealing in terms of understanding this distinct relationship?

González Melo: They have been very different experiences. In Chicago, for example, Aguijón Theater premiered Within and Epopeya. Despite being texts with marked national references and with a Cuban (Sándor Menéndez) director, in both cases there was a rich dialogue with a wider Latino community, thanks also to the excellent translations of Marcela Muñoz. The actors, artistic team, and spectators took on as their own the themes of uprooting and political frustration. I felt something similar with the premiere of Por gusto in Repertorio Español in New York, and what was also with a Cuban director, Leyma López: the incessant disillusionment of youth and the monotony of a circular existence were related issues to a multinational cast. When Ohio Northern University produced Nevada, I remember that they were very interested in the detailed study of the context. Part of the team visited the island and the editing included documentary projections, which contrasted deliciously with the dramatization of the text in English (by the Mexican Otto Minera and with translation of Yael Prizant). In Miami, where the Hispanic community is also wide and varied, the essential confrontation has been with the Cuban public, which logically is the most interested, either by direct experience or by reference, in fictions about the marginal Havana of Kiddo, Talc, and Nevada, works that Alberto Sarraín directed. I feel that the premiere of Nowhere in the World at the XXXIII International Festival of Hispanic Theater, in production of Teatro Avante, directed by Mario Ernesto Sánchez and with translation by Marian Prío, has further dimensioned the debate on Cuba / United States tension, which is the conflict between those who stayed and those who left. I always mention the translators because I consider their work and dedication essential. They, and my British translator William Gregory, have been responsible for my texts being so well rewritten in that language.

Gunnels: How do you choose what specific issue you are going to dissect in the work? Your 2019 play Bayamesa is the direct portrayal of traditional, early twentieth-century Cuba, where the lead María Milanés struggles to align traditional Cuba with her own very feminist dreams and ambitions. In it, you shift time and space on the stage to bring the play into tense dialogue between past and present, with a gut-wrenching suicide that leaves the audience broken. In Bayamesa we find the authentic woman who encourages all but also the idea of suicide as a social issue emerges, when today there are more and more suicides of young people. It's like the final lines of your other 2019 play Outside the Game: "history repeats itself, and it repeats itself."

González Melo: The motivation for writing is multiple and changes from one project to another. The essential thing is always that the starting material resonates with me, that it seems urgent to share it on stage. In the case of Bayamesa, I owe a lot to my mother, who is a philologist and writer, and who spoke to me for the first time about María Luisa Milanés (1893–1919). I read her poems. I read her surprising autobiography, which is possibly the first feminist manifesto written in Cuba and one of the first in Latin America. I was struck by her symbolic suicide: a shot in the belly, with her military father's pistol. A free soul like her preferred to escape in this way, rather than continue being subjected to the prevailing machismo. I knew that the play must be a requiem that would bring her back to life, through a fiction that tried to accompany her, give her a voice, even during the short hour and a half that the staging lasts. A century of her death was celebrated in 2019 and yet, as you say, unfortunately this continues to be such a current drama....

Gunnels: Where do you see your work going after Bayamesa?

González Melo: I am immersing myself more and more in the history of Cuba. I think that our history has been approached very little in dramaturgy, sometimes with a very superficial gaze, and I trust that theater has the possibility of shining a clear and precise light on events of the past that allow us to situate ourselves in the complexity of the present. How can we live, how can we understand the country we are if we do not analyze what has brought us here? For years I worked on issues and conflicts of the immediate present, from the spaces on the margins to the luxury of the new rich. But right now that present has me exhausted. Imagine a country that is increasingly under-supplied, with lousy public transport, a country where people have to spend hours and hours in horrifying lines to get a pound of pork, a bag of detergent, a liter of oil, all at astronomical prices. The current panorama is bleak; I would not know in what dramatic tone to approach it. Perhaps only from the farce or the grotesque. That is why I take refuge in the past, because I feel that without memory there is no density of tradition. There is so much to dig into. Theater has not gone into depth, for example, in the serious cases of censorship caused by the cultural policies of the Revolution. Censorship interests me a lot. We have it too close to us, often without realizing it. I am very interested in historical revision, provided it has a particular nuance that can speak to a global tension.

Gunnels: Censorship continues to be a pernicious problem in the world, perhaps now with different 'faces.' When addressing the Padilla case in your play Outside the Game, you concentrate on problematizing the role of the artist.⁶In this play, González Melo re-envisions the infamous Padilla Case, whereby celebrated poet Heberto Padilla is arrested, jailed, tortured, and finally exiled for his counterrevolutionary work that questioned the Revolution, the Comandante (Fidel Castro), and role of writers in general. Used as a classic illustration of the traumatic censorship of the late 60s and early 70s in Havana, González Melo tells the story from the voice of the poet himself as the lead role. Are you interested in "complicating things," to put it in the words of your own Heberto Padilla?

González Melo: It is said that one writes the same work throughout life. The issue of censorship and self-censorship has always interested me, perhaps because from a young age I had to negotiate with that force. My book Wax Memoirs almost didn't see the light of day, because although it won a national award for its publication, it told about my discovery of sexuality at the Lenin school, which the editorial officials did not like at all. Kiddo, in fact, can be understood as a work about the fear of free expression within the Depás family, where each one fears being open to the other and they all live in a spiral of lies. Epopeya, although it won the 2014 National Prize for Dramaturgy and was published by Ediciones Alarcos, had a fleeting presentation of only fifty copies. It was not distributed in bookstores; the book cannot be found anywhere and the work cannot be released in Cuba. (It's a play where I use the metaphor of the Trojan War and the conflicts of Hecuba by Euripides as a hypotext to debate, once again, the return to the island of exiled Cubans, once Priam has fallen in combat).

It is true that in recent years I have moved much closer to the relationship between art and censorship. In 2017 I directed at Argos Teatro in Havana Letters of Love to Stalin by the Spanish playwright Juan Mayorga, which for me is a play that talks about the same situation that many artists, journalists, and Cubans in general suffer: the terror of telling the truth, of speaking freely. It is also one of Bayamesa's themes: the censorship of creative freedom, the expression of pain through poetry, the need to be independent. The father, husband, and mother of María Luisa Milanés did not allow that rebellious spirit, and that unleashed the conflict and brought forth the fatal outcome. The same thing happens with Heberto Padilla: he was a man very close to the Cuban Revolution in the early 1960s. He was even a diplomat, but he slowly became disenchanted and his poetry became increasingly inadmissible for a regime that ended up suffocating him. I don't want to "complicate things," rather I try the opposite: to make these issues visible and debatable by turning them into theater and language.

About the Interviewer and Interviewee

Bridgette W. Gunnels is Associate Professor of Spanish at Emory University and a scholar in Latin American literature from the twentieth century, in all forms, with special emphasis in the short story.

Abel González Melo is a Cuban dramatist, writer, teacher, and theater director. González Melo studied Theater Arts at the Universidad de las Artes de Cuba and is the recipient of various prizes and awards for his literary and theater works, including the Premio Primer Concurso de Dramaturgia de la Embajada de España (2005) for Chamaco [Kiddo]. In January 2020, he won the Casa de las Américas prize for his work, Bayamesa.

Excerpt

Appalachian literature is thriving. From the earliest oral traditions to print accounts of frontier exploration, from local color to modernism and postmodernism, from an exuberant flowering in the 1970s to its high popular and critical profile in the twenty-first century, Appalachian literature can boast a long tradition of delighting and provoking readers. Yet as anyone who enjoys reading or teaching this literature knows, finding an anthology that offers a representative selection of authors and texts from the earliest days to the present can be difficult. What you are now holding in your hands, or accessing through an electronic device, is the result of our efforts to assemble that book.

We are especially aware of the need to have a representative selection of Appalachian texts in one book because we teach Appalachian literature and have wished for such a book. The problem is not that the region's literature isn't available. Poems, short stories, and novels are available electronically from a myriad of websites; however, even today's computer-savvy readers and students can flounder when the material they seek is scattered to the four quarters of the internet.¹Websites for locating Appalachian writing include Documenting the American South (docsouth.unc.edu) and Making of America (quod.lib.umich.edu/m/moagrp/). Additionally, many specialized anthologies of Appalachian literature have appeared over the past few decades. Yet by their very nature, specialized anthologies cannot cover the full sweep of Appalachian literature and must be supplemented by other readings.²Outstanding specialized anthologies include W. K. McNeil, ed., Appalachian Images in Folk and Popular Culture (1995); Sandra L. Ballard and Patricia L Hudson, eds., Listen Here: Women Writing in Appalachia (2004); Felicia Mitchell, ed., Her Word: Diverse Voices in Contemporary Appalachian Women's Poetry (2003); Kevin E. O'Donnell and Helen Hollingsworth, eds., Seekers of Scenery: Travel Writing from Southern Appalachia, 1840–1900 (2004); Marita Garin, ed., Southern Appalachian Poetry: An Anthology of Works by Thirty-Seven Poets (2008); Jessie Graves and William Wright, eds., The Southern Poetry Anthology: Contemporary Appalachia (2010); Chris Green, ed., Coal: A Poetry Anthology (2006); and Anthology of Appalachian Writers (a journal-like, serial publication of contemporary Appalachian writing published by Shepherd University).

Good older anthologies of Appalachian literature exist. Robert J. Higgs and Ambrose Manning's Voices from the Hills: Selected Readings of Southern Appalachia (1975) was an important, groundbreaking work that provided an excellent selection of Appalachian writings in one volume. But by the mid-1990s, changing ideas about Appalachia and literary theory, along with the remarkable number of fine authors whose works had appeared since the book's publication, made that collection feel incomplete. Aware of those gaps, Higgs and Manning, along with scholar and poet Jim Wayne Miller, published a two-volume sequel, Appalachia Inside Out, in 1995.

But to date, no one collection provides the historical depth and range of Appalachian literature, from Cherokee oral narratives to fiction and drama about mountaintop removal and prescription drug abuse, that contemporary readers and scholars seek. What is really needed, we feel, is a one-volume anthology of Appalachian literature that is comprehensive, reflects contemporary ideas about authorship and Appalachia, and brings readers well into the twenty-first century. That is what this book attempts to do.

In creating this anthology, we had a twofold task. Like all anthologists, we had to decide what principles would govern our selection of authors and, given those principles, what authors and texts we should include. But even before wrestling with those difficult decisions, we faced the conundrum that anyone working on our region confronts: just what do we mean when we say "Appalachia"? Geographically and conceptually, debate over this question runs high.

Merely determining the territory encompassed by the term "Appalachia" has been a matter of contention. Geographers' maps delineating the physiographic province of Appalachia, for example, outline a region stretching from central Alabama and Georgia northeast to the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Labrador, and from the Piedmont through the western rim of the Cumberland Plateau as far as Ohio. However, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century attempts to trace the region's boundaries, such as the map included in John C. Campbell's The Southern Highlander and His Homeland (1921), place the region within the borders of the slaveholding South with the Mason-Dixon Line demarcating the northern border, the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers marking off the western border, and elevation (the Blue Ridge) delimiting the eastern. The Appalachian Regional Commission's 1965 and subsequent maps of the region, guided by political and economic forces at play in the War on Poverty years, identify an area that incorporates portions of thirteen states, from the southern-tier counties of western New York to central Alabama and northeastern Mississippi, including significant parts of Ohio and a small chunk of the northwest South Carolina Piedmont. In sharp contrast to all of the above, folklorists and cultural geographers such as Henry Glassie and Terry Jordan-Bychkov insist that culturally, Southern and Central Appalachia are part of the Upland South, which runs from the eastern Piedmont of Virginia and the Carolinas west through Tennessee and Kentucky to include the Ozarks (Jordan-Bychkov argues that shared cultural traits extend the Upland South through East Texas); Northern Appalachia, they assert, is part of the mid-Atlantic and midwestern cultural regions.³ John C. Campbell, The Southern Highlander and His Homeland (1921); Henry Glassie, Pattern in the Material Folk Culture of the Eastern United States (1968); Terry G. Jordan-Bychkov, The Upland South: The Making of an American Folk Region and Landscape (2003).

As with maps, the popular conception of the region has also been subject to vicissitudes and controversy. Prior to the mid-nineteenth century, the southern mountains were viewed as just that: southern, with a high elevation and a whiff of the backwater. Since the southern backwater had once lain as far east as the coastal plain, frontier rustication was not yet synonymous with mountain. Yet beginning in the mid-nineteenth century and flowering fully in the post–Civil War era, fueled by an enormous body of writing in the popular press, Appalachia became known as a land apart, home to what William Goodell Frost, president of Berea College, identified in 1899 as America's "contemporary ancestors." These curious creatures were alternately viewed either as a genetic and cultural reservoir of America's best (noble poor rural white people of northern European ancestry who spoke Elizabethan English and lived a lifestyle like that of the colonial era), or as a sad example of America's worst (degenerate poor rural white moonshiners and feudists who spoke substandard English).⁴William Goodell Frost, "Our Contemporary Ancestors in the Southern Mountains," Atlantic Monthly, 1899. A recent controversial literary example that reinforces the degenerate-culture vision of Appalachia is J. D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (2016). Vance's book has generated so much popular attention on the region that several Appalachian authors, including many of the authors featured in this anthology, decided to write back against Vance's portrayal of Appalachia in Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to "Hillbilly Elegy" (2018). Examples of the degenerate-culture representation in the contemporary media include The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQBiXDNVeSA); Buckwild (http://www.mtv.com/shows/ buckwild/series.jhtml), Squidbillies (https://www.adultswim.com/search?q=squidbillies), and Saturday Night Live's "Appalachian Emergency Room" (http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/appalachian-emergency-room/n12005/). Distorted though they may be, those two views of Appalachia are still present in the popular imagination, as best-seller lists and television shows indicate.⁵The contemporary popular media engage less in romanticization of Appalachians, although the trope abounds in the literature. Nothing seems to be filling the beloved shoes of The Waltons (serialized from 1972 to 1981 and made into television movies three times in the 1990s) or Christy, the 1994–1995 television series about a stoic young city girl teaching in the Tennessee mountains in 1912 who gently guides the mountain people away from their bad ways, bringing out their natural goodness. The character Kenneth Parcel, played by Jack McBrayer, on the television comedy 30 Rock (2006–2013) may be the best example of contemporary media's embracing of the "good" qualities of Appalachian people, albeit couched within the all-too-familiar hillbilly stereotypes. Kenneth, from Stone Mountain, Georgia, is unfailingly cheerful, kind, and honest. He is also misogynistic and religiously narrow-minded. He rejects science and supports the Confederacy. References to incest abound when Kenneth is around.

That dichotomy—the romanticized and the degenerate—remained operative through the better part of the twentieth century, with few attempts at complicating it. (Horace Kephart, John C. Campbell, and Harry Caudill are notable exceptions.) Then, in the 1970s, under the influence of the civil rights movement and similar ideological initiatives among women, Native Americans, and other marginalized groups, Appalachian residents, together with activists and scholars, developed an Appalachian studies movement to challenge this distorted image of Appalachia and provide an accurate account of the region's history and contemporary situation.⁶Chad Berry, Philip J. Obermiller, and Shaunna L. Scott, eds, Studying Appalachian Studies: Making the Path by Walking (2015). This effort has produced outstanding writing, although in some quarters there has remained a tendency to continue romanticizing the region as a haven for old-time living and, as Ronald D. Eller notes, "A flourishing minor industry has developed to fabricate such oddities as dulcimers, quilts, log cabins, and 'Hillbilly Chicken.'"⁷Eller, Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers: Industrialization of the Appalachian South, 1880–1930 (1982), xvii. For a discussion of the commodification and fetishization of Appalachia, see Allen W. Batteau, The Invention of Appalachia (1990). Some of the best statements on the conflicting narratives comprising the "invention" of Appalachia appear, of course, in the literature of the region and the scholarship on that literature.⁸Batteau, The Invention of Appalachia. See also Henry Shapiro, Appalachia on Our Mind: The Southern Mountains and Mountaineers in the American Consciousness, 1870–1920 (1978).

In navigating these turbulent waters, we also had to ask ourselves what story of the region we wanted to tell. In answering this question, we were influenced by current ideas about anthologies and the literary canon. Whereas most early- to mid-twentieth-century American anthologies attempted to produce a master narrative—a collection of canonical authors whose work and biographies support one particular vision of the nation, region, or group represented—contemporary critical theory's expanded ideas of authorship have challenged that approach, which tends to exclude writers who fail to conform to the master narrative, such as women or ethnic minorities.⁹For a discussion of master narratives in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century anthologies of southern literature, see Susan Harrell Irons, "Southern Literary Reconstructionists: Shaping Southern Literary Identity, 1895–1915" (Ph.D diss., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 2001). Hence, anthologists today (ourselves included) tend to view their collections as dialogues or debates among sometimes conflicting voices.¹⁰William Andrews, preface to The Literature of the American South: A Norton Anthology (1998), xxii.

Indeed, in Appalachia, as in other regions, the culture, like the geographic configuration, can be seen as porous—that is, the boundaries are constantly changing. The result is that no one can definitively say what Appalachia is or is not, even though almost everyone seems to try. As Douglas Reichert Powell observes, "Regions are not so much places themselves but ways of describing relationships among places. These descriptions serve particular purposes for the people doing the describing."¹¹Douglas Reichert Powell, Critical Regionalism: Connecting Politics and Culture in the American Landscape (2007), 10. It is precisely this unsettled definition and the controversies it continues to inspire that is the story we wish to tell in this anthology. Appalachia is complicated, and this rich complexity is worth celebrating and studying.

What is the traditional master narrative of Appalachian literature and scholarship? Higgs and Manning summarize it succinctly: "the mountaineer, [and] his struggles with himself, nature, and the outside world."¹²Robert J. Higgs and Ambrose Manning, Voices from the Hills: Selected Readings of Southern Appalachia (1975), xvii. While it is undeniably true that this story of the (white male) mountaineer has been important throughout the region (and is represented in this anthology), many other stories have existed as well, and we do not want to leave them out—to perpetuate what Edward Cabbell calls black "invisibility" in Appalachia, for example, or to relegate women to "walk-ons in the third act," as Barbara Ellen Smith characterizes the region's historiography, or to deny the experiences of LGBTQ Appalachians.¹³Edward J. Cabbell, "Black Invisibility and Racism in Appalachia: An Informal Survey," in Blacks in Appalachia, ed. William H. Turner and Edward J. Cabbell (1985); Barbara Ellen Smith, "Walk-Ons in the Third Act: The Role of Women in Appalachian Historiography," Journal of Appalachian Studies (1998); Jeff Mann, Loving Mountains, Loving Men (2005). Hence, diverse voices of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and race speak throughout this anthology through authors such as Elias Boudinot, Frank X Walker, August Wilson, Dorothy Allison, Jeff Mann, and Blake Hausman.

In addition to correcting the obvious omission of a multitude of voices from the traditional Appalachian master narrative, we wanted to avoid miring this anthology in what Theresa Lloyd calls "mama and biscuits literature"—texts that for good or ill stereotype Appalachia as a land of simple agrarian folklife. Not that we fail to represent regional folklore—those looking for it will be pleased to find Jack tales, traditional songs, snake lore, and a great deal more. But along with an important agrarian heritage, our region has long had an urban and suburban dimension. Art historian Betsy White, for example, has demonstrated the presence of a thriving fine arts tradition fully reflective of international trends in western Virginia and East Tennessee towns along the Great Road, a heavily traveled trade route running along the contemporary I-81 corridor from Pennsylvania to Southern Appalachia.¹⁴Betsy K. White, Great Road Style: The Decorative Arts Legacy of Southwest Virginia and Northeast Tennessee (2006). In 1858, (West) Virginia artist and author David Hunter Strother confirmed this blend of backwoods and urbane, noting that in East Tennessee one could find both "the prints of the deer-skin moccasin and the French kid slipper," or "the mud-chinked cabin of the pioneer" beside "the elegant villa from a design by Downing or Vaux."¹⁵Strother, "A Winter in the South, Fifth Paper," Harper's New Monthly Magazine (1858), 721. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the region has felt the full effects of industrialization, modern transportation, consumerism, migration, the centralization of American agricultural production in agribusiness enterprises outside the region, suburbanization, the global connections of the internet, and the multiple genres of electronic media. These forces have virtually obliterated traditional agrarian Appalachia, although an interest in local foods in the region, part and parcel of a larger local foods movement in the United States, is fueling a return to home gardening and small-scale, specialized farming. This anthology includes not only the canonical texts that have constructed the idea of Appalachia as a rural, isolated folk society—such as work by Jesse Stuart and James Still—but also writings that challenge that stereotype by portraying the region as urban or suburban, and as fully engaged with the social, intellectual, economic, and political world beyond the mountains—as in texts by Thomas Wolfe, Lisa Alther, Jayne Anne Phillips, and many others.¹⁶Rudy Abramson and Jean Haskell, eds., The Encyclopedia of Appalachia (2006), which emphasized the region's urban as well as rural dimensions, pioneered this multi-tiered approach to Appalachian studies. We follow this lead.

One non-agrarian facet of the Appalachian experience that has been fully documented in its literature is the effects of the extractive and manufacturing industries, such as coal and textiles. This anthology tells that story through both conventional and more radical texts. Represented are genres and authors such as fiction by Rebecca Harding Davis, Thomas Bell, and Denise Giardina; poetry by Don West, Irene McKinney, and Ron Rash; nonfiction by Mary Harris "Mother" Jones and Harry Caudill; protest songs by Aunt Molly Jackson and Ella May Wiggins; and a strike narrative collected from "Bloody" Harlan County in the 1930s.

Another story that we felt was important to tell was that of the Appalachian environment. Nowhere is human stewardship of the environment more pressing than in the region's coalfields, where people and nature suffer the effects of mining and mountaintop removal, as articulated here by Ann Pancake, Robert Gipe, and Wendell Berry. Yet nowhere more than in our mountains is the possibility of an intimate human-nature relationship as obvious, as witnessed by the writing of Harvey Broome, Harry Middleton, Marilou Awiakta, and bell hooks, among others. Presenting a new vision of agrarianism, Barbara Kingsolver argues the importance of local farming for Appalachia's people and environment, as Sandor Katz and Shannon Hayes encourage readers to relearn homemaking and fermentation skills as a form of activism.

Having explored the stories of Appalachia that we wanted this anthology to tell, we still faced a vexatious problem: who would get to tell those stories? That is, just who is an Appalachian author? The simple answer would be writers born in the region who write about regional topics—for example, Mildred Haun, Harriette Arnow, Wilma Dykeman, Robert Morgan, Fred Chappell, Lee Smith, Harry Caudill, and Jo Carson. However, that definition would have forced us to leave out important writings about the region by authors not born here, such as William Bartram, George Washington Harris, Mary Noailles Murfree, Horace Kephart, and others. It could also have led us to omit significant authors born here but whose writings are not obviously regional, such as Charles Wright. Ultimately, we decided to follow the lead of the Appalachian Writers Association in defining Appalachian authors: writers who were born in the region, adopted the region, or wrote about a significant experience in the region.

Nonetheless, decisions about whom to include were hard to make. We wanted to satisfy expectations by including authors who have a following among the region's readers and scholars, but we also wanted to break new ground by introducing authors who had been marginalized or ignored in the discourse of Appalachian literature. Furthermore, especially since the 1970s, that era of literary outpouring that some scholars identify as the Appalachian Renaissance, so many outstanding authors have been publishing that we were forced to omit many worthy candidates. (Our publisher wisely insisted that we keep the book to one reasonably sized volume.) We know that readers will lament the absence of one favorite author or another, but we hope that our suggestion of the range of Appalachian literature is broad enough to accommodate the region's multitudinous stories. We rely on the excellent specialized anthologies of Appalachian writing to flesh out the stories for those readers who seek more.

Another way that we wanted to break new ground was by including authors from Northern Appalachia. We acknowledge that there are strong arguments for not doing so and for focusing instead on what John Alexander Williams calls "core" Appalachia—that is, the southern mountains as defined by Campbell and others.¹⁷John Alexander Williams, Appalachia: A History (2002), 13. Aside from the precedent set by previous anthologies and collections of scholarship, along with the southern-focused expectations of readers who encounter the word "Appalachia," it is in writings from the southern highlands that one finds the "shared themes and narrated stances, . . . [the] repeated and revised tropes" that, according to Henry Louis Gates, are the hallmark of a literary movement.¹⁸Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (1988), 127. But as Katherine Ledford notes, incorporating Northern Appalachian authors invites us to engage in comparative regional studies—for example, to examine the concept of the American frontier in the writings of New Yorker James Fenimore Cooper as well as in the southern account of Anne Newport Royall, or to study the effects of extractive industrial economies in Jason Miller's Pennsylvania and Harry Caudill's Kentucky.

Scholars of the South may wonder how we distinguish Appalachian literature from its non-montane cousins of the Upland South. Hugh Holman raised the question in his 1976 review of Voices from the Hills, and it still has relevance.¹⁹C. Hugh Holman, "Appalachian Literature? Two Views," Appalachian Journal (1976), 79. There are, for example, obvious similarities between the poor mountain whites of Murfree and Fox, and their counterparts in the work of lowland southern authors Caldwell and O'Connor, who are not included in this Appalachian anthology.²⁰See, for example, Sylvia Jenkins Cook, From Tobacco Road to Route 66: The Southern Poor White in Fiction (1976). But southern literary studies have tended to give short shrift to Appalachian authors, as Fred Chappell and Rodger Cunningham have noted, making the need for Appalachian literary studies of continuing relevance.²¹Fred Chappell, "The Shape of Southern Literature to Come: An Interview with Will Hickson"; and Rodger Cunningham, "Writing on the Cusp: Double Alterity and Minority Discourse in Appalachia," in The Future of Southern Letters, ed. Jefferson Humphries and John Lowe (1996). Even more important is the obvious fact of a demonstrable, self-conscious literary tradition in the southern highlands.

As for the genres we have included, they range from the traditional belles-lettres—fiction, poetry, and drama—to nonfiction, diaries, interviews, song lyrics, and oral literature. We have a preference for complete units—for example, short stories over selections from novels, essays over portions of nonfiction books or, when we simply could not ignore an important book, whole chapters or excerpts that provide a sense of completeness.

The difficulties of acquiring copyright permissions, the bane of the anthologist, vexed us as well. We had to make some hard choices when permissions trails went cold or when manageable deals could not be struck with copyright holders. Some writing we wished to include was off-limits to us due to copyright restrictions increasingly imposed by large commercial publishing houses. Within these restrictions, we have tried to construct an anthology that covers much ground and does so in a representative manner. We acknowledge that this anthology is only the beginning of the Appalachian story, and we encourage readers and instructors to supplement this anthology with a complete long work such as a novel or a collection of short stories or poems for a more sustained experience with an author and her or his craft.

As our story of creating this anthology suggests, we have been concerned with simultaneously representing, complicating, and furthering the discourse on the Appalachian region and its cultures. The complexity that we have struggled to understand and represent here speaks to the undeniable value of regional studies. Particularly since the rise of critical theory in the 1990s, some scholars have brushed off regional studies as a type of soft scholarship, inferior to studies of race, class, gender, sexuality, or the environment. The richness represented in these pages reveals that this assumption is simply not true.

This, then, is the vision of Appalachia and its literature represented in our anthology. Mountain and valley, rural and urban, folkloric and postmodern, traditional and au courant, northern and southern, white people and people of color, straight and gay, insiders and outsiders, sinners and saints—the dualisms multiply, endlessly and excitingly, and maybe, on some level, are not dualistic at all.

About the Authors

Katherine Ledford is professor of Appalachian studies at Appalachian State University and coeditor of Back Talk from Appalachia: Confronting Stereotypes.

Theresa Lloyd is coeditor of the literature section of the Encyclopedia of Appalachia and professor emerita at East Tennessee State University.

A freeborn Black abolitionist from Ohio, Joshua McCarter Simpson opened his 1854 indictment of the hypocrisy of Christian supporters of slavery, "To the White People of America," with searing words that echo across the centuries. Simpson's poetic voice resonated when Donald Trump strode through Lafayette Park for a photo opportunity—an image of him holding a Bible in front of St. John's Episcopal Church—moments after DC police, reinforced by National Guard troops, dispersed peaceful protesters who had gathered to demand that government leaders address systemic racism.

Simpson published "To the White People of America" in his collection The Emancipation Car, Being an Original Composition Of Anti-Slavery Ballads, Composed Exclusively For the Under Ground Rail Road (1854), written for abolitionists ferrying enslaved people to freedom. The Emancipation Car includes forty-three poems, all meant to be sung to then-popular tunes, and a few prose passages. The title of Simpson's collection extends the metaphor of the Underground Railroad, where these songs were popular among the formerly enslaved and where Simpson served as a conductor. In 1874 the collection was reprinted with its prose passages reworked in verse and a new appendix featuring poetic commentaries on the Fifteenth Amendment, the Underground Railroad, and related topics.

Simpson was born around 1820 in Windsor, Ohio, in the far northeastern corner of the border state, near Lake Erie. He was indentured as a servant from his childhood until he turned twenty-one, working in brutal conditions for a stonemason and later a farmer. He then taught himself to read and write, attended the Oberlin Collegiate Institute from 1844 to 1848, and moved to Zanesville in central Ohio, where he became an herbal doctor and grocer. Simpson gradually embraced abolitionism during his servitude and became a fierce advocate for emancipation thereafter. In his preface to The Emancipation Car, Simpson explains, "As soon as I could write, which was not until I was past twenty-one years old, a spirit of poetry, (which was always in me,) became revived, and seemed to waft before my mind horrid pictures of the condition of my people, and something seemed to say, 'Write and sing about it—you can sing what would be death to speak.' So I began to write and sing."¹Joshua McCarter Simpson, "Note to the Public," in The Emancipation Car, Being an Original Composition Of Anti-Slavery Ballads, Composed Exclusively For the Under Ground Rail Road (1874; repr., Miami: Mnemosyne Publishing Co., 1969), vi. He first publicly performed an anti-slavery song in 1842 and published a collection of thirteen poems titled Original Anti-Slavery Songs in 1852. Simpson died in 1876.

Joshua McCarter Simpson's writing is remarkable for its force, conviction, moral clarity, and emotional depth. His poems are also frequently witty, both in their turns of phrase and in their relationship to the popular tunes with which Simpson chose to pair them. Simpson notes that "To the White People of America" should be sung to the tune "Massa's in the Cold, Cold Ground," a blackface minstrel tune composed by New York songwriter Stephen Foster in 1852, just two years prior to the publication of The Emancipation Car. In dialect, Foster's song depicts enslaved people crying as they mourn the death of their former owner, rendering Simpson's ironic appropriation bitingly clever. "In my selection of 'Airs,'" writes Simpson, "I have gathered such as are popular, and extensively known. Many superstitious persons, and perhaps many good conscientious, well-meaning Christians, will denounce and reject the work on account of the 'Tunes,' but my object has been to change the flow of those sweet melodies (so often disgraced by Comic Negro Songs, and sung by our own people,) into a more appropriate and useful channel."²Simpson, "Note to the Public," v–vi.

Despite his groundbreaking creativity, Simpson is little known today. Few scholars have written about his work, and he has never been the subject of a biography. I learned about Simpson when music bibliographer Erin Fulton included The Emancipation Car in the "Checklist of Southern Sacred Music Imprints, 1850–1925" that she compiled for the Sounding Spirit publishing initiative. Fulton turned to The Emancipation Car as Sounding Spirit searched for words from historical composers and hymnwriters in expressing our solidarity with Black Lives Matter protests in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and many others.

Reading Simpson's words from 1854 immediately conjures the image of Trump at St. John's Church:

"To the White People of America"
Air—"Massa's in the Cold, Cold Ground"

O'er this wide extended country,
  Hear the solemn echoes roll,
For a long and weary century,
  Those cries have gone from pole to pole;
See the white man sway his sceptre,
  In one hand he holds the rod—
In the other hand the Scripture,
  And says that he's a man of God.
 
Hear ye that mourning?
  'Tis your brothers' cry!
O! ye wicked men take warning,
  The day will come when you must die.
 
Lo! Ten thousand steeples shining
  Through this mighty Christian land,
While four millions slaves all pining
  And dying 'neath the Tyrant's hand.
See the "blood-stained" Christian banner
  Followed by a host of saints (?)3Question mark appears in the original.
While they loudly sing Hosannah,
  We hear the dying slave's complaints:
 
Hear ye that mourning?
  Anglo-sons of God,
O! ye Hypocrites take warning,
  And shun your sable brothers blood.
 
In our Legislative members,
  Few there are with humane souls,
Though they speak in tones of thunder
  'Gainst sins which they cannot control,
Women's rights and annexation,
  Is the topic by the way,
While poor Africa's sable nation
  For mercy, cry both by night and day.
    Hear ye that mourning?
    'Tis a solemn sound,
    O! ye wicked men take warning,
    For God will send his judgment down.
 
Tell us not of distant Island—
  Never will we colonize:
Send us not to British Highlands,
  For this is neither just nor wise,
Give us equal rights and chances,
  All the rights of citizens—
And as light and truth advances,
  We'll show you that we all are men.
    Hear ye that mourning?
    'Tis your brothers sigh,
    O! ye wicked men take warning,
    The judgment day will come by and by.

About the Author

Jesse P. Karlsberg is the senior digital scholarship strategist at the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship. He is the project director and editor-in-chief of Sounding Spirit, a research lab and publishing initiative promoting collaborative engagement with historical American songbooks. Karlsberg is an internationally recognized singer, teacher, composer, and songbook editor in the Sacred Harp tradition.

Queer [__] Revolution? 

"The place in which I'll fit will not exist until I make it."

—James Baldwin

"The gay revolution began as a literary revolution." This is the first bold statement in Christopher Bram's 2012 cultural history Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America. From before the homophile movement of the 1950s to the post-Stonewall gay liberation movement to the virulent activism of ACT UP and other HIV/AIDS activist organizations to the normalcy wars of the 1990s and the fight for marriage equality, the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement has occurred in the streets and in the press, in the courtrooms and in the bedroom, at the intersections and with the hash tag, challenging and revolutionizing American life.

In this article, I suggest that the latest "revolutionary" movement in LGBTQ+ life is not one found in the streets or in published literary forms long familiar to us but in the digital square spaces through which queer intimacy is being reimagined and reenacted. Forms of activism and intimacy have shifted from the mediation of bound rectangles of printed books and pamphlets to the square profiles of gay geospatial social networking and dating applications. It is these square spaces that stand in contrast to the LGBTQ+ normalcy wars of the 1990s and the subsequent proliferation of narratives of assimilation and hetero- and homo-normative relationship structures. Dating and "hook-up" geospatial applications like Grindr, Scruff, Daddyhunt, Growlr, Jack'd, Hornet, Chappy, and others have radically altered the terrain of queer intimacy and precede similar "straight" applications like Tinder that used them as model. As Polly Vernon wrote in "Grindr: a New Sexual Revolution?" (2010): "Grindr is reconfiguring the landscape of human relationships."¹Polly Vernon, "Grindr: a New Sexual Revolution?," The Guardian, July 3, 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/jul/04/grindr-the-new-sexual-revolution/print. Some have described this reconfigured landscape as one of networked intimacy and liquid love, extending Zygmunt Bauman's ruminations into digital terrain.²See Lik Sam Chan, "Ambivalence in Networked Intimacy: Observations from Gay Men Using Mobile Dating Apps," New Media & Society 20, no. 7 (2017): 2566–2581; Mitchell Hobbs, Stephen Owen, and Livia Gerber, "Liquid Love?: Dating Apps, Sex, and the Digital Transformation of Intimacy," Journal of Sociology 53, no. 2 (2016): 271–284. My essay asks several questions to which there are no definitive answers: What do we do with this revolution in queer life? What do we do with this networked intimate landscape? What do we do with this thing called liquid elove?

While others have examined some of these applications' nefarious psychological or public health ripple effects, here I consider two of these applications, Grindr and Scruff, to discuss the vocabularies (a digital lexicon that includes "Masc4Masc," "Woof," and "Tap," among others) and rhetorical methods that queer men deploy to relate to one another anew in both generative and troubling ways. I follow Robert F. Reid-Pharr's assertion that all identities are "essentially permeable and thus impure," and "all names (black, gay, man) are ultimately monuments to the impossibility of ever fully distinguishing self from other."³Robert F. Reid-Pharr, Black Gay Man (New York: NYU Press, 2001), 12. Though impossible to fully distinguish or delineate, and only tenuously related to any authentic representation of self, the square profile spaces of digital dating apps provide stark relief (in literal, discrete boxes) between self and other even if the avatar-self often fulfills the estranged, "other" space in that formulation. In this way, although these apps have revolutionary capabilities and foster a myriad of positive affective encounters both virtual and actual, like earlier moments in queer activist intensity and homotextual production, we are again making code of ourselves in our relational affective structures through mediated digital games of masking, ghosting, haunting, catfishing, kittenfishing, benching, breadcrumbing, cushioning, firedooring, lockering, self-pornographying, among the many other terms in this perpetually expanding digital lexicon.

Finally, I consider lyrical responses to this new "square space" in LGBTQ+ dating practices, namely the poetry of Danez Smith, as a way to illustrate the merging of Bram's high "literary" queer revolutionary tradition with the ongoing "digital" revolution Vernon and others seek to understand. Hopefully, this merger pushes us to think more critically and expansively about the various manifestations of "revolutions" in queer intimacy across time and (real and virtual) terrain as filtered through language, data, "code," and the ever-present "Mask" of queer life.

Mask4Masc: A HomoText(ual) Micro-History

"So we are taking off our masks, are we, and keeping / our mouths shut, as if we'd been pierced by a glance!"

—Frank O'Hara, "Homosexuality" (1954)

A brief historical framing shapes how I think of the generative and troubling dimensions of digital square spaces in contemporary queer life. The figurative "Mask" permeates queer writing and thinking since the first American homotexts, a term I use here to describe explicitly gay/queer-centric publications.⁴While my conception is perhaps connotatively less complex, I take "homotexts" from a 1978 essay, "Homotextuality: A Proposal," by scholar Jacob Stockinger, who coined the term "homotextuality" to signify one way the then nascent field of gay and lesbian studies might bridge formalist criticism with thematic approaches. The term "homotextuality" itself has a robust history in transnational academic queer literary scholarship, including Robert K. Martin's "Gay Studies in the Victorian Novel" (Newsletter of the Victorian Studies Association of Western Canada 13, no. 1 (1987): 69–71) and Terry Goldie's Pink Snow: Homotextual Possibilities in Canadian Fiction (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2003). However, as more recent scholars like Catherine A. Davies have written, in the push for a field of homotextual criticism, Stockinger and others often reduced and conflated specific contexts, unique experiences, and cultural moments: the homotextual became the homotext, finite, concrete, fully knowable and not reflective of the spectrum and unknowability of human sexuality, real and imagined. As Davies writes, this model of "homotextuality" seems "to reduce all experiences of same-sex desire to a singular phenomenon" (32). Following Davies, my use of the terms "homotexts" and "homotextuality" herein is not meant to imply singularity or coherent continuity but intersectional moments where what is convergent or divergent might be observed. For me, these moments take place in the "homotexts": fictional, poetic, and nonfictional published works and the "texts" of square spaces. Like Davies, this essay focuses on the "intersections of these divergent lines of gay experience" (Davies 32, emphasis provided). See Jacob Stockinger, "Homotextuality: A Proposal," in The Gay Academic, ed. Louie Crew (Palm Springs, CA: Etc. Publications, 1978): 135–51 and Catherine A. Davies, Whitman's Queer Children: America's Homosexual Epics (New York: Continuum, 2012). In 1906, Edward Prime-Stevenson, writing as "Xavier Mayne," published privately in Italy Imre: A Memorandum, one of the first openly homosexual novels written by an American. Mayne's The Intersexes: A History of Similisexualism as a Problem in Social Life followed two years later, becoming the first study of homosexuality by an American author. Imre's narrative proceeds through parts with subtitles like "Masks" and "Masks and—A Face" and includes lines such as "The Mask—the eternal social mask for the homosexual!—worn before our nearest and dearest" and "I understood perfectly that a man must wear the Mask."⁵  Xavier Mayne, Imre: A Memorandum (Naples: The English Book-Press, 1906), 146, 111, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015019188047;view=1up;seq=7. Mayne's The Intersexes extends these ideas from the fictional to the nonfictional mode and further discusses the pre-U.S. homophile movement's imperative preoccupation with "the Mask":

To hide from his closest friends, from suspicion by the world! Hide it he must. Accounted a diseased human thing, an outcast from men, a beast . . . playing his part like a man . . . . Ever the Mask, the shuddering concealment, the anguish of hidden passion that burns his life away! . . . The Mask, ever the Mask! It becomes like the natural face of the wearer.⁶Xavier Mayne, The Intersexes: A History of Similisexualism as a Problem in Social Life (Privately Printed, 1908), 86, https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/002080887.

In Imre, Mayne writes of the "man-loving man"⁷Mayne, Imre, 111. as well as "the Friendship which is Love, the Love which is Friendship" in his exploration of Uranian love.⁸Mayne, Imre, 150. Largely deployed by early "homosexual" thinkers, writers, and advocates like Stevenson, uraninan was once a term used to understand homosexuality, gender variance, and describe same-sex affective bonds. While Imre has a mostly happy ending, the novel still views the "love between two men" as a "nameless horror," one necessitating the mediation of social "masks" to be enacted.⁹Mayne, Imre, 111.

While I cannot do justice to the richness of either Mayne's Imre or The Intersexes herein, "Xavier Mayne" kicked things off and marked the spot; he put his finger on a queer tension that continues into our present. Foundational to the homotextual literary-activist tradition in the United States is this tension between what Martinican poet-philosopher Édouard Glissant might call transparency and opacity, the desire for love between two men expressed publicly versus a private "anguish of hidden passion" symbolized by the Mask.¹⁰Glissant troubles the transparent/opaque binary through his "right to opacity," a right for what one scholar understands as "stubborn shadows." See Nicole Simek, "Stubborn Shadows," symplokē 23, no. 1-2 (2015): 363–373. Glissant states, "As far as I'm concerned, a person has a right to be opaque." See Manthia Diawara's film Un monde en relation (2009). Similarly, he writes in Poetics of Relation, "Opacities can coexist and converge, weaving fabrics. To understand this truly one must focus on the texture of the weave and not on the nature of its components" (190). See Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, translated by Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997). As Christian Sancto has written, this right need not be understood solely in the judicial-legal sense but as performative. See Sancto, "Visibility in Crisis: Configuring Transparency and Opacity in We Are Here's Political Activism," InVisible Culture 28 (2018). In many ways, this article pays attention to the intersecting performative textures of the mask woven in queer history as one that has persisted, necessarily so for many subjects even as political visibility has increased and expanded legal rights for LGBTQ+ US subjects. Such century's old attention to transparency and opacity in queer cultural production takes on new connotations in the Photoshop age in which it is now possible to modify, highlight, de-focalize what or who can be seen clearly and what or who might be made cloudy. We find this early thinking replicated from 1908 through the official Homophile years of activism beginning in the 1950s, beyond groups like the Gay Liberation Front and the Gay Activist Alliance in the 1970s, through Gay Men's Health Crisis and ACT UP and into our digital present. We can trace the replication of the masked figure through close attention to the genealogy of "coded" thought in queer American life.

From the masked jester of the Mattachine Society to a cover of the Daughters of Bilitis publication The Ladder, post–World War II homophile imagery extends the preoccupation with a necessary secrecy as protection in the era of the Lavender Scare. High literary writers such as Gore Vidal wrote in "code." (Vidal authored pulp fictions under the pseudonyms of Katherine Everard, Cameron Key, and Edgar Box). As Stephen S. Mills writes in his 2014 poem, "A History of the Unmarried," "Frank O'Hara loved Vincent in code: / (F) hearts (V)." This hyper-coded, anonymous and pseudonym-onous form of queer ontology and relationality is the received narrative of queer life at midcentury, when studies of sexual deviancy and the closet-structure were at their apex largely as a result of the social, economic, and indeed existential dangers of visibility.¹¹Another figure of note in this genealogy is William Alexander Percy, who biographer Benjamin E. Wise calls a "sexual freethinker" and who negotiated his same-sex desire against the backdrop of the Mississippi Delta in the first half of twentieth century. Although best remembered for his memoir Lanterns on the Levee (1941), much of Percy's early poetry contains coded referents to Classic Greek tropes of man-man love and friendship in line with other Uranian writers. For an overview of Percy's life and work, see John Howard, "'Our Country'—Benjamin E. Wise's William Alexander Percy," Southern Spaces, April 17, 2012, https://southernspaces.ecdsdev.org/2012/our-country-benjamin-e-wises-william-alexander-percy.

Yet, the pages of homophile periodicals also espoused calls for decoding. The Mattachine Review's September 1958 issue featured the article "Discard the Mask," which in its very title gave the movement an ethical imperative. ONE Magazine featured similar stories, "Homosexuals Without Masks" (November 1958) and "The Tragedy of the Masks" (February 1959).¹²See Craig M. Loftin's work for deeper critical insight and overviews of much of this ONE Magazine material; Loftin, Masked Voices: Gay Men and Lesbians in Cold War America (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2012); Loftin, ed., Letters to ONE: Gay and Lesbian Voices from the 1950s and 1960s (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2012). In one of the era's most direct but lesser known homotextual calls for unmasking, Foster Gunnison, Jr., listed as vice-president of the Mattachine Society of Florida, wrote of "The Agony of the Mask" in a 1966 story published in short-lived D.C. homophile periodical The Homosexual Citizen: "Secrecy destroys self-identity . . . To attempt two lives in two worlds at once and still emerge whole would seem to be well beyond the adjustment capabilities of most persons . . . 'The trouble is that for the work's sake you must wear the mask.'"¹³Foster Gunnison, Jr., "The Agony of the Mask," The Homosexual Citizen 1, no. 4 (April 1966), Don Kelly Collection in Gay Literature and Culture, Cushing Memorial Library, Texas A&M University. In this latter quote within the quote, Gunnison is relating to his readers the feelings of a clergyman who wrote to him and, as Gunnison writes, "shall remain anonymous." Again, the imperative of secrecy and anonymity especially when confronted with the realities of economic survival.¹⁴For an overview of Gunnison's papers, see Charles McGraw, "Archives and Sources: The Papers of Foster Gunnison, Jr, and the Politics of Queer Preservation," History Workshop Journal, no. 65 (2008): 179–187.

Across the 1960s, such "anguish" and "agony" over the Mask gave way to a radical if not revolutionary gay and lesbian sensibility in line with the broader social climate and movements. For example: former Students for a Democratic Society member Carl Wittman's 1969 A Gay Manifesto calls for removing the mask of the Mattachine in order to perform a new show: "We've been playing an act for a long time, so we're consummate actors. Now we can begin to be, and it'll be a good show!"¹⁵Carl Wittman, "A Gay Manifesto," in We Are Everywhere: A Historical Sourcebook of Gay and Lesbian Politics, ed. Mark Blasius and Shane Phelan (New York: Routledge, 1997): 380–388. Martha Shelley's "Gay is Good," modeled after homophile activist Frank Kameny's earlier coining of that phrase, understood that "the worst part of being a homosexual is having to keep it secret."¹⁶"Martha Shelley" is the pseudonym for Martha Altman. For a discussion of her name evolution, see Eric Marcus, "Making Gay History: Martha Shelley," February 21, 2019, in Making Gay History, produced by Nahanni Rous, podcast, mp3 audio, 24:18, https://makinggayhistory.com/podcast/martha-shelley/. See Martha Shelley, "Gay is Good," in We Are Everywhere, ed. Mark Blasius and Shane Phelan, 392. Such activist homotexts responded to publications like Gunnison's "The Agony of the Mask" and still earlier works, such as Xavier Mayne's, in their coalition-building, consciousness-raising calls to visibility as a form of liberation.

And yet, the homotextual periodicals of the gay-Pride era reflect the continuation for masking and secrecy albeit in different forms; post-gay liberation, the inherited coding of queer sexuality and desire for intimate companionship simply evolved to include hanky codes, gay bar and bathhouse secret codes, and other gendered and sexualized forms of inclusion or exclusion. In a letter to the editor published in NEWSWEST, a Los Angeles newspaper for gay people, titled "Those 'Bitches' Need Love Too," San Francisco native Steve Edwards writes, "I only hope that someday we will no longer feel those fears which make us erect such masks, and we will be able to communicate openly and honestly with one another, and without judgment."¹⁷ Steve Edwards, "Those 'Bitches' Need Love Too," NEWSWEST, February 19, 1976, Don Kelly Collection in Gay Literature and Culture, Cushing Memorial Library, Texas A&M University. Many proponents of queer digital life celebrate the "open" and "honest" communication that digital applications afford in and for our present, a post-Stonewall line of thinking. The history of liberation is not so simple and the progress narrative too-readily susceptible to critique. The Mask persists, and our attention to both how and where—even if we cannot answer why—it persists is necessary for our coalitional cultural politics.

Few homophile periodicals showed people's faces and much of the material produced by queer writers at midcentury used pseudonyms, like Vidal, replicating Stevenson's "Xavier Mayne" of 1906/1908. While the "ecstasy" of the 1970s might be read as closet doors thrown open and masks removed, I am not alone in arguing that the mask began to take on other forms, wherein the Castro Clone stood in contrast to what Steve Edwards called the "bitchy queen," and the liberated queer world began its own pathway to homonormative standards and expectations. The rhetoric—such as the text-phrase Masc4Masc—and faceless torso profiles common to gay digital dating applications in our current moment are directly related to this history of masking, coding, and erasing certain kinds of sexual and gender identity and performance from mainline queer politics and cultural figurations.¹⁸See, for example, Roderick A. Ferguson, One-Dimensional Queer (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2019). What do we do with the anguish, the agony, and the ecstasy of Masc4Masc in today's queer digital landscape? How is the call for discretion, as in "R U discreet?," any different from earlier terrains of queer intimacy in printed homotexts? Is "Gay is Good" just an appositive for "Grindr is Good," with both "Gay" and "Grindr" standing for gay white masculine-presenting cisgender man? Isn't the Mask still Masc?

This too-brief history gets us to the present, but what do we do in the current digital cruising utopia? My point in setting up this somewhat reductive rhetorical-historical genealogy is to show that before the HIV/AIDS crisis derailed much of this conversation around coding and secrecy in queer life due to its vital-viral and highly publics direct-action politics, many queer homotexts sought to articulate a way of being in the world that directly negotiated the nuances of the "Mask," both within and for queer life. Second, the advent of the digital age and its attendant concerns of mediated spaces of desire and intimate encounter are not by their nature new concerns. Sure, the technology has changed, and the "text" of earlier literary homotexts has been transposed into the text messages exchanged between digital app users. However, as much as this medium shift from text as "literary" to text as "digital"—from the denotative text to the highly visual and spatial domains of digital life—has expanded the definitional dimensions of what we mean when we say textual, rhetorical, spatial, and visual, many of the relational and affective dimensions of digital dating applications echo the coded concerns of earlier generations of queer revolutionaries. In this, LGBTQ+ culture might be more prepared for the hyper-mediated identities and split subjectivities inherent to digital life because of this received history coupled with the already mediated intersectional identities and self-definitions that many of us embody.¹⁹Indeed, there is something to be said for a comparative intersectional analysis of the ways in which the "mask" and "masking" have functioned in other historically marginalized and socio-politically oppressed groups using a not explicitly queer framing. For example, in the African diasporic tradition one could trace "masking" from Paul Lawrence Dunbar's "We Wear the Mask" (1896) to W.E.B. Du Bois's "double-consciousness" (1903) to Franz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks (1952) to Maya Angelou's spoken-word "Mask," among many other entries in a rhetorical genealogy of black thought.

However, in grappling with the often white-cis-gay-male reductive square box of Grindr, we are reminded that masking is a diachronic process through which oppressed groups cope with power structures. Individual acts of masking and collective calls for inclusivity are not concerns unique to Grindr and other digital applications, and to be clear, one can choose to wear the Grindr mask for reasons that are not necessarily non-inclusive or normative. Real and virtual cruising is as complicated as the desire they follow, and I do not suggest here that any group is using Grindr the "right" way. Rather, we may learn from transnational queer-of-color critique how to grapple with those who wear such a Grindr mask and what that mask means for the queer revolutionary present. Much of José Quiroga's work on masks and codes in the Latin American context is essential. Quiroga informs us that, for some, "homosexuality" might be "understood as a constellation—lines of flight, encounters where the code allows for its sparks to fly off in all directions."²⁰José Quiroga, Tropics of Desire: Interventions from Latino America (New York: NYU Press, 2000), 22. As one reviewer of José Esteban Muñoz's work writes, all "cruising is a way of moving with 'no specific destination'; the ultimate goal is 'to get lost [...] in webs of relationality and queer sociality.'"²¹See Sara Warner, "Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (review)," Modern Drama 54, no. 2 (2011): 255-257. Quoted in Joshua Chambers Letson, Tavia Nyong'o, and Ann Pellegrini, "Foreword: Before and After," Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: NYU Press, 2019), xiii. Allowing codes to fly off in all directions with no specific destination in "webs" of queer sociality serves as one ethical imperative for how queer people might frame and reframe intimate digital square spaces to consistently resist the reductive hetero- and homonormative structures that exist across twenty-first-century actual-virtual-digital life. Furthermore, in understanding that the "the space of the [digital] mask goes beyond the certainties of assumed identities; it aims, on the contrary, to blur them," we may bring the decades-long norm-confronting work of the queer to bear on the realm of digital queer spaces and the persistent calls to trouble the mask structure for queer life.²²Quiroga, 3.

But perhaps this rippling constellation of comments and concerns with masks and codes and inclusivity has gotten ahead of itself. All of this questioning must originate with one question: what are Grindr and Scruff (et al.)? For some, these are still subcultural phenomena, and so I want to take a moment to gloss them. Both Grindr (launched 2009) and Scruff (launched 2010) exist across a spectrum of Web 2.0 geospatial gay social networking applications and mobile platforms targeting narrow intimate markets. As of 2017, Grindr had over 27 million users in 192 countries; Scruff counted 12+ million users in 180 countries. As Andrew DJ Shield has written in "Grindr Culture: Intersectional and Socio-Sexual," with Grindr,

There are no algorithms to match users: instead, Grindr participants initiate contact with (or reject) each other based on one profile photo, about 50 words of text, some drop-down menus, and private chats. By centering on the [square] user photo, Grindr's interface hyper-valuates visual self-presentations, which shapes an individual's experiences on the platform, especially when the user's body provides visible cues about a racial or cultural minority position, gender non-conformity, or disability (150).²³Andrew DJ Shield, "Grindr Culture: Intersectional and Socio-Sexual," Ephemera 18, no. 1 (2018): 149–161.

Scruff operates similarly wherein the visual—what is masked or unmasked, concealed or revealed—is, by format and medium, privileged. For both, the textual masks remain in the roughly "50 words of text" that users may select to (mis)represent themselves; both Grindr and Scruff offer a limited range of racial categories, but over time, each has expanded the lexicon of identity constructions, and Scruff, it should be noted, was the first to include space for trans-identification within the homonormative digital app "square-space" framing. Anyone of a certain age can download and use these applications, making them democratic and participatory, in line with Lev Manovich's five principles of new media, and, as spatial and participatory applications, they are in line with Janet Murray's four affordances of digital media.²⁴See Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001); Janet Murray, Inventing the Medium: Principles of Interaction Design as a Cultural Practice (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011). Neither Grindr nor Scruff explicitly markets itself as a "hook-up" application; both contain current features like Scruff's Ventures or Grindr's global "Explore" grid that encourage queer travel and exploration and position the platforms as thinking both with and beyond sex. However, most users download the apps for the purposes of cruising or "looking," representing what Tim Dean writes as the heavily mediated nature of gay men's sex lives. As such, the apps operate forcefully as virtual "hook-up" spaces within the queer cultural imagination.²⁵Dean challenges scholars to understand "how erotic contact is mediated" and how we "constitute our objects of research via the languages we use to describe it [...] sex is mediated not only by vernacular but also by expert nomenclatures" (225). He writes, "Looking for UAI' [the scholarly acronym for 'unprotected anal intercourse'] is not something you see on Grindr or cruising websites" (225). See Tim Dean, "Mediated Intimacies: Raw Sex, Truvada, and the biopolitics of chemoprophylaxis," Sexualities, 18, no 1/2: 224–246. In this vein, serosorting (or serodiscrimination) is common on the apps, and many users disclose some degree of sexual health information and sexual practice preferences on their profiles.

Cruising for sexual contact, then, is central to the revolutionary "square spaces" of queer digital intimacy. Rusi Jaspal thinks of Grindr as spatial, as "a new space for sexual self-definition," (189) and Evangelos Tziallas writes of the liberating "self-pornification" the apps enact for many users. These "square spaces," then, are generative of new sexual possibility and definition even if that full possibility has not yet been and may never be attained. Jaspal writes,

Prior to the advent of the Internet, Gay and Bisexual Men used particular social and physical contexts to meet other men, such as saunas/bathhouses, and bars/clubs (Berubé 2003). In the 1970s, for example, many Gay and Bisexual Men employed subtle signifiers (e.g. ''hankie code'', colored handkerchiefs worn in back pockets) to communicate their sexual preferences (Snyder 1989). When the Internet became widely available in the 1990s, it revolutionized the ways in which Gay and Bisexual Men could connect with one another (188).

Like others before and since, Jaspal notes the transitional "revolutionized" landscape of queer intimacy afforded first by the Internet and later by smartphone apps. As John Walker writes, "LGBTQ people have long used digital spaces as a means of connecting with others like themselves . . . Scruff et al. are simply among the latest technological means through which we've learned how to make those connections."²⁶John Walker, "Before Grindr and Scruff: A Brief Oral History of Gay Men Finding Each Other Online," Splinter News, July 19, 2016, https://splinternews.com/before-grindr-and-scruff-a-brief-oral-history-of-gay-m-1793860384. Furthermore, both how we make those digital-intimate connections and how we might use digital technology in the service of our scholarship is a topic queer historian John Howard explores in "Digital Oral History," where he writes, "Digital queer history" both "helps us expose illegitimate hierarchies of productively illicit practices, generating both challenges and possibilities for shattering normative structures of sexual pleasure and desirability" and encourages researchers "to ponder just how far we are willing to bend the rules, as we aggressively push unwieldy old institutions in revolutionary new directions."²⁷John Howard, "Digital Oral History and the Limits of Gay Sex," in Queering the Countryside: New Frontiers in Rural Queer Studies, ed. Mary L. Gray, Colin R. Johnson, and Brian J. Gilley (New York: NYU Press, 2016), 329, 331.

Indeed, this "revolutionary" research is ongoing in many new digital directions as we seek to understand not only the history and development of queer intimacy and affective intensity across various spaces (saunas, bathhouses, bars, clubs, hanky codes, apps, etc.) but also how these newer "square spaces" are playing out in real lives in the here-and-now and how "square space" interactions and encounters might constitute academic evidence within our disciplinary methodologies. First, let me approach the question of Grindr/Scruff as "academic evidence." While many have studied this proliferation of queer dating and hook-up apps since 2007 in terms of the sociological, technological, psychological, or public health impacts of these apps, taking study into those "new directions," here I am more invested both in how queer culture understands them, uses them as means of communication and homotextual composition as well as forms of affective intimate encounter, both virtual and actual, and in their relationship to a long history of LGBTQ+ masking, coding, and inclusionary/exclusionary practices.²⁸For excellent studies in some of these areas, see Rusi Jaspal, "Gay Men's Construction and Management of Identity on Grindr," Sexuality & Culture 21, no. 1 (2017): 187–204; Lik Sam Chan, "The Role of Gay Identity Confusion and Outness in Sex-Seeking on Mobile Dating Apps Among Men Who Have Sex with Men: A Conditional Process Analysis," Journal of Homosexuality 64, no. 5 (2017): 622–637; Evangelos Tziallas, "Gamified Eroticism: Gay Male 'Social Networking' Applications and Self-Pornography," Sexuality & Culture 19, no. 4 (2015): 759–775; Jack Turban, "We Need to Talk about How Grindr is Affecting Gay Men's Mental Health," Vox, April 4, 2018, https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/4/4/17177058/grindr-gay-men-mental-health-psychiatrist. In terms of queer visual rhetoric, it is striking that the logo for Grindr is a mask, usually a black mask against a yellow background or a yellow mask against a black background. Scruff's logo is a bold "S" or its full name in silver against a black background. The niche target audience for each app is somewhat different: Scruff came into being for more mature, hirsute men and pogonophiles in direct contrast to the somewhat younger and smoother early users of Grindr. Such contrast across similar apps remains if often in less stark relief. The evidence attests: although digital applications may represent a certain form of revolution for queer life and a new kind of text for scholars of sexuality to study, the mask—in its textual, spatial, and visual dimensions—persists.

How then are these "square spaces" playing out in real lives in the here-and-now? As one example, as a graduate student I served as co-facilitator of a Queer Men's Discussion Group with an office of LGBT life for two years. During one session, my co-facilitator and I discussed Grindr and Scruff, and while the specifics of that conversation are confidential, the range of responses were vast: from validations of the democratic (even if anonymous) importance such spaces afforded to critiques of their utility for queer life, embodied experience, and issues with inclusivity. In 2016, Gay and Lesbian Review editor Richard Schneider commented on this range of use-value that we are still debating:

Cruising today is more likely to be carried out on smartphone apps like Grindr and Scruff [...] So rapid has been this shift to cyber cruising that its implications for GLBT identity and community have yet to be worked out [...] the cyber world and the classic GLBT world have one thing in common: the possibility of projecting an identity that's either authentic or disguised, out or closeted—or something in between.²⁹Richard Schneider, Jr., "In Time for the Holidays: 'Cruising,'" Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide 23, no. 6 (2016): 4.

"Identity that's either authentic or disguised, out or closeted—or something in between," again this cyclical tension from the origin of homotextual literary activism, like a spiraling vortex or the seemingly endless image of a Mac's rainbow wheel, returns to us in the digital age. Does one catfish, use other pictures as one's own or ghost, disappear once the allure of the code wears off? R U discreet enough? As we can see, the spaces may have changed, the media may be different, the vocabulary expanded, but the concepts and discourse remain. The ghosts of Xavier Mayne's foundational "Mask" in queer life echo in the ghosting and catfishing encounters mediated by the "filter bubbles" of modern queer digital dating technologies, where the homotext leaps from the printed page of novels and pamphlets to the applications on mobile devices. While this critical, historical, and conceptual framing could go deeper (and it is my hope that this article stimulates further academic and popular conversations), I want to close with a mention of one queer literary figure whose work negotiates the "revolutionary" square space.

The Swipe, the Tap, the Woof, Oh My!: Danez Smith and the Grind of Mediated Digital Desire

". . . everyone on the app says they hate the app but no one stops . . ."

—Danez Smith, "a note on the phone app that tells me how far i am from other men's mouths" (2017)

If Xavier Mayne gave us the evocation of the "Mask" in the wilderness years of pre-gay-rights America with Imre, if Frank O'Hara's poem "Homosexuality" evokes the lyrical (mis)understanding of the mask in 1950s America—"So we are taking off our masks, are we, and keeping / our mouths shut, as if we'd been pierced by a glance!" (1954)—if Mark Doty's 1995 poem "Homo Will Not Inherit" provides us with the landscape of "Downtown Anywhere and between the roil / of bathhouse steam [...] he said to me, I'm going to punish your mouth" of queer spatial intimacies amid post-Stonewall, post-AIDS, 1990s-normalcy-wars, perhaps it is Danez Smith's poetry that gives us both the agonies and the ecstasies of the Grindr mask in our digital age. Danez Smith: the latest queer-literary-activist revolutionary.

Smith's poetry evokes the simultaneously and somewhat paradoxically troubling and generative dimensions of gay digital dating social networks. Smith is a black, genderqueer, and HIV-positive poet and performer whose work often demonstrates how digital intimacy both reinforces and challenges the "essentially permeable and thus impure" nature of identity.³⁰Reid-Pharr, 12. The structure of Smith's first collection (2014) evokes HTML code wherein each section inserts one word into the title [INSERT] BOY: first [INSERT] BOY becomes [black] boy then [papa's lil'] boy, [ruined] boy, [rent] boy, [lover] boy, [again] boy. In the poem "Craigslist Hook-Ups," the speaker recounts three hook-ups orchestrated through online personal ads where the language evokes the expanding lexicon of queer affective terminology: "forgive me father for I have called another man daddy"; "a sloppy chorus of sir yes, please & thank you."³¹Danez Smith, [INSERT] BOY (Portland, OR: Yesyes Books, 2014), 61, 62. Such language, developed within the queer vernacular and transposed onto Craigslist before becoming lyric evocation in Smith's poems, is potent in its virtual and actual allusions.

However, Smith's second collection Don't Call Us Dead (2017)—their most recent collection is the forthcoming Homie (2020)—directly references the "square spaces" of mobile gay social networking. Indeed the "phone app" of Smith's poem, "a note on the phone app that tells me how far i am from other men's mouths," is most assuredly Grindr. Sometimes through enjambment, Smith's poem juxtaposes the generative aspects of Grindr encounters, virtual and actual, with the troubling ones as in the opening line: "headless horsehung horsemen gallop to my gate / dressed in pictures stolen off Google."³²Smith, Don't Call Us Dead (Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2017), 32. The figure is "headless," a form of masking common on the apps, which makes him both a "horsehung" horseman, a desired object literally de-faced, and a fraud, "stolen off Google." Smith further evokes how Grindr both concretizes and undermines identity with lines like, "No Fats, No Fems, No Blacks, Sorry, Just a Preference :)" and the accompanying poem entitled "& even the black guy's profile reads sorry, no black guys" to whom Smith addresses the lines "if no one has told / you, you are beautiful & loveable & black & enough & so—you pretty you—am I."³³ Smith, Don't Call Us Dead, 32–33. Identity squared-in, then challenged, and ultimately reinforced, sex acts orchestrated and denied, intimacy of various types: Smith's poetry evokes all of the messy complexity of queer digital life through spaces like Grindr, spaces that often reflect the homonormative, transphobic, racist, misogynistic spaces of everyday life. Beyond swipes and taps and woofs, Smith's poetry gives us the get-down-grind of mediated digital desire, what Legacy Russell calls "digital orgasm."³⁴Legacy Russell, "Digital dualism and the glitch feminism manifesto," Cyborgology 10 (2012), http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2012/12/10/digital-dualism-and-the-glitch-feminism-manifesto/. Smith's poetry sees potential (re)generation in what Foster Gunnison, Jr. earlier troubled: the "attempt" at "two lives in two worlds at once," the masks of the virtual and the actual, from which one might "still emerge whole." The attempt may fail, but for Smith there is something potent and beautiful in such failure: "…everyone on the app says they hate the app but no one stops…."³⁵Smith, Don't Call Us Dead, 32. The desire, despite frustration, for more: connection, intimacy, the mediation of two subjects in two separate worlds, a search for some version of (e)love. As David B. Hobbs writes, Smith's poetry "comments on the world and at the same time bends language to hope for the possibility of another."³⁶See David B. Hobbs, "Between the News and a Prayer," The Nation, November 15, 2017, https://www.thenation.com/article/danez-smith-between-the-news-and-a-prayer/. Arguably, this, too, is what the gay geospatial dating applications that Smith riffs off have the potential to do, a possibility to echo and extend the ethic of José Esteban Muñoz's Cruising Utopia: "We must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds. Queerness is a longing that propels us onward."³⁷ José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: NYU Press, 2009), 1.

Furthermore, I want to highlight that beyond references to Grindr and similar apps, digital referents permeate Smith's work. Smith's "elegy with pixels & cum," dedicated to late gay porn star Javier "Kid Chocolate" Bravo, illuminates the dehumanization and objectification of Bravo as well as the glorification, veneration, and immortalization of him afforded by digital life, where "men gather in front of screens to jerk & mourn," again the juxtaposition of liberating carnality and affective intensity.³⁸Smith, Don't Call Us Dead, 48. "[E]legy" is followed by "litany with blood all over," which visually depicts the process of Smith's own seroconversion through digital manipulation: the palimpsestic word cloud of "my blood" and "his blood" becomes increasingly muddied as the separation between the two is impossible to discern, a pool of typography where words mask other words.³⁹Ibid, 51–52. Far from the smartphone's mediation of desire between two autonomous subjects, what these apps reveal through Smith's imagination is a proliferation of desires; the word cloud of Smith's poetry where the digital separation between "him" and "me" becomes increasingly palimpsestic and opaque represents a deliberate blurring, an opacity of unknowingness and unintelligibility, that reflects and replicates the messy masking of the constellation that is desire.

What Danez Smith offers in their poetry is both the context of digital orgasm and an instructive tool, a guide of sorts, to queer digital life for their readers. Smith does this through poetry that reflects the digital form: lowercase lettering throughout, digitally rendered word clouds as poetic meditation, phrases of text struck-through in translucent moments of self-editing, even the separation of poetic sections via two backward slashes evokes the unavoidable presence of digital coding in Smith's lyrical ruminations. Smith's is both digital poetry, written within and for the revolution in queer intimacies and affective human landscapes of the Grindr age, and a lyrical extension of the masked-coded and inclusive coalitional concerns that have permeated homotexts across time in the American queer intimate literary landscape.

Grindr is "Glitch": Or Is the Mask Here to Stay?

"Culture was a way of talking and not talking, it was the code and it was also the mask" (26).

—José Quiroga

I have tried to provide the rhetorical-cultural-spatial-historical, and Smith gives us the lyrical, but perhaps there is more to say about the theoretical potential of Grindr and other apps. I want to end by thinking of Grindr as glitch, a slippery place full of radical cultural potential. In a 2015 article, trans-studies and feminist scholar Jenny Sundén discusses gender as a broken technology, one she thinks of as "accidental error" through the digital term "glitch."⁴⁰Jenny Sundén, "On trans-, glitch, and gender as machinery of failure," First Monday 20, no. 4 (2015), https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/5895/4416. While I will not go into Sundén's use of glitch in terms of gender, glitch, etymologically from the Yiddish word glitsh meaning "slippery place," "forces us to pay attention to the materiality and fragility of new media."⁴¹Sundén. In this way, Grindr and Scruff are glitchy wherein the possible is sometimes materially attainable via the screen's mediation of fragile and imperfect connections. The proliferation of LGBTQ+ dating and hook-up digital applications clarify and cloud, reveal and conceal, seeking transparency and enacting opacity—a glitch between the virtual and the actual that represents the expansion of the possible as well as the continuation of a m/Mask, a posture once thought of as a "glitch" that was "fixed" via gay liberation and its attendant progressive narratives of closet deconstruction, increased queer visibility, and greater social acceptance.

The digital glitch is often liberating, generative, reductive, ridiculous, troubling: as Zadie Smith questions Facebook and new media gadgetry: "Doesn't it, suddenly, look a little bit ridiculous? Your life in this format?"⁴²Zadie Smith, "Generation Why?," New York Times Review of Books, November 25, 2010, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2010/11/25/generation-why/. Sure, square spaces are not enough; they're not fully YOU, whatever that you might actually signify; they are not revolutionary enough, not inclusive enough, echoing many of the masks and troubles of our current moment. But as the history of LGBTQ+ movements and the spatial terrain of intimate encounters attests, to quote James Baldwin, "The place in which I'll fit will not exist until I make it."⁴³Baldwin quoted in Claudia Roth Pierpont, "Another Country," New Yorker, February 9, 2009, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/02/09/another-country. Or as Smith's contemporary Saeed Jones writes, "However many masks we invent and deploy, in the end, we cannot control what other people see when they look at us."⁴⁴Saeed Jones, How We Fight for Our Lives: A Memoir (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2019), 106. Or, to give the last word to Danez Smith, "We do what we queers do—taking scraps and making an abundance."⁴⁵Danez Smith, "Reimagining Ourselves in an Increasingly Queer World," New York Times, June 16, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/16/us/danez-smith-lgbtq-essex-hemphill.html. "Grindr is glitch": one slippery place wherein queers continue to make a world that fits them and their forms of loving. 

Acknowledgments

First, I would like to thank Don Kelly for his generosity, trailblazing, queer curation, and friendship. Much of the thinking in this piece originated during my tenure with the Don Kelly Research Collection Fellowship in Gay Literature and Culture at Cushing Memorial Library, Texas A&M University. Thanks to the Cushing Library and fellowship team, especially Rebecca Hankins, Michael Jackson, Krista May, Francesca Marini, Leslie Winter, and Jenny Reibenspies for their assistance and warmth during my time in Texas. Thanks as well to the students in my spring 2019 American Studies course, "Queer Intersections, American Outlaws," for helping to expand my thinking on these topics through our discussions. Finally, thanks to those Grindr and Scruff (et al.) users who continue to imagine and enact new possibilities for queer life.

About the Author

Eric Solomon earned his doctorate in English from Emory University and is a visiting assistant professor of English and American Studies at Oxford College, Emory University. His work is featured in Southern Spaces, south, Pop Matters, and Mississippi Quarterly.

Women's Space, Queer Space: Communes, Landykes, and Queer Contact Zones in the Lesbian Feminist South

The middle-aged man sitting in the row in front of me shoved his wife's arm and pointed at two women. "See?!" he said, conspiratorially, derisively. I looked at my friend Cheryl and raised an eyebrow. Where did he think he was, anyway? The Southeastern Conference (SEC) Women's Basketball Tournament audience is filled with lesbians—butches, femmes, sports dykes, some distinguished by a modified mullet, others by their no-makeup, tennis shoes, and jeans uniform, but all united in their obsession with women's basketball.

Of course, the tournament audience includes others besides lesbians; like most queer spaces in the South, lesbians share the space with many other groups—retirees, parents and their tween daughters, and random diehard SEC fans who love their team or really hate their rivals. Yet the SEC Women's Basketball Tournament is a roving capital of the southern sisterhood, and it is anything but subtle, but if you ask the fathers and the busloads of white-haired retirees about all the lesbians they will look at you blankly, whether they noticed them or not.

This is because "the South" has always been an imagined community, based in wish fulfillment and aspiration, that depends upon deliberate unlooking. It excludes populations that, collectively, comprise a majority of the population. It excludes black southerners, who understandably have a more ambivalent relationship to the "sense of place" invested in their subordination. It excludes the many immigrant groups that have made the South their home over the generations—Chinese, Lebanese, Italians, and more recently, Indians, Vietnamese, Africans, Hispanics. It ignores queer southern communities in towns both small and large. In other words, the "sense of place" so beloved by traditional southern literary critics overlooks the actual people in that place.

This tendency to disavow the full complexity of diverse communities in the South has a long, shameful history. The Confederacy imagined a southern aristocracy based on honor and culture, obscuring a white supremacy dependent on stolen slave labor. Post-Reconstruction politics did more than rewrite the cause of the Civil War—it also remade the space of the South: Confederate memorial statues were erected, often in town squares or in prominent public locations, as Jim Crow laws limited the spaces and places African Americans could live, work, and recreate.¹For more see, Caroline E. Janney, Burying the Dead but Not the Past: Ladies' Memorial Associations and the Lost Cause (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008) and Micki McElya, Clinging to Mammy: The Faithful Slave in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). The fact that these public Confederate monuments still dominate southern spaces, and that their removals provoke intense debate and outcry, suggests how effectively this southern space made inequity seem natural.

The ubiquitous notion of a static, conservative South has led to many unwarranted assumptions about LGBTQ communities and their incompatibility in the South. Gay liberation was framed as an urban phenomenon; gay people leave their inhospitable small towns and regions and build a critical mass in major cities like New York and San Francisco, where their visibility and numbers result in political clout and political influence. Greenwich Village in New York and the Castro in San Francisco were two models; pioneer Harvey Milk encouraged queers across the country to join him in paradise.

This metronormativity has been questioned in studies of rural and southern queer spaces like John Howard's Men Like That, Mary Gray's Out in the Country, and Scott Herring's Another Country. Howard's ground-breaking book challenged the linking of gay identity and urban life, insisting that this bias "at times has denied agency to rural folk, [and] has assumed that nonurban dwellers can't attach meanings to, can't find useful ways of framing, their nonconforming attractions and behaviors."²John Howard, Men Like That: A Southern Queer History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 14. He argues that "in Mississippi, spatial configurations—the unique characteristics of a rural landscape—forged distinct human interactions, movements, and sites," and that the urban model "incompletely and inadequately gets at the shape and scope of queer life."³Howard, Men Like That, 15. He suggests new models for understanding that queer life, decoupled from both identity and a fixed sense of place.

Scott Herring concurs. He provides a detailed overview of the growing scholarship on queer rural communities, concluding that "these artists and authors pay heed to the 'non-metropolitan' as a dynamic space of inquiry and sexual vitality. Complicating geophobic claims that ruralized spaces are always and only hotbeds of hostility, cultural and socioeconomic poverty, religious fundamentalism, homophobia, racism, urbanoia, and social conservatism, their works question knee-jerk assumptions that the 'rural' is a hate-filled space for queers as they archive the complex desires that contribute to any non-metropolitan identification."⁴Scott Herring, Another Country: Queer Anti-Urbanism (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 9. Herring's own work focuses on contemporary artistic portrayals of the rural queer in periodicals, photography, memoirs, and graphic novels.

This work on rural queerness is enhanced by feminist and queer geography, which has provided new paradigms to theorize how ideologies order and impede our understandings of space and how different configurations can remake that sense of space. Jack Geiseking explains that "space is not absolute or fixed in the Kantian sense but constantly produced in how it is all at once created, conceived, and lived."⁵Jen Jack Giesking, "A Queer Geographer's Life as an Introduction to Queer Theory, Space, and Time," in Queer Geographies: Beirut, Tijuana, Copenhagen, eds. Lasse Lau, Mirene Arsanios, Felipe Zuniga-Gonzalez, Mathia Kryger, and Omar Mismar (Roskilde, Denmark: Museet for Samtidskunst, 2014), 14. Our "natural" notions of space, in other words, are not innocent; instead, as the Women and Geography Study Group argues, "dominant senses of place reflect, in both their form and their content, the meanings given to places by the powerful."⁶Gillian Rose, Nicky Gregson, Jo Foord, et al., Introduction to Feminist Geographies: Explorations in Diversity and Difference, ed. Women and Geography Study Group (Essex, UK: Longman, 1997), 9. They continue, "A consequence of the way in which very specific senses of place are constructed through the particular images and values attached to them by the socially and culturally powerful, is that senses of place are often highly controversial. Other groups may challenge the senses of place produced by the powerful, and cultural geographers therefore argue that senses of place are often also sites of contestation."⁷Rose et al., Introduction to Feminist Geographies, 9. This focus on space as a site of contestation serves as a dominant focus of feminist and queer geography. "Space" isn't natural, and it isn't neutral.

Doreen Massey lays out the terms for understanding space beyond the fixed narrative of the powerful. She argues that space is heterogeneous, inhabited by diverse groups of people who often disagree about its functions and purpose. Multiple and relational, space is also open-ended and unfixed. As she explains,

What is special about place is not some romance of a pre-given collective identity or of the eternity of the hills. Rather, what is special about place is precisely that throwntogetherness, the unavoidable challenge of negotiating a here-and-now. . . . There can be no assumption of pre-given coherence, or of community or collective identity. . . . In sharp contrast to the view of place as settled and pre-given, with a coherence only to be disturbed by "external" forces, places as presented here in a sense necessitate invention; they pose a challenge. . . . They require that, in one way or another, we confront the challenge of the negotiation of multiplicity.⁸Doreen Massey, For Space (London: Sage Publications, 2005), 140–141.

Massey's insistence that there is no "pre-given coherence" to a space challenges a fundamental assumption about the fixity of the South and rejects the idea that there is some coherent essence of southernness. It constructs space that is always being created in the present moment, negotiating often contradictory perspectives.

Indeed, Massey's notion of "throwntogetherness" allows for radical reimaginations of space: "What I'm interested in is how we might imagine spaces for these times; how we might pursue an alternative imagination. What is needed, I think, is to uproot 'space' from that constellation of concepts in which it has so unquestioningly so often been embedded (stasis; closure; representation) and to settle it among another set of ideas (heterogeneity; relationality; coevalness . . . liveliness indeed) where it releases a more challenging political landscape."⁹Massey, For Space, 13. The idea of "alternative imagination" of space is a dominant theme in feminist and queer geography. Geiseking privileges the "action of queering: refusing the normative and upsetting privilege for more radical, just worlds, even those not yet imagined,"¹⁰Giesking, "A Queer Geographer's Life," 15. to "uproariously alter the everyday spatialities of heterosexuality."¹¹Giesking, 15. These disruptions include interventions in "the built environment" and the "landscapes" we construct to represent "nature."

Though studies of this utopian "act of queering" tend to focus on contemporary, urban interventions, the act of queering was central to utopian reimaginations of rural space in early women's liberation. Creating autonomous women's space and queer space was a central focus of women's communes and the landyke movement, which had particular resonance in the archive of southern lesbian feminism.

Landykes, Communes, and Lesbian Idealization of the Rural

Early women's liberation was long engaged with challenging the patriarchal hierarchies of space, both public and private. Many early protests—the sit-in at Ladies Home Journal, for example, and the burning of undergarments at the Miss America pageant—were forms of performance art that sought to make visible the seemingly "natural" public spaces allowed to women. These demonstrations intended to smash the public/private distinction that had isolated women and made their concerns a personal failing rather than a structural injustice. The creation of temporary spaces of freedom within a larger heteropatriarchal society—like gay bars and women's music festivals—were another strategy to reconfigure space.

Some lesbian feminists opted for more permanent means of escape that involved experiments in living that were, fundamentally, experiments of spatiality. Greta Rensenbrink explains that "separatist communities emerged in urban areas, especially San Francisco and New York, and increasingly on rural land communes across the United States."¹²Greta Rensenbrink, "Parthenogenesis and Lesbian Separatism: Regenerating Women's Community through Virgin Birth in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s," Journal of the History of Sexuality 19, no. 2 (May 2010): 291. These separatist communities often functioned as "collectives" in urban areas; some of the most important manifestos of the early women's movement emerged from collectives, which formed and reformed with alacrity in the early 1970s. Women lived and worked in the same space, breaking down the notions of public and private, masculine and feminine. Collectives broke down hierarchies within private and public lives, as well. Members often rejected the distinction between intellectual labor and physical labor; in press collectives, for example, women both wrote articles, short stories, and poems and physically printed these pieces—sometimes on mimeograph machines and later on letterpresses they bought and taught themselves how to use. There was deep suspicion about "leaders" of these groups; decisions were collectively and democratically reached. Cooking, cleaning, home repair—all were burdens to be shared equally in the collective. Collective members tried to re-make space to construct new revolutionary models. They also tried to remake economic models. Frequently, only a few of the members of these collectives had "straight" jobs, which were used to support the entire community. Collectives experimented with different models for self-sufficiency to free themselves from the obligations of capitalist patriarchy. Very few women stayed in these collectives for long; manifestos often had more staying power than the intentional communities that produced them.

Some collective experiments sought physical separation from mainstream society. Research has shown the "the country was an 'ideal' or 'fantasy' place for lesbians to live,"¹³David Bell and Gill Valentine, "Introduction: Orientations," in Mapping Desire: Geographies of Sexualities, eds. David Bell and Gill Valentine (New York: Routledge, 1995), 8. because it seemed to allow for a reinvention of space from the ground up. Sine Anahita explains, "In the early 1970s, the landdyke movement was created when a radical branch of second-wave feminism converged with ideas from the hippie back-to-the-land and other social movements. . . . From the outset, landdykes articulated the connections between ecological and feminist principles. Early activists sought to create a network of land-based communities where ecofeminist principles could manifest in everyday acts to prefigure a lesbian feminist, nature-centered, postpatriarchal future."¹⁴Sine Anahita, "Nestled into Niches: Prefigurative Communities on Lesbian Land," Journal of Homosexuality 56, no. 6 (August/September 2009): 724. This geographical experiment allowed for more democratic and communal constructions of space to teach, inspire, provide refuge, and influence the larger culture with guerrilla-type actions. Rose Norman, Merril Mushroom, and Kate Ellison, editors of a special issue of Sinister Wisdom on the landyke movement in the South, explain that "landykes were creating something larger, beyond a couple or a family. They attempted to live out egalitarian and ecological principles, which they saw as the core of female culture. They attempted this within sometimes stark financial, cultural, and psychological limitations."¹⁵Rose Norman, Merril Mushroom, and Kate Ellison, "Notes for a Special Issue, Landykes of the South: Women's Land Groups and Lesbian Communities in the South," Sinister Wisdom 98 (Fall 2015): 8. While the landyke movement was national, the editors suggested that the South has always contained a large share of these experimental communities.¹⁶Norman et al., "Notes for a Special Issue," 5.

Such movements are controversial and have been denounced as essentialist, white-identified, privileged, and unrealistic, but participants portray them differently. Some are unapologetic in their insistence on a women-only space and cling to essentialist notions of women's innate difference and superiority, but others see the landyke movement as an essential part of their development that allowed for creative rethinking of what is possible in culture, politics, and living. Sarah Shanbaum explained: "We created a closed and separatist environment, and in that closed and separatist environment, we learned and we became strong, and then we broke that like an egg, and went out into the world, and did what it was we wanted to do."¹⁷Dee Mosbacher, dir., Radical Harmonies: Woodstock Meets Women's Liberation in a Film about a Movement that Exploded the Gender Barriers in Music (Wolfe Video, 2004). Seeing separatism as a necessary phase that led to a broader inclusiveness is common for participants, and it is a pattern that we see in the archive of southern lesbian feminism as well.

Women's space and women's land were essential for the utopian possibilities they fostered. Greta Rensenbrink argues that "separatists embraced prefigurative politics, seeking to live the future in the present and working to create communities and local cultures that anticipated a utopian dream."¹⁸Rensenbrink, "Parthenogenesis and Lesbian Separatism," 292. As one landyke participant explained in the documentary Lesbiana:

We were actively rethinking the world. Each time I walked out of the bar, I felt like I was crossing a zone from a fictional world—the life in the bar—into reality—life in the city. And that is how I developed this notion of reality versus fiction. Meaning that women's reality was perceived as fiction by men, and what we called reality, was in fact the accumulation of masculine subjectivity that has been working for centuries establishing laws, traditions, etc. And we called that "reality," but it was nothing more than the male version of reality carried through the centuries. During that time, I was writing two pages. On one page I was trying to figure out the male system, a horrible system, detrimental to women: patriarchy. I was trying to figure out its strategies and its tactics, and how it evolved and was persistent to this day. And on the other page, I was writing about desire, utopia, beauty, pleasure, and everything I was discovering with other women. This is how I stayed in touch with the reality of patriarchy and still I could take flight, into love, lust, sisterhood, and all the discoveries I was making at that time.¹⁹Myriam Fougère, dir., Lesbiana: A Parallel Revolution (Women Make Movies, 2012).

The creation of a utopian, liberated space, both actual and imagined, was a key part of early women's liberation. It is why the arts were so enmeshed with political activism; why "consciousness-raising" moved from physical gatherings to novels; why women's press collectives were seen as political activism. Physical and imaginative space were mutually interdependent, and a compelling imagined space might end up having more impact than a physical space.

Many writers in the southern lesbian feminist archive were invested in communes and collectives. Bertha Harris went with a group of lesbian friends (including anthropologist Esther Newton and her then-lover Louise Fishman, the painter) to an upstate New York property owned by Jill Johnston,²⁰Esther Newton, Margaret Mead Made Me Gay: Person Essays, Public Ideas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 277n6. which served as a weekend getaway and part-time retreat that Harris would later memorialize in Lover. Blanche McCrary Boyd joined a commune in Vermont (not an exclusively lesbian commune, though she transforms it into one in Terminal Velocity); Rita Mae Brown was part of a women's collective, the Furies, in Washington, D.C., and when she eventually moved to Virginia (after the sale of Rubyfruit Jungle to Bantam Books) she didn't establish a commune, but she did buy land.

In Rebels, Rubyfruits, and Rhinestones, James T. Sears describes a seamless transition of southern queers from their small southern towns to New York City and back to intentional communities in the South—a fluid circulation that negated neither urban gay communities nor southern identities.²¹James T. Sears, Rebels, Rubyfruit, and Rhinestones: Queering Space in the Stonewall South (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001). The Pagoda community in St. Augustine, Florida was one of the most famous,²²For more information, see Lin Daniels, "Pagoda, Temple of Love: Practice Ground for the Matriarchy," 1977, http://kongress-matriarchatspolitik.ch/upload/Lin-Daniels.pdf. but many smaller ones thrived under the radar across the South. Dorothy Allison belonged to a women's collective in Tallahassee, Florida. Catherine Nicholson lived in a collective in Charlotte, North Carolina but was kicked out for her intergenerational romance with Harriet Desmoines; photographs of the Sinister Wisdom group, taken at Nicholson's house on Country Club Drive (with many of the women topless), suggest a faux commune had formed there. And Catherine Ennis, who was so cautious that she wouldn't do readings of her lesbian novels too close to her hometown, appeared in the Ponchatoula Times in the mid-1980s with her "artisans" collective; the photograph suggests a lesbian commune flying under the radar.²³"Copper Fountains Bring Ponchatoula Artisans Fame," Ponchatoula Times, July 31, 1986, http://ptl.stparchive.com/pageimage.php?paper=PTL&year=1986&month=7&day=31&page =1&mode=F&base=PTL07311986P01&title=The%20Ponchatoula%20Times. In smaller communities this sort of caution wasn't uncommon. Other communes—usually those in urban centers or college towns in the South—were more open and combative, though often no more visible. The Atlanta Lesbian Feminist Alliance (ALFA), which operated for two decades in the largest urban center in the South and hosted a number of lesbian writers, including southern lesbian feminist writers, was largely unknown in Atlanta proper. The Feminary collective in Durham, North Carolina was well known within lesbian feminist circles but fairly anonymous inside the Research Triangle. More recent communes include one in Alabama and Camp Sister Spirit in Mississippi.²⁴A 2009 New York Times article discusses the Alabama community—see Sarah Kershaw, "My Sister's Keeper," New York Times, January 30, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02 /01/fashion/01womyn.html. For more on Camp Sister Spirit, see "Controversial Camp Sister Spirit Celebrates 10 Years," WLOX News, September 22, 2003, http://www.wlox.com/story/1451559/controversial-camp-sister-spirit-celebrates-10-years/.

Despite their many differences in locations, visibility, and intentions, all these communes and collectives served an important function in the archive of southern lesbian feminism. Southern lesbian feminists were deeply invested in the spaces and places of the South. Whether they stayed in the South or fled to New York or San Francisco, they engaged imaginatively and combatively in the remaking of southern place to create a South they did not have to leave. Southern lesbian feminists—white, Latina, and African American—reconsidered their own "sense of place" in regard to their sexual identities and regional inheritance.

Southern lesbian feminist writers reinvent southern space as an imagined kingdom of racial impurities, sexual perversity, and political radicalism. In their imaginary sites of southern space, they include utopian imaginings, communes and collectives, and queer contact zones within the larger communities.

About the Author

Jaime Harker is professor of English and the director of the Sarah Isom Center for Women and Gender Studies at the University of Mississippi. Her research centers on popular American women writers of the interwar period, Cold War gay literature, and women's liberation and gay liberation literature. Prior to writing the book from which this essay is excerpted, she has written two other monographs: America the Middlebrow: Women's Novels, Progressivism, and Middlebrow Authorship Between the Wars (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007) and Middlebrow Queer: Christopher Isherwood in America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).

The Great South

From 1873–74, towards the end of Reconstruction, journalist Edward King travelled the former Confederacy attempting to unpack the meaning of "the Great South" (1875) for largely northern readers of Scribner's magazine.¹See King, "This book is the record of an extensive tour of observation through the States of the South and South-west during the whole of 1873, and the Spring and Summer of 1874" (i). Along with Scribner's publishers and illustrator J. Wells Champney, King aimed to provide "the reading public a truthful picture of life in a section" recovering from the ravages of war (i). King divided his documentary travel narrative into serialized segments largely along state and town lines.²See King's subtitle: "A Record of Journeys in Louisiana, Texas, the Indian Territory, Missouri, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, and Maryland." King's empathetic analysis brought to light many of the problems (political, racial, economic) afflicting the still-occupied former Confederacy; "The South can never be cast in the same mould as the North," he wrote (793). One had to experience it to understand it. King's work reified and reinforced conceptions of how the idea of the South functioned in the American imaginary of that time: an exotic "other" land to be penetrated, explored, known, purposed.³See Jennifer Greeson, Our South: Geographic Fantasy and the Rise of National Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). Nearly 150 years later, despite numerous changes and persistent discussions of the demise of distinctly southern ways of being and doing, scholars and popularizers continue to debate and deploy variations of King's Great "Southern question" (794).

In different ways, both John Wharton Lowe's Calypso Magnolia and Joshua Jelly-Schapiro's Island People descend from King's documentary travel memoir. While Lowe's Calypso Magnolia is written in an academic idiom, he extends The Great South to a larger Circum-Caribbean geography, proposing a movement across and not simply within. In contrast, Jelly-Schapiro's Island People draws from the well of Caribbean thinkers and documentarians in enacting theories of place through the practice of experience. Lowe travels imaginatively through literary texts. Jelly-Schapiro travels literally to examine histories and cultures of the islands he visits. However, like King, both ask readers big, overarching questions—what and where is the Great (circum)Caribbean?—and, more importantly, does it matter?

"Hyphenating Waters": Calypso Magnolia and the circumCaribbean

Lowe approaches these questions through a diligent analysis of books spanning the Mexican-American War (1846–1848) to the more recent Cuban American writing of the 1980s–90s. He invests substantial energy in altering the grand, exceptionalist narrative of southern literary studies, which goes (reductively) something like this: for decades after the Civil War, the South was a "Sahara of the Bozart," devoid of anything resembling "high" culture, until the arrival of native (white) sons such as William Faulkner⁴"The emergence of William Faulkner as the centerpiece of narrowly focused notions of Southern identity seemed to crystallize the inward-looking aspect of the discipline" (5). and the Nashville Agrarians, who almost single-handedly were responsible for a cultural Renaissance that proved "the South" to be a place of great, autochthonously conceived and produced, art. Like much other recent scholarship, including Candace Waid's excerpt in Southern Spaces which challenges the idea of the white exceptionalist Southern Renaissance, Calypso Magnolia seeks to rethink the South and southern literary history through specific attention to movement and migration across geographic and imaginary borderlands, and against any essentialist, bounded notion of "the South," southern racial demographics, or "southern culture." Lowe aims to "cross artificial boundaries," "to unlock old geographical and cultural restrictions," to "help us see ourselves anew" (ix, xi). Lowe invites us, as readers and scholars, to "reconfigure the South and the Caribbean" (11). These are large tasks that Calypso Magnolia sets and achieves to varying degrees.

Lowe's work enters existing scholarly conversations in what some have called the "New Southern Studies."⁵In a June 2001 special issue of American Literature, Houston A. Baker, Jr. and Dana D. Nelson coined the phrase "new Southern Studies" as an "emerging collective already producing a robust body of work" in rethinking southern culture (231). Baker and Nelson cite Patricia Yaeger's Dirt and Desire (2000) as one of these works. Baker's Turning South Again (2001) represents his own venture at this scholarship. In responding to the article which formed the basis of Lowe's book-length study, Kimberly Nichele Brown firmly places "Calypso Magnolia" within this scholarly trend: "the South" becomes "unmoored from its local or provincial connotations" and "finds its rightful place within transnational discourses" (82). Like others before him, Lowe uses an aquatic metaphor, "crosscurrents," in his scholarly act of drawing connections between "the South" as traditionally conceived and the broader circumCaribbean.

Lowe models his frame—"circumCaribbean"—after the "circum-Atlantic" work of Paul Gilroy and Joseph Roach, among others.⁶Lowe cites Glissant, Foucault, Bhabha, and Brent Staples as further influences. See Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995); Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). One can see Lowe approaching the term "circumCaribbean" in his earlier article on these subjects; in writing of Roach's "path-breaking" work, Lowe praises him for adumbrating "a culture of performance that circles around the Caribbean rim" (71). See Lowe, "'Calypso Magnolia': The Caribbean Side of the South," South Central Review 22, no. 1, 54–80. Spatially, writes Lowe, the circumCaribbean "embraces the coastal Gulf and the Caribbean, as well as the islands that dot the seas and the western Atlantic" (xi). Lowe moves around and within, creating a geography that is boundary crossing and somewhat nebulous by definition and limitation. In such a vast space, what is the rationale for the foci of individual chapters? Admitting the difficulty of language barriers and distinctions, Lowe opens the conversation to other scholars with greater proficiency in the non-English speaking locales of this circumCaribbean (11).

He begins with the Mexican-American War via southern writers who wrote about it, William C. Falkner (great-grandfather of that Faulkner), Arthur Manigault, and Raphael Semmes. Next, he presents two enigmatic figures of the nineteenth century—Lucy Holcombe Pickens and Martin Delaney—as writers who "saw the affinities of the coastal South with the Caribbean lands and had their characters crisscross Gulf waters" to and from Cuba (60). For Lowe, Pickens and Delaney were writers of the Caribbean imaginary who saw, from different worldviews, equal benefits in this crisscross movement. Calypso Magnolia then follows the seismic shift of the Haitian Revolution in subsequent literature. Lowe centralizes the work of Floridians Zora Neale Hurston and James Weldon Johnson and Tennessean Madison Smartt Bell, but he is careful to include non-US southern writers such as Victor Séjour, C. L. R. James, and Alejo Carpentier. Lowe then turns to the travel writing of northerner Constance Fenimore Woolson and the peripatetic Lafcadio Hearn, who "limned a new sense of the circumCaribbean" (18). His chapters five and six offer comparative readings of contemporaneous authors: Zora Neale Hurston through the prism of Claude McKay, and Richard Wright through George Lamming. Calypso Magnolia closes with the experience of Cuban American writers in south Florida largely in the final decades of the twentieth century.

Lowe is exhaustive and syncretic, weaving disparate strands across multiple locales from multiple perspectives. He is a close reader from the outset, and his copious plot summaries serve as helpful entrances into unfamiliar texts.

As necessary and vital as Lowe's molecular moves are to thinking anew about "southern" literature and scholarship, the overarching narrative still favors a certain way of perceiving. At the beginning of this project, before Lowe coined circumCaribbean and was talking only about the "Caribbean Side of the South," he aimed "to rupture the artificial boundaries of region and nation to reach out to the Caribbean" ("Calypso Magnolia," 60). Why must the US South "reach out"? Why must the "South" have a "Caribbean Side"? What if the Caribbean has no desire to be reached out to? What if there's no South to reach out? What if the gaze was reversed? Arguably, Lowe's impulse teeters on making the Caribbean an exotic "side-chick" to the central story. Why centralize Hurston and Johnson and Smartt Bell in a discussion of the Haitian Revolution? Why read Wright through the prism of Lamming and not complicate this impulse more thoroughly?

Lowe aims "to pursue narrative as it cuts across maps that create artificial lines around peoples and cultures" (7). Why not, then, make more radical departures in authorial choices and texts? For example, why not read Reinaldo Arenas's pre-exile La Vieja Rosa/Old Rosa (1980) as a "southern" text clearly speaking back to Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! from a distinctly Cuban-to-US South direction?⁷Lowe broached this type of critical move at moments. In his final chapter, he posits a reading of Cristina García's The Agüero Sisters alongside Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!. However, the aims of Calypso Magnolia seem to be more syncretic and surveying (317). As Kimberly Nichele Brown writes, "What would it mean to southern literary studies to cast Faulkner not just as a southern writer, but as a Caribbean one?" (86). How would such a reversal in perspective "cut across" more disruptively and make us rethink cultural hegemony more deeply? Such questions persist in a work that could justify its organizational logic more forcefully in conjunction with its larger aims. The "currents" of the Caribbean, after all, flow in multiple directions.

Additionally, Lowe writes, "I mean to suggest through the term 'Calypso Magnolia'" a "kind of cultural overlapping" (67). Overlapping seems to imply a one-directional filter that places something "new and fresh" atop a foundational norm, simultaneously rethinking and reifying it. Consider what Lowe labels "the overarching pattern of [his] book":

the movement of Southerners both physically and imaginatively, out of the constructed boundaries of the Southern United States into the wider world of the circumCaribbean, a process that unsettled notions of exceptionalism and nationalism alike, while simultaneously, and paradoxically, creating a vision of a new Southern empire, which would conjoin slave-owning states with the plantations and territories of the Caribbean, Central America, and beyond (22).

Aside from political and economic implications, what are we to make of the imperial cultural ramifications evident in this statement of the larger "pattern" of Calypso Magnolia? Throughout, Lowe brilliantly elucidates what "Southern" writers gain from such a physical and/or imaginative movement. What do those writers or thinkers "beyond" gain from this movement? The book lays "out the myriad ways the 'South of the South' has affected the inhabitants of the U.S. South," and attempts gestures in the opposite direction (1). However, the whole remains too linear and one-directional. Calypso Magnolia could benefit from a more circular, messier approach.

A weightier "Introduction" might have offered a firmer sense of what Lowe means by "crosscurrents" as an organizing principle. This is a substantial missed opportunity. Current is a term of physical movement. In more directly defining "crosscurrents," Lowe might have pulled together his circumCaribbean frame with other critical movements and interventions. As is, Calypso Magnolia leaves us with currents as an aquatic, uniting metaphor:⁸As Brown writes in her review of Lowe's earlier "Calypso Magnolia," "I can see many benefits of using the sea… to find points of connection between the South and the Caribbean" (83). where all is "tied… together across and upon the currents of the great sea" (19).

Lowe asks readers to cross those currents via his case studies. Calypso Magnolia's final and most exciting chapter, "Southern Aijaco: Miami and the Generation of Cuban American Writing," addresses crossings as they impact identity, pondering what it might mean to feel "crossed" or hyphenated in southern-Caribbean-ness. Spatially, Florida seems the perfect confined locale for Lowe's larger study: not quite "southern," not quite "Caribbean," but somehow a cross of both. He considers the work of Cuban-Americans of the "'one-and-a-half' generation," such as Gustavo Pérez Firmat's Life on the Hyphen and Next Year in Cuba, Cristina García's The Agüero Sisters, Virgil Suarez's Going Under, and Roberto Fernández's Holy Radishes! (293). Lowe's readings of Cuban American fiction and memoir, often "in and on the liminal space of the hyphenating waters between Cuba and Florida," are some of the most original and engaging in Calypso Magnolia (332). In reading lives on the hyphen, Lowe opens the door for future studies of hybridity modeled after his circumCaribbean framing. Despite my concerns, Lowe's writing is careful and specific, and always exemplary. As it seeks to shift the kinds of questions we ask, Calypso Magnolia's "crosscurrents" will help readers think beyond and across hyphenating waters.

"So Many One Night Stands": Island People and Island Hopping

In Calypso Magnolia's chapter on Woolson and Hearn, Lowe mentions Edward King's The Great South as making "extravagant claims as to the novelty of its 'discoveries,' which were achieved through 'penetration' and 'investigation'" (147). The Great South helped a nascent American empire "train the eye southward" as testing ground for its global ambitions and depicted in its illustrations stereotypes of African Americans and poor whites (147, 167). Unlike Lowe, Joshua Jelly-Schapiro's Island People: The Caribbean and the World never mentions The Great South. Similarly, many of the figures discussed by Lowe are not mentioned in Jelly-Schapiro's travel narrative. There are two small exceptions. While Lowe devotes half a chapter to Lafcadio Hearn, Jelly-Schapiro casually mentions a parking garage in Fort-de-France named in Hearn's honor; while Lowe seems to primarily read George Lamming only in relation to Richard Wright, Jelly-Schapiro reads Lamming directly in relation to Barbados, casually nodding to Wright in describing Lamming as a "native son" (341, 287). Otherwise, one should not approach a comparison of Calypso Magnolia and Island People via the figures they mention and/or study but the ideas and questions they elicit.⁹Other than a passing reference to Faulkner's Mississippi, the only traditionally defined "southern" writer to appear in Island People is Georgian Flannery O'Conner, whose relationship to depictions of race is mentioned in reference to Jean Rhys (12, 367). For US readers, Jelly-Schapiro's Island People again trains "the eye southward," to the "South of the South." However, unlike The Great South, Jelly-Schapiro does not present the Caribbean as a place of discovery, penetration, or investigation. Island People is an experiential travel narrative in which orientalism and exoticism are mostly resisted and the Caribbean is firmly centered.

What is Jelly-Schapiro's idea of the (circum)Caribbean? And why does it matter in/to the "World" of his subtitle?

While Edward King is understandably absent in Island People, another titan of travel writing hovers over many of its pages. Patrick Leigh Fermor's The Traveller's Tree: A Journey through the Caribbean Islands (1950) seems Island People's singularly most direct antecedent. Both are "pitched neither strictly at scholars nor at holiday makers" but at a general readership (Island People 11). Jelly-Schapiro returns to The Traveller's Tree throughout as he narrates his travels sometimes in relation to Fermor's own 1940s-era perceptions; it comes as little surprise to learn that Jelly-Schapiro wrote a new introduction to the 2011 reissue of Fermor's classic.¹⁰Joshua Jelly-Schapiro, "Introduction," in The Traveller's Tree: A Journey through the Caribbean Islands (New York: New York Review of Books, 1950, 2011), ix–x. The genealogical link is apparent. Like Fermor, Jelly-Schapiro is, among many other things, a travel writer. Like Fermor, Jelly-Schapiro comes from elsewhere.

Fermor is not the most important figure looming over Island People. As a Caribbeanist thinker, Jelly-Schapiro is influenced largely by C. L. R. James. In fact, Island People begins and ends with James and feels like an epic homage to him: "But the Caribbean, James argued, was unique" (5); "I had… adopted C. L. R. James as a kind of intellectual hero and style icon alike" (401). For Jelly-Schapiro, James was "his first big intellectual crush," and it is easy to see James's influence on Island People (401). In James, Jelly-Schapiro finds a great syncretic thinker who brought together disparate strands of philosophy, culture, and history into a coherent narrative in which the Caribbean was central (not marginal) to "the larger telos" of modernity, capitalism, and democracy (3). Island People, in its structure and vastness, also aims to be a syncretic work mapping and describing the central importance of the Caribbean in the world.

Unlike Lowe, Jelly-Schapiro is not a literary critic but a geographer, and in large part, Island People reads as a much more "centered" and "bounded" investigation. Like Calypso Magnolia's "circumCaribbean-South," Island People considers its subject, "the Caribbean," as both "place" and "idea" (6). Although Jelly-Schapiro mentions the full range of Caribbean thinkers, Island People feels more invested in specificities of place and practice than theories or philosophies. "The abstraction was also a place," he writes (335), and "This book ponders not merely what the Caribbean is but where it is as well" (12, emphasis provided). Unlike Lowe, Jelly-Schapiro does not move around the circumCaribbean rim, but dwells on the subaquatic link of islands that form the Greater and Lesser Antilles. He "centers on the islands," viewing the "Caribbean as an archipelago: as a 'sea of islands'" (13). Whereas Lowe aims to move around and form connections, Jelly-Schapiro island hops, with nearly every chapter focusing on a singular island in the archipelago.

As a result, Island People often reads like a disjointed narrative of island hopping tourism, a text structured around what José Quiroga calls "scattered" islands that form "so many one night stands."¹¹José Quiroga, Tropics of Desire: Interventions from Queer Latino America (New York: New York University Press, 2000), xiii. Like Fermor's Traveller's Tree, the structural logic lies in sections divided by island nations: part one, the "Greater Antilles" of Jamaica, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Hispaniola; part two, the "Lesser Antilles," including Martinique, Dominica, and Trinidad. While Jelly-Schapiro often makes a joke of Caribbean tourists, some in thrall to "stories about how Papa Hemingway" got drunk on daiquiris on a Havana barstool "after a day of marlin hunting in the Florida Current," the lingering effect is of so many island-hopping one night stands in which the experience is fleeting even if fulfilling (117). The power of Island People is that it attempts to be something other than that story. It is a documentary effort to let the islands, their peoples, histories, and cultures, speak for themselves, from the Caribbean to the World.

Island People's textual logic constantly reminds readers that this is a book in which an outsider, a tourist, is describing, probing, and organizing a narrative to tell the rest of the "world" about it. No matter his affinity, deep care and carefulness, Jelly-Schapiro is still a traveler leaving traces in his archipelagic tour. You can, for example, follow his trail of hotels throughout.¹²The reader follows Jelly-Schapiro from Kingston's Myrtle Bank Hotel (44) to Havana's Hotel Nacional (99) and Havana Hilton (100) to San Juan's Condado Vanderbilt Hotel (175) to La Romana's Casa de Campo (216), Port-au-Prince's Hotel Oloffson (260), George Town's unnamed Hotwire.com recommendation (281), Grenada's Heliconia guesthouse (296), to Antigua's Sandals and "Florida-style condos" (309), St. John's Heritage Hotel (310), Fort-de-France's Hotel L'Imperatrice (336), Dominica's Pointe Baptiste (369), and finally, Jelly-Schapiro's last stop, Trinidad's "ugly new Hyatt" (400). As historically well-researched, fiercely intelligent, and superbly written as Island People can be, readers never stop travelling. You may choose to "enter" at the island of your choice. (I began with Cuba). All of this amounts to what can feel like a lack of foundation for important claims and moments to resonate.

Island People is immensely satisfying. If it often fails to resonate, it constantly reverberates. We learn about Brand Jamaica, run with Usain Bolt, hear Bob Marley, Pete Tosh, and Lady Saw, find Stella's groove, and search for the "moments of filial love" and the "ghosts of colonial violence" (49, 58); in Cuba, we enter the "empire of vice" (99), find cubanidad, Fernando Ortiz, El Taino y la yuma, José Martí, Carpentier, Batista, Che and Castro, have a "love affair with spandex" (113) and phallocentrism, meet Eleggua and Abakuá, Antonio Maceo and Bola de Nieve, Assata Shakur and Carlos Moore, and many more. And so on and on across the islands¹³A small list of Island People's inhabitants: in Puerto Rico (via the Bronx), we find Rita Moreno, Pedro Albizu Campos, Luis Muñoz Marín, Tito Puente, "El Cantante" Héctor Lavoe all sharing the same island; in the Dominican Republic, we read about tigueres, the Coliseum of Cockfighting (208), the "sex economy" (206), Trujillo, "los morenos" and a lack of "pride" in "racial hybridity" (221, 203), perejil and el corte; in Haiti, centered in the text, "at the core of the Caribbean story" (226), again revealing C. L. R. James's influence, the same perejil and el corte, Kreyol, the Massacre River, Toussaint L'Ouverture, Dessalines, the Citadel and Henri Christophe, Boukman, the Duvaliers, Tonton Macoutes, Carnival of Flowers and earthquakes where the "'earth moved like a wave and all was ruined'" (261), Titanyen and bodies, Wyclef Jean, Cité Soleil, Katherine Dunham, and "people's invisibility to their own state" (265); in the Lesser Antilles, we read about George Lamming and Rihanna, Paule Marshall, Jamaica Kincaid, Maurice Bishop, Barbuda's "breeding myth" (308), Montserrat's "volcano crisis" (315), Martinique's Aimé Césaire, Glissant, Fanon, Chamoiseau, and other "literary riches" (358), Jean Rhys and Dominica's "Candy Land for lovers of nature and calm" (365). until finally, Trinidad gives us Beyoncé (yes, that one), Eric Williams, Derek Walcott, "soul calypso," New Orleans and the rim of Carnival, Palance, "queer subcultures" and "gay-bashing norms," the "Black Power Killings," Stuart Hall, and the inevitable return to C. L. R. James.

Jelly-Schapiro's exhaustive, four hundred page, highly syncretic, travel narrative is indeed full of people, places, things, and historic events. Yet, in breaking the Caribbean into its disparate parts, Island People falls short in crafting coherent meaning—realistic, theoretical, or phantasmagoric—of the Caribbean idea. Perhaps this is an impossible request due to sheer scale, genre (travel narrative/history), and intended audience (general). However, many a Caribbean thinker has articulated a central argument for the basin's meaning and function—Edouard Glissant's Poetics of Relation, Antonio Benítez-Rojo's Repeating Island, Kamau Brathwaite's tidalectics, Wilson Harris's cross-culturality, Stuart Hall's "home of hybridity," and Derek Walcott's "sea is history," to name a few. Jelly-Schapiro touches on many of them in Island People, revealing both his deep knowledge of his subject and his recognition of the almost sheer impossibility of unifying the Caribbean idea into any original tidy narrative.

Is the Caribbean exceptional or relational? Island People does not seek to answer this question. Instead, in refusing to form concrete connections between the islands of the Caribbean and other comparative sites, Jelly-Schapiro follows his hero C. L. R. James in extrapolating Caribbean history and meaning to make larger claims about modernity and "the World" of his title: "It was in the Caribbean that many of the salient characteristics of the Americas at large—traumatic histories of colonialism and genocide and slavery; migration and creolization as facts of life; the persistent sense of cosmopolitan possibility and newness inherent to a New World—were brought into starkest relief" (8). Whereas Lowe's Calypso Magnolia works to rethink traditionalist readings of southern literary culture, Jelly-Schapiro's Island People refutes V. S. Naipaul's claim that "History is built around achievement and creation, and nothing was created in the West Indies" (11). In its aim to center the Caribbean in the World and document the West Indies as crucible of syncretic creation and significant global influence, Island People succeeds tremendously.

Wade in the Crosscurrents

Together, Lowe and Jelly-Schapiro have written one important work: Calypso Magnolia-Island People. Where Lowe is sometimes too lofty in his desire to bridge, Jelly-Schapiro is often too reductive in his discrete articulation of separate island spaces. Jelly-Schapiro's justification of a book solely about the Caribbean can seem too specific and isolationist. Lowe's constant syncretic desire to move across raises questions of positional privilege and universalist tendencies. In reading them side-by-side, readers can wade in the crosscurrents and decide for themselves what and where the (circum)Caribbean is.

The conversation between Calypso Magnolia and Island People benefits all who join it. In an era when a US travel ban seeks to curtail the movements of individuals and groups of people and much is made of walls and constructed borders, Lowe and Jelly-Schapiro remind us of the history of colonization, enslavement, exploitation, exoticization, narrativization, and migration at the heart of all histories of the Americas. Lowe cuts across the "artificial borders" confining the US South to rethink national borders and cultural restrictions; Jelly-Schapiro invites us on a journey in which America signifies much more than the myopic vision of any one nation-state and the Caribbean, place and idea, takes center stage in a history of all of the Americas.

Understanding what we mean when we say "South," "(circum)Caribbean," or "America" matters as our definitions and limitations directly affect those who get included and those who get excluded from our spaces and our ideas of place. Jelly-Schapiro writes, the "ways in which a place is imagined, especially by those with power to act on it, matters" (7). Both Calypso Magnolia and Island People help put into perspective how our ideas of place matter and reverberate locally and beyond.

About the Author

Eric Solomon earned his doctorate in English from Emory University. Dr. Solomon is an independent scholar living in Atlanta, Georgia. He is currently revising his first manuscript.

Introduction

As a child, Ann Pancake dreamed of escaping from West Virginia. Achieving this goal as a young adult, however, only served to strengthen her emotional and cultural bonds to the Mountain State. Over the last two decades, Pancake has become one of the leading Appalachian writers of her generation. Her work addresses many themes in its concern with the everyday lives of West Virginians and the making of regional and national identities. Pancake engages the history of Appalachia and its people, revealing the impact of deindustrialisation, rural poverty, and environmental destruction.

Published by the University Press of New England in 2001, Pancake's first collection of short stories, Given Ground, earned the praise of Elizabeth Judd in the New York Times for "depicting an ignored part of the country with a clear and admiring eye." Pancake, wrote Judd, possesses the "unusual gift for portraying difficult lives with a plain-spoken accuracy that makes them seem suddenly exceptional."¹Elizabeth Judd, "Books in Brief," New York Times, August 12, 2001. Six years after Given Ground came Pancake's first novel, Strange as this Weather Has Been.²Ann Pancake, Strange as this Weather Has Been (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint Press/ Shoemaker & Hoard, 2007). Widely praised for its literary vision and striking language, the novel presents an unflinching portrait of a poor West Virginian family living in the shadow of a strip mine. Writing in the Iowa Review, Jeremy Jones declared Strange as this Weather Has Been to be "a true novel . . . brimmed with beauty and poetics but aimed at change and justice."³Jeremy Jones, "Ann Pancake's STRANGE AS THIS WEATHER HAS BEEN," Iowa Review, January 8, 2011. Pancake's most recent collection of short stories, Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley, arrived in 2015 to considerable acclaim; Publisher's Weekly recommended it as a "gritty, stylish assembly."⁴"Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley," Publisher's Weekly, December 8, 2014.

Pancake's distinctive style and incisive portraits of Appalachian life have led to acclaim and awards. West Virginian novelist Jayne Anne Phillip characterised Pancake as "Appalachia's Steinbeck." Georgian writer and environmental activist Janisse Ray has described her writing as "shockingly pure, like holding gold in your hands." For critics such as Dan Chaon, Pancake's work is "astonishing . . . tender, alive, full of heart and empathy but never sentimental, full of clenched drama and secrets and surprises but always subtle."⁵Quotes taken from Pancake's personal website, http://www.annpancake.blogspot.com. Pancake has received the Bakeless Literary Award for short story writing, a Whiting Award, an NEA grant, a Pushcart Prize, and creative writing fellowships from Washington, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania. Strange as this Weather Has Been won the 2007 Weatherford Award by the Appalachian Studies Association, was a finalist for the 2008 Orion Book Award, and was chosen as one of Kirkus Review's ten best fiction books of 2007. Most recently Pancake was chosen as the first recipient of the Barry Lopez Visiting Writer Fellowship at the University of Hawaii.

This interview considers the formative role of Pancake's childhood in Appalachia, and the impact of her time in college and working abroad on her literary aesthetic. Pancake considers her work from a variety of perspectives, tackling questions of violence, historical memory, race, and culture, before discussing the publication of her most recent collection and her plans for the future.

[This interview took place on Wednesday, March 9, 2016 with supplementary correspondence in July and October. It has been edited for clarity. Many thanks to Ann Pancake for being so generous with her time and her willingness to talk about her life and work. Thanks also to the Hagley Museum in Wilmington, Delaware, for providing the setting and the equipment for this discussion.]

Growing Up

JAMES: Hi Ann. Thanks for taking the time to talk with me. Perhaps you can start by offering a brief introduction to readers who might be unfamiliar with your life prior to the publication of Given Ground.

ANN: Sure. Until I was eight years old I lived in Summersville, West Virginia. That's in Nicholas County, an important coal producing part of the state. That was the period of my life in which I became aware of the coal industry and of strip mining, partly because we could see strip mining from our house, and my dad talked to me about strip-mining and the damage it caused. When I was eight we moved to Romney, West Virginia, which is where my dad's family has been for a couple hundred years, and it's agricultural—there's no coal up there. I lived in Romney until I was eighteen, and then I went to West Virginia University.

When I graduated with my BA at twenty-two, I went overseas, partly because I didn't think there was anything to write about in West Virginia, and also because I didn't have a job and the unemployment rate was really high in West Virginia. I got a job in Japan and taught there for a year. In my twenties I also taught in American Samoa for two years and I taught in Thailand for almost a year. I did a good bit of travelling in Asia and the South Pacific. I got my MA in English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and shortly after, went into the doctorate program at the University of Washington, where I was from 1993 until 1998.

JAMES: I've read about your wanting to get away from West Virginia when you were growing up.

ANN: By the time I was a teenager I really wanted to see other parts of the world and get out of West Virginia. I thought the state was boring and very limited . . . at the same time, my whole life I'd had this highly complicated relationship with it because I was also much prone to homesickness. So I was both deeply attached to West Virginia but also feeling very much the pull to see places outside. I still have that conflicted relationship. Appalachia has an almost mysterious pull on people who grow up there, even on people who aren't native but who have lived there a long time. As a teenager, I felt very strongly the push/pull relationship with West Virginia I feel still.

JAMES: Do your siblings have the same fraught relationship with West Virginia?

ANN: Yes, I'd say the five of us who left the state do have a deep attachment that is also fraught. My only sibling who stayed is my brother who has a lot of addiction problems, which is why he will never leave. My sister, as I think you know, made a documentary film about mountaintop removal in West Virginia called Black Diamonds – she lived in Baltimore while she made it and lives in Philadelphia now, but she feels a profound connection to West Virginia like I do. We're all pretty attached to it. West Virginia is like no other place I've ever been, culturally. You can't find it or replicate it.

JAMES: One of your brothers is an actor and your sister is involved in film and documentary production.⁶Sam Pancake and Catherine Pancake. Ann and Catherine collaborated on the production of Black Diamonds, a 2006 documentary film about mountaintop removal and the fight for coalfield justice in West Virginia. Did your parents encourage you to develop an interest in the arts as children and was that typical where you grew up?

ANN: My parents did encourage us in the arts, and it was not typical in our community, but my parents both went to college, which was also not typical. Only a small percentage of people in our home county finished college, even now, and that was even a smaller percentage in the 1970's. But my parents expected us to go to college, and we had access to many books, which a lot of families did not. My mom was an art teacher in high school so we were also given art materials from the time we were little. We were very fortunate that way. Most of us were born pretty creative, and I think it was wonderful to grow up playing all the time with these creative siblings because we could make up games and imagine things together. I believe this early kind of play was instrumental to how we later developed as artists, Sam and Catherine and I. At least it was for me. Growing up in West Virginia was poor in some ways, but it was rich in imaginative activity, and it was rich in its proximity to the natural world.

JAMES: What kind of literature did you read growing up?

ANN: Oh . . . stories about being outside. Books about dogs! Old Yeller, Where the Red Fern Grows, Sounder, that kind of thing.⁷Fred Gipson, Old Yeller (New York: Harper & Bros., 1956). Wilson Rawls, Where the Red Fern Grows (New York: Laurel-Leaf Books, 1961). William Armstrong, Sounder (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1969). It wasn't that common to get kids' books that were set in rural areas, most seemed to be set in cities, so if I got my hands on books with rural settings, they resonated more. Where the Lilies Bloom was important to me. It was set in Appalachia. My Side of the Mountain was another one I really liked.⁸Jean Craighead George, My Side of the Mountain (New York: Scholastic, 1959). Bill Cleaver and Vera Cleaver, Where The Lilies Bloom (New York: Harper Collins, 1969).

JAMES: What kind of things would you write as a child?

ANN: When I began to write, I usually wouldn't finish things, but I would write the starts to disaster stories or adventure stories. I didn't understand what "literature" was or why you would read it, so as a teenager, I read authors like Stephen King. But by the time I was sixteen, along with the disaster stories and horror stories, I wrote a few pieces set in West Virginia, pieces that were realism and based on my own experiences. Even then, I knew that those stories felt different in my body.

JAMES: Living so close to the boundaries of other states, how did you identify as a West Virginian?

ANN: Growing up, many of us were very aware we were West Virginian. As a kid in West Virginia, you get a lot of messaging from the larger culture and from the states surrounding you that your place is more backwards, that you are hicks. And, of course, the media delivered that message all the time about "hillbillies." So I understood us as underdogs and I understood that others looked down on us. That sense of identity didn't come from my parents, it came more from the dominant culture. And anytime we ventured out of West Virginia (not that it was common) I was very aware of how West Virginia was different, and how people considered us lesser than them.

College and Travel

JAMES: Why did you decide to stay in West Virginia for college?

ANN: It was an economic thing. I didn't know how to get scholarships anywhere else, and my dad planned to pay for it, so he said we needed to go to school in state. I did get a good scholarship from WVU after my first semester.

JAMES: How was college? Was it strange being close to and yet apart from your family?

ANN: College was really difficult for me socially. I did fine academically, but going to Morgantown was a culture shock, even though it was only a hundred miles from Romney. Now I know a small college would have been much better for me. I don't know what WVU is like now, but at that time we had a large number of out of state students, partly because our tuition was so cheap, and the whole time I was there I only had one professor who was actually from Appalachia. I experienced a lot of culture clash at WVU and little sensitivity to that on the part of the faculty and the administration. I think it's different there now.

JAMES: In what ways did you experience this culture clash?

ANN: Our accents marked us. You'd open your mouth, and others would make assumptions about your intelligence and class and politics and your level of sophistication. It made you want to keep quiet. I think now about interviews Catherine and I did for her documentary, and how people in southern West Virginia would preface things by saying, "Now, I can't talk good," and then they'd say something incredibly insightful. In their accent.

JAMES: Early in Strange as this Weather Has Been you describe the loneliness of your protagonist Lace at West Virginia University in a way that feels intensely autobiographical.⁹"I told myself once I go to WVU, I'd never look back. Truth was, though, after a month away, I was feeling a kind of lonesomeness I'd never known there was…they had hills in Morgantown, but not backhome hills, and not the same feel backhome hills wrap you in. I'd never understood that before, had never even known the feeling was there." Pancake, Strange as this Weather has Been, 4.

ANN: Yeah it is very autobiographical. I mean, I stayed, I didn't quit, but yeah a lot of that is autobiographical.

JAMES: Lace ends up dropping out of West Virginia University to return to the mountains. Did you ever think about following that trajectory?

ANN: Oh yeah, I thought about dropping out, but again, the alternatives were worse. By that time in my life, I'd worked fast food and done line work and waited tables and worked in a grocery store—I realized that if I dropped out, those kinds of jobs would be my future.

JAMES: After college you just split for Japan.

ANN: Yeah [laughs]

JAMES: Why?

ANN: I heard about a job there from a friend, heard that the owner of a language school in Japan was coming to campus to interview, and I interviewed, and I got it. I had never, ever thought about going to Japan. But I was working at Wendy's, after graduating with my BA in English, no teaching certificate. Unemployment in West Virginia was 12% then. It could have been anybody that showed up, from Norway or South Africa, I think I would have gone.

JAMES: In terms of teaching abroad, particularly teaching English as a foreign language, do you feel that process of thinking about the construction of language had an impact on your own writing?

ANN: Hmm . . . that's a really good question. I think what had an impact was less the actual teaching of English than being in cultures that weren't American and weren't Appalachian. By being in such a radically different culture, I recognized that Appalachia itself had its own distinct and interesting culture, and I started to understand how different our language was from Standard English. It's hard to describe how mind-expanding it was to go from West Virginia to Japan. I'd not even been on a commercial airplane. As an artist and a writer from West Virginia living in Japan, I would feel like I had eyes opening all over my head. Also the Japanese relationship to art and to perception . . . their attentiveness and receptiveness to beauty in the everyday was something they gave to me.¹⁰In an earlier interview with Robert Gipe for Appalachian Journal, Pancake cited the impact of the Japanese 'wabi sabi' aesthetic, noting its similarities with Appalachian culture—"an aesthetic that values the old and flawed and rusty." Robert Gipe and Ann Pancake, "Straddling Two Worlds," Appalachian Journal, 2011.

Language and Regional Dialect

ANN: When I first started writing about West Virginia, I wrote with dialect by default, more or less unconsciously, because I wasn't yet very aware that we spoke a dialect nor was I aware that our accent was as strong as it was. I became more aware of the dialect in my stories as I got older and left West Virginia. I write very intuitively. When I'm doing early drafts I hear the story in my head or I hear sounds in my head or the characters talking in my head, and if I'm writing about West Virginia, those voices and sounds naturally come as dialect. Over the decades I have come to think more consciously about the politics of dialect. Dialect in literature can be used in a demeaning way, to set aside the characters who use dialect as "less than" the writer, the reader, and the characters who don't use dialect. Or, one can use dialect in a culturally sensitive and less politically regressive way. I, of course, aim for the latter. I want to use dialect in ways that empower the people I write about and in ways that show how beautiful and inventive Appalachian language can be.

JAMES: It feels like there is a form of double movement here where, to teach English as a foreign language, you became very aware of your own dialect, and the pressure to mould your own patterns of language into a standardised form of English. How aware of that conflict were you?

ANN: When I first left West Virginia and was teaching ESL and then attending graduate school, I felt compelled to use Standard English exclusively and to clean up my accent. Once in Japan when teaching kindergartners, I walked in a classroom after six months or so and said "Good morning, how are you?" And they came right back with, "Fahhhn, Thank you." And I was kind of horrified, that without my knowledge, I had taught these forty, five-year-old Japanese kids English with an Appalachian accent without knowing I was doing that. So certainly during my twenties and during graduate school I tried to mask or change my accent. I don't worry about that so much anymore, although I know when I'm not home, my accent is much diminished. But I'm lucky because I can go back and forth, speak without the accent and speak with it, whereas some of my siblings have lost their accent and can't get it back.

JAMES: Do you worry about losing your accent? How does your accent relate to your identification with West Virginia?"

ANN: I have worried about it. But I know now it's not going to be lost because I'm fifty-three and if I go home I can go right back into it. It's not as strong as when I was little, but it's still in there.

JAMES: And after Japan you returned to the States, and then went to teach in American Samoa?

ANN: Yes, after Japan, I lived in Albuquerque, New Mexico for a year. After that, I taught in American Samoa. This was again economic necessity and also a desire for adventure.

JAMES: Did living in American Samoa affect the way you felt about yourself as an American?

ANN: That's a good question. In American Samoa, I lived for the first time in a place that had been colonized by the United States. I became acutely aware of colonization in the South Pacific and also more aware of the relationship between the US and other countries, the way America exerts power over other countries and exploits them.

JAMES: Did you see similarities or connections between class inequalities or exploitation in West Virginia, and American Samoa as part of a larger colonial project?

ANN: I did, I did. The connections became even more clear to me when I started living in parts of the US that weren't Appalachia, and as I began to understand dominant middle class white culture in the US. As I came to recognize the class discrepancies within the US and realized how little economic and political power Appalachia had, I saw the relationship between Appalachia and exploited non-Western countries. I realized how Appalachia can be seen as a resource colony for the larger United States. And those connections became more defined during graduate school when I started to read postcolonial theory and post-Marxist theory. The only places I've seen people as poor as they are in parts of southern West Virginia was in Indonesia and Thailand.

JAMES: Did that experience impact your direction in graduate school?

ANN: Yes. I wrote my master's thesis on a Samoan writer, Albert Wendt, using postcolonial theory. The driving question of my PhD dissertation was how Americans sustain their delusion that we have essentially a classless society given the glaring economic disparity in this country. I explored that question through nineteenth and twentieth-century literature and film. When Americans can't blame class discrepancy on racism, they often explain poverty as temporary. The idea is that the lower classes will eventually catch up, in time. This has been used to explain the "Appalachian problem," when Appalachia's poverty is not attributed to how dumb and lazy we are.

JAMES: Alongside your dissertation were you still writing fiction?

ANN: I was writing fiction whenever I could. That usually meant during breaks between quarters. While I was writing so much intellect-driven scholarly work, the pressure to write intuitive fiction would build, so when I had a break, the fiction would kind of come boiling out.

Early Work and Literary Style

JAMES: Your first published collection Given Ground was released not too long after you finished graduate school. Was that writing you had been collecting and publishing over a period of time?

ANN: Yes. The oldest story in that book, "Getting Wood," I wrote in 1987. Those stories were not written as a collection but pulled together over a period of years.

JAMES: How did you pick the stories you wanted to put into the collection?

ANN: I pulled together Given Ground when I needed to publish a book for tenure. I put into it every story I'd written that seemed finished enough, and then received feedback from a few friends. I jettisoned one story, then wrote "Redneck Boys" to complete the book. Half of the stories had been published in literary journals already, so that was a kind of confirmation that they were solid enough to put into the collection. However, if I hadn't had the pressure of tenure, I wouldn't have tried to publish that book because I didn't think it was strong enough to find a publisher. Not yet.

JAMES: Did the reaction to the book surprise you? Or is critical acclaim not something you really put a lot of weight on?

ANN: The award, the Bakeless Prize, was a huge surprise. And I was surprised, too, by how the book has been received. It's not an easy book in a lot of ways. The sensibility and style are idiosyncratic, I think. The subject matter is dark. I've come to understand that it's not ever going to reach a broad audience, but those readers it does reach, it reaches deeply, and that's fine with me.

JAMES: To what extent can that idiosyncrasy be traced back to West Virginia? Or, to your broader nomadic experience as a young adult?

ANN: The idiosyncrasy in my writing is mostly rooted in having grown up in WV, although I may not have recognized those idiosyncratic parts without the perspective of having lived in wildly different cultures outside West Virginia. But part of the idiosyncrasy I think I was just born with.

JAMES: You've been praised for moving away from a literary tradition rooted in formula and caricature, and for the complexity of your characterisation of both Appalachia's land and people. Was that always explicit in your work?

ANN: I was aware that I was resisting stereotype by the time I was writing in college. There are plenty of amazing Appalachian writers who work with complex representations of our region and who influenced me. Still, much writing about Appalachia over the past 150 years, especially writing that has gotten wide distribution, has been by outsiders, and a lot of that perpetuates the usual stereotypes. I've come to believe that the general reading public expects those stereotypes, so publishers expect them, too. But what I also understand are the political ramifications of stereotypes—they demean the people, make it easier to justify their exploitation, easier to see them as worthless. So I've always been very sensitive about complicating or overturning the usual caricatures and stereotypes.

JAMES: Could you name some of those writers, and say how their work appeals to you and what makes it unique?

ANN: Some writers from West Virginia who work with complex representations of the region and who influenced me as a younger writer include Breece Pancake, Jayne Anne Phillips, Denise Giardina, Davis Grubb, and Chuck Kinder.¹¹Breece Pancake, The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake (Boston, MA: Little, Brown,1983). Jayne Anne Phillips, Black Tickets (New York: Dell Pub., 1979). Jayne Anne Phillips, Machine Dreams (New York: E.P. Dutton/Seymour Lawrence, 1984). Jayne Anne Phillips, Lark and Termite: A Novel (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009). Denise Giardina, The Unquiet Earth: A Novel (New York: Norton, 1992). Denise Giardina, Storming Heaven: A Novel (New York: Ballantine Pub. Group, 1987). Davis Grubb, The Night of the Hunter (New York: Harper, 1953). Davis Grubb, The Voices Of Glory (New York: Scribner, 1962). Chuck Kinder, Snakehunter (New York: Knopf, 1973).All of these writers grew up in West Virginia. Each has a different vision of the place, but each vision presents our culture with a nuanced depth perception that complicates the one-note picture of Appalachia so often perpetuated by outsider writers. They offer characters struggling with internal contradictions; they provide context and history that help shed light on the state's darker elements; they carry a sense of place deep in their bodies; and they do amazing things with our language.

There are also West Virginia writers younger than I am who deserve far more recognition than they've received so far, writers who are writing better, in my opinion, than most of their peers outside the region: Jessie Van Eerden; Matthew Neil Null; Glenn Taylor. Only Glenn has received much notice from the wider literary establishment.¹²For recent work see Jessie Van Eerden, My Radio Radio (Morgantown, WV: Vandalia Press, 2016). Matthew Neill Null, Honey from the Lion (Wilmington, NC: Lookout Books, 2015). M. Glenn Taylor, A Hanging at Cinder Bottom (London Borough Press, 2015).

JAMES: The way you write about Appalachia is clearly very striking, but also something which can be co-opted into broader cultural/media narratives of Appalachian rural poverty that offer a simplistic and frequently unflattering image of Appalachian life—do you grapple with this as a writer, how aware of it are you, does it affect your craft or editing process?

ANN: I'm very aware of how easily one can lapse into stereotype when writing about Appalachia. Appalachian people in the world are confronted with stereotypes about themselves constantly, so we're sharply conscious of them. Still, in early drafts, I might fall into a stereotype because I haven't gotten to the stage of the work where I'm complicating things. So, to answer your question, when I'm writing about violence in Appalachia, I try to be careful to complicate the issue. I try to tell the truth, and I try to tell it with context and by offering different perspectives on the violence and by making the perpetrators and the victims full human beings as opposed to flat caricatures.

West Virginia is its own culture within Appalachian culture, and Appalachian culture, in turn, shares some qualities with US southern culture. If I'm around Southerners there is a feeling of familiarity and home, more so than if I'm around people from Pennsylvania, even though Pennsylvania is fifty miles from where I grew up. I've also been influenced as a writer primarily by writers from the South and from Appalachia.

JAMES: I wanted to talk a little about your use of violence in your writing. One of the recurrent themes in your work is ghosts, especially in relation to the Confederacy and the Civil War. How does that historical violence, or its afterlife, translate into and overlap with physical or literal violence?

ANN: That's a good observation and a good question. I'm not sure how exactly to answer it. Appalachia does have a violent past: the violence of the Civil War and the "Indian" wars before that; the violence inflicted on the environment starting from the time of industrialization; the violence surrounding the labor movement in the early part of the twentieth century; the forms of violence the larger nation imposes on Appalachia in its appetite for Appalachian resources. Appalachian people are not more violent than other Americans, however, despite popular narratives to the contrary. In fact, before the drug epidemic, West Virginia consistently had the lowest violent crime rate in the nation. Still, I believe that all that violence in our past continues to manifest in our present.

The violence to the environment continues, and there is not the political will to stop it, and there is much violence suffered by Appalachia's people. Although often that's self-inflicted: addiction, overdose, suicide. I believe that self-inflicted violence is related to environmental destruction and economic exploitation. I recognize that my work contains a fair amount of literal violence. Some of that is just factual, reflecting the region's history. Some of the violence in my work, though, probably comes out of my love and hate for the region, my fears of and for the region, and my deep desires for the region. The violence may arise from all that conflicted unconscious material.

JAMES: How much of that fear comes from a sense of displacement, or fracture? Earlier you talked about becoming aware of your identity as a West Virginian through interacting with people from surrounding states. You describe a sense of "we are this because we are not something else." How much of that can be traced back to the Civil War?

ANN: West Virginia's paradoxical place in the Civil War is one of the reasons I find West Virginia fascinating. The state separated from Virginia to be part of the Union in 1863, and popular belief is that we did this because we were against slavery. The truth about our secession is much more complicated and is tied also to the schemes of industrialists. There were certainly Union sympathizers in West Virginia and Union troops. My county, Hampshire, was very Confederate, though, with slave-owners, including my own family. Romney was right on the border, and Romney changed hands between the Union and the Confederacy fifty-four times during the war. I grew up playing in Civil War trenches a mile behind my house.¹³The trenches Pancake is describing are the Fort Mill Ridge Civil War Trenches, among the best preserved Civil War trenches in the nation. "Fort Mill Civil War Trenches", National Parks Service, http://www.nps.gov/nr/feature/places/13001121.htm.The remnants of the war were very present when I was growing up. And there are stories my family has passed down from the war—my family was Confederate identified, so their stories are about the Yankees coming in and raiding the farm.

JAMES: That feeds into another question I wanted to ask about the role of race in your work—I believe West Virginia is the third or fourth whitest state in the country.¹⁴According to the latest United States Census estimates, West Virginia is the fourth-whitest state in the Union.

ANN: West Virginia is very white, but there are and were African-Americans there. It's true, they don't often appear in my work, and I don't think I have any who are main characters. I believe this is the case because I don't want to misappropriate or misrepresent them. My personal relationship with race growing up taught me a lot. My county was very racist and still is, but my parents were much more liberal than most people there. My parents tried to bring us up with a "colorblind" philosophy: everyone is the same regardless of skin color, which also of course isn't true, but it was pretty enlightened for those times and that place. In junior high and high school I had an African-American boyfriend. I haven't talked about that or written about it much, I probably should. That certainly opened my eyes to racism, by the time I was fourteen, because of the kinds of insults I would receive and also because I started to see through my boyfriend's perspective. It also called into question my belief in Christianity. I started to reject the church at that time in large part because I saw very clearly its hypocrisy concerning race, at least where I lived.

JAMES: In your work you're very aware of trying to offer a representative account of West Virginian life. Are you more reluctant to write about African American experience?

ANN: Yeah, I'm much more comfortable writing about class. It's good that you bring that up, people don't usually ask me about it. The truth is, I do have experience with race in Appalachia. I need to ask myself why I don't write more about it.

JAMES: I want to read a short moment from your short story "Ghostless" which encapsulates one of the reasons I enjoy your writing so much:

The cold came high in my chest, but the wind had finally laid and from some distance I could feel the heat off the horse. The hide-odor off the horse, that soily smell he carried even in winter. I pushed my face into it, into the hollow behind the shoulder, before the belly swell . . . . I still had horse on my hands, and I smeared them across my Sunday pants, listening, the wood fire brightening my back.

That's gorgeous. The physicality of your writing, its tactile nature, your relationship to senses and sensory language. Where does that come from and how has it developed over time?

ANN: I write by sinking myself as deeply as I can into a place or a person, then imagining how the character's senses would respond to a situation, or imagining how I personally would react sensorily to a place. Certainly touch and smell in particular are powerful for me in the way they evoke memories. The way they are more animal. I also revise a whole lot, so as I do more drafting, more of that sensory detail comes in.

JAMES: And growing up in West Virginia played an important role in developing that detail in your work?

ANN: Now that I've lived out of West Virginia I've come to understand that growing up in Appalachia usually means growing up closer to the ground than one might in other places. Growing up in Appalachia in the 70's was pretty raw. You were not sheltered in the ways the middle-class is sheltered in Seattle. We had a lot of tactile interaction with the natural world, plants and animals, we were raised working big gardens and running the woods, and we saw our food get killed and skinned out and butchered. We ate that. I think as little kids we were very directly in touch with our senses. We weren't inside, we weren't on computers. I could also identify how poor people were by how they smelled, because the really poor people didn't have plumbing, so couldn't wash like we could. I see this as a metaphor for how white poverty is sometimes invisible in this country.

JAMES: How do you keep that visceral relationship to West Virginia in your writing?

ANN: I try to get home at least twice a year, and the place is very deeply embedded in my memory and in my body, so it's present to some extent even when I'm not there. When I do return, I can settle back into the land pretty quickly. At the same time, the culture in West Virginia has changed since I was a kid. Also, at this point in my life and my career, I'd like to be writing more about places that aren't West Virginia. That'll happen some in my next book.

Presents, Pasts, and Futures

JAMES: Your latest collection Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley remains centered in West Virginia, but in a different way. There seems to be more scope for hope or forward momentum than in your earlier writing.

ANN: I'd agree with that, I think part of it is time of life. I'm at a point in my life where I just can't bear to be spending all that time in darkness like I could while writing Given Ground and some of my earlier work. I also think that, just in order to survive as an American in 2016, I've had to try to figure out ways to look towards light exactly because we are in such a dark time, from a certain perspective. I also think—I wrote about this in an essay for the Georgia Review—I'm finished with writing about how things are hurt in Appalachia.¹⁵Ann Pancake, "Towards Light," Georgia Review, 2009. I'm tired of documenting destruction. I'm committed to writing that imagines unconventional ways to relate to the natural, including the natural world in Appalachia. Some of the stories in Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley such as "Sab" or "The Following" play with redefining relationship with the natural world.

JAMES: In the story that opens Me and My Daddy, "In Such Light," that progression definitely comes through. Trauma and hurt persist, but it holds more scope for maturation than many of your earlier stories.

ANN: I'd agree.

JAMES: Do you think that literary shift is connected to a broader recognition within the United States that the country needs to move away from a reliance on coal and seek less destructive and more sustainable forms of energy?

ANN: I think my literary shift is connected to a recognition that we won't survive as a species unless we think very, very differently about live beings that aren't human in this world. As for the shift away from coal, it is true that in Appalachia less coal is being mined now, but that's in part because of the boom in natural gas. Areas of West Virginia that were untouched by coal mining are now being devastated by hydrofracking. However, I do think we're at the beginning of the end of coal. And I think there is a wider movement, particular among younger generations in West Virginia, which understands that our state must move beyond dependence on natural resource extraction if we are to survive as a culture and as a people. This gives me optimism.

JAMES: It's been almost fifteen years since the publication of your first short story collection. What do you think are the most notable differences between Me and My Daddy and Given Ground?

ANN: Given Ground was written almost entirely intuitively and without much consideration of an audience. I wrote that book mostly for myself, not because I'm a narcissist, but because I couldn't imagine that many people would want to read those stories. For those reasons, it's more music-driven, less concerned with plot, and less accessible than Me and My Daddy. Me and My Daddy I obviously wrote after finishing my novel, and the novel required that I learn how to work with plot and that I make my writing more accessible. I wanted an audience for Strange as this Weather Has Been. I think those influences and considerations bled over into my writing of Me and My Daddy. Teaching creative writing and writing a novel has made me more conscious of craft, has made me use a little more intellect when I write fiction. I'm not convinced, however, that that is a good thing.

JAMES: Why did you choose that particular title?

ANN: [Laughs] My publisher decided that. I had named the book "Bone Dowser" which was also the original name of the story in the collection now called "The Following." My publisher thought we'd sell more books with the title Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley. I'm sure he's right.

JAMES: If that was a conversation which had happened fifteen years ago, do you think the outcome would have been the same?

ANN: [Laughs] would I have been as malleable do you mean? No I probably would have been more resistant. I've become less resistant, and I don't have as much investment in that kind of stuff anymore. That's a good question!

JAMES: Part of maturing is coming to terms with what exactly you are able to do through your work and through your activism, and being able to channel that in ways and into things which are productive.

ANN: Yeah, exactly.

JAMES: Do you ever feel like you're writing about a West Virginia that doesn't exist in the same way anymore?

ANN: In some ways West Virginia has changed significantly since I grew up there. One change that I mourn is the way the dialect and accent are being lost among younger people. Exposure to mass media is homogenizing our language. The place is also under greater environmental attack and is suffering a drug addiction epidemic. Those changes, though, I understand very well, because of my research and experiences and because of addiction problems in my family, so when I write about that West Virginia, I'm writing about one that still exists.

JAMES: You live in Seattle now, quite far removed from Appalachia. Is your relationship with the land different now, and if so in what ways?

ANN: I'm not immersed in the land here like I was growing up in West Virginia. Also, the land here doesn't speak to me like back home does. It doesn't give me sounds and stories. Still, I love the mountains in Washington. But it feels more like a friend, while back home land feels like family -- and that includes the way family can be fraught. My relationship to the land back home is very painful because there is so much ongoing destruction of it. In Washington, there is certainly destruction, but because of the kind of economic and political will here, there are vast tracts of land that aren't going to be destroyed, at least not anytime soon, and I can escape into those. That helps to ameliorate the pain I feel about back home. But I won't ever be rooted in the land in Washington like I am rooted in Appalachia.

JAMES: What's the next step? You mentioned that moving forward you are looking to write about Appalachia, but in different ways, and then looking to write about other things as well.

ANN: I can't be really specific about the project I'm working on now because it's in its very early stages, but it's a book that explores the ways we can have different relationships with the natural world and with things that aren't human. It's nonfiction. So there's that strand of it, which runs simultaneously with the ways I see Appalachia as a microcosm of what's happening globally in terms of the environment and as a harbinger of where we're headed without a revolution in our common sense. Finally, there' s a thread about my family, whom I see as a kind of microcosm of Appalachia, in the ways my family's addiction, fear, economic exigencies, and mental illness have caused the destruction of land I love where I grew up.

The book is part memoir, part imagining forward. It asks how we might live well in a time of mass extinction. A modest thesis, I know. I'm obsessed with the question because I've witnessed all my life a place I love be destroyed. Appalachia has always been called backwards, but in the last couple of decades, the rest of the country caught up with Appalachia and recognized the natural environment everywhere is being devastated.

Most recently, the land where I grew up, in Romney, has been destroyed by the parts of my family who are entangled in my brother's drug addiction. I see this family dynamic and tragedy as a microcosm of larger destructive forces in Appalachia. I see Appalachia, in turn, as a microcosm of larger destructive forces in the United States, especially capitalist corporate forces. So in this new book, I plumb that question—"how do we live well while natural places and beings are being annihilated at an unprecedented rate?"—by tracing my own personal history of loss as a West Virginian.

Part of my answer to the question involves radically reconceiving our relationships with natural beings. To do that, we need to become intellectually flexible enough to see rationalism and mechanistic science as just one way of knowing among several, with no one way superior to the other, and each with its own purpose. In other words, I'm suggesting we give more validity to intuition, the unconscious mind, the imagination, and ideas of the sacred.

About the Interviewer

E. James West is a teaching fellow in the Department of History at the University of Birmingham and a postdoctoral fellow at the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library. His research centers upon on African American history and literature since 1865, with a particular interest in African American media and  print culture.

Introduction

Thomas Mullen is the author of four novels, including The Last Town On Earth (2006), which received the James Fenimore Cooper Prize and was recognized by USA Today as the best debut novel of the year. Mullen's books are notable for the range and variety of their historical settings and influences. Last Town on Earth is set in a mill town in the Pacific Northwest during the 1918 flu epidemic. The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers (2010) is a Depression-era story following two brothers who gain notoriety due to their bank-robbing exploits. Even his novel The Revisionists (2011), although set in a dystopian future, examines historical agency.

Mullen's newest book, Darktown (2016), is set in the racially polarized, crime-ridden underworld of Atlanta in 1948. The city is on the cusp of a civil rights movement that will transform it politically, socially, and spatially. By following the travails of two African American policemen who were among the first men to desegregate the Atlanta police force, Mullen's novel offers an original perspective on the city's history.

Mullen, a resident of Decatur, Georgia for nearly a decade, came upon this episode in Atlanta's history while researching a magazine article. In this exclusive Southern Spaces interview, he speaks with Joseph Crespino about the sources that informed his fiction, the history that underlies Darktown, and the uses of history and fiction in understanding place and time.

Interview

About the Interviewer

Joseph Crespino is Jimmy Carter Professor of American History at Emory University, specializing in southern history since Reconstruction. He is the author of Strom Thurmond's America (New York: Hill & Wang, 2012) and In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2007) and co-editor, with Matthew Lassiter, of The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

Excerpt

Any collection that aims, as this one does, to represent the upheaval and diversity of a field that is remaking itself must confront at the outset the difficulties posed by that upheaval and diversity. What is "southern studies" today, well into the twenty-first century, in the age of the global-superpower United States? Whatever it is, we think it is mimed by the form of this volume, which does not presume to present a canon, a comprehensive account, or a curated catalog that demarcates the contours of a stable, shared field. Instead, this book contains an idiosyncratic collection of essays on keywords that individual scholars have chosen as particularly critical for the project of southern studies as each of them personally understands it. The result is a collection that is contingent and fragmentary, but capacious enough to hold side by side various disciplinary and theoretical approaches, generational affinities, and intellectual perspectives on an arena of inquiry whose boundaries are constantly being renegotiated.

It is in this very indeterminacy and flexibility that southern studies is becoming an important model for other interdisciplinary intellectual enterprises, perhaps particularly American studies writ large. We realize only too well that just a generation ago southern studies marched obstinately in the rearguard of American studies both politically and methodologically; while we are not prepared to claim that it has leapfrogged fully to the vanguard—indeed the unevenness of the shift is evidenced across this volume—we do believe that its ongoing radical reconfiguration demands broadening notice and broadening participation. At this moment, in this volume, "southern studies" emerges through a process of scholarly definition from the bottom up rather than from the top down. Contributors approach the field through the lens of assumptions and possibilities afforded by single critical terms, rather than by making or subscribing to broad pronouncements about the object or method of the field of study.¹ The organization of this collection follows this logic. Although our section headings describe broad family resemblances between terms, neither they nor the "keywords" themselves are intended to approach taxonomic precision. For similar reasons, we have avoided—although some contributors have not—the term "New Southern Studies," which carries, at least implicitly, the promise of a coherent and distinctive effort but whose constitutive features remain contested.

Indeed, it is the almost universally agreed-upon impossibility of making such broad pronouncements that is the hallmark of southern studies today, for it has been reconfigured as an enterprise whose object has become irrevocably obscure. What is southern studies studying? The self-evident answer would seem to be the US South, the self-evident corollary of which is that the US South is neither solid nor exceptional. It lacks an essence (and therefore cannot be known in essentialist terms), a polity, and clearly defined boundaries. Such, at least, are some of the echoing premises of contemporary studies of what has proven to be a slippery object of interrogation.

In a parable told by the Buddha, blind men are brought together to examine an elephant. The results are well known: each grabs a different part and reports a different result. The Buddha then offers his lesson: scholars (the less-remembered subject of the parable) are quarrelsome and disputatious, not to be trusted for an accurate depiction of reality. Whatever its value as an assessment of scholarly temperaments, the parable makes the commonsensical assumption that there's an elephant at the other end of scholarly inquiry: a thing to be known—ideally, at any rate—in ways that are comprehensive and accurate.

The field of southern studies, however, seems uncertain of the existence of the elephant, and in some instances actively interested in its demise. In a 2008 review, for example, Leigh Anne Duck calls for a "Southern studies without 'The South'" as a potentially "enlightening" mode of "exiting the realm of our most basic assumptions."²Duck, "Southern Nonidentity," Safundi 9, no. 3 (2008): 329. For scholars such as Duck, the problem with "the South" is precisely the assumptions that have accumulated around it, the conceptual baggage generated by earlier generations of scholarship and popular belief that, arguably, has served to obscure as much as to clarify. As Michael O'Brien has observed in his influential The Idea of the American South (1979), the South itself can be viewed in one of two ways: either as a "solid and integrated social reality about which there have been disparate ideas" or "as an idea, used to organize and comprehend disparate facts of social reality." Opting against the elephant, O'Brien approaches the South as "centrally an intellectual perception . . . which has served to comprehend and weld an unintegrated social reality," observing that the idea of the South "has secured such a hold on the American mind that it is a postulate, to which the facts of American society must be bent, and no longer a deduction."³O'Brien, The Idea of the American South, 1920–1941 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979): xxi, xxii. Although not entirely unprecedented, O'Brien's wedge between the idea of the South and the social reality it purported to represent would prove enabling to later scholars interested in the production, maintenance, and usage of the South as, variously, an invention, an imagined geography, a geographic fantasy, or (in Duck's terminology) "the nation's region."

For many contemporary scholars, the present slipperiness of the US South constitutes a hard-won triumph over the positivist certainties of an early generation of scholarship that, for reasons both historical and institutional, tended to position the South as "Uncle Sam's other province." As Matthew D. Lassiter and Joseph Crespino observe in The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism, "Liberal historians in the postwar decades called for a distinctive southern history based not on a set of empirical differences between region and nation but, rather, on the presumed divergence of a collective southern identity from national myths and American ideals."⁴Lassiter and Crespino, "Introduction," The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009): 8. For other fields as well, presumptions of southern exceptionalism served as methodological anchors. In a postwar academy flush with resources, southern literary studies coalesced around a set of ostensibly southern senses (of place, community, family, "the concrete") and Faulknerian formulas ("You would have to be born there," "I don't hate it!" "The past is never dead. It's not even past"). Sociological studies of the US South, meanwhile, became institutionalized in the decade in which Franklin Delano Roosevelt identified the region as the nation's "No. 1 economic problem."

Indeed, one solution to any "southern problem"—of which there have been many, from the founding to the present—is to declare it a southern problem, not a national one. Imagined Souths have been used to contain problems ranging from poverty and racial oppression to cultural backwardness and religious fanaticism. But if some monolithic fantasies of the US South have trended toward abjection, others have headed in a romantic direction, imagining the South as a land not of poverty but of resistance to materialism; not of racial oppression but of benign paternalism and noblesse oblige; not of cultural backwardness but of tradition, piety, and bucolic agrarianism. Although scholarly methodologies have tempered their extremes, it is probably fair to say that such fantasies have exerted a persistent force on the study of the US South that, until recent years, has been predicated on difference, especially difference within the nation.

As the solid object of study has receded from us—indeed, as scholars have pushed away from it—its conceptual underpinning has come into focus. "The South" exists only as one side of an implicit binary ("North"/"South") and thus exists always in implied relation—usually antithesis—to what is outside it. Many of the essays collected in this volume seek to disrupt this binary conceptual structure, though contributors use a variety of tactics. Some expose the structure itself and ask how it works and what it is good for; others pursue the multivalent lines of relation between "the South" and terms other than its opposite. The keywords in this volume, then, represent not merely ways to think about the US South but also ways of thinking into and through and beyond it. The question at issue has evolved from "what is southern studies studying?" to "what does southern studies do?"

As the essayists in this volume strip away the mystifying assumption of difference or otherness, they show us what southern studies can do. They train our attention on regimes of white supremacy, labor discipline, and what Colin Dayan has resonantly termed "servile law"—American regimes exemplified by, though never confined to, the southern United States. They illuminate the residues and persistences of interacting peoples and places, markets and material cultures.⁵See C. Dayan, "Servile Law," in Cities Without Citizens, eds. Eduardo Cadava and Aaron Levy (Philadelphia, PA: Slought Foundation, 2004); The Law Is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011). They interrogate new approaches that have broadened the archive and conceptual scope of southern (and American) studies. They investigate the structures of feeling that continue to consolidate and dissolve various Souths, remapping the gap between "real place" and space as it is configured affectively.

As the contributors to this volume exceed the binaristic relation that underpins "southernness," they uncover multiplying, interconnecting webs of relation. They show us that to do southern studies is almost always to work interdisciplinarily: to work in and across a field of intersections and sutures between a geographic, social, economic designation and the products of culture that engage it or something within it. They also show us that to do southern studies is to work transnationally, for beginning from a construct that is defined geographically but not politically invites or requires troubling traditional geopolitical borders by thinking across, within, and between them.

This geopolitical frame brings us to a final critical consonance among the essays in this volume. Many of them share a note of urgency, an urgency directed not toward the loss of the object of study or the ambiguous state of the field but rather toward the present moment. Americans today stand as citizens of a unilateral global superpower without—from the perspectives of many involved in this work—possessing an honest or realistic sense of what the United States is, what it has been, and thus what it could become. This ignorance, whether willful or not, is underwritten by the persistence of monolithic fantasies of the US South—fantasies that continue to inflect the cultural production of space in the United States in this era of global unilateralism, producing feedback loops that exceed (as they always have) the borders of the nation. Doing southern studies is undoing the monolith by—in the words of one essayist in this volume, Shirley Elizabeth Thompson—"pursu[ing] a radical interdisciplinarity" forged from "critical and contingent methods and theories" and "more precisely articulating the disruptive knowledge of subalterns." Doing southern studies is unmasking and refusing the binary thinking—"North"/"South," nation/South, First World/Third World, self/other—that postcolonial studies has taught us is the most damaging rhetorical structure of empire.⁶Particularly Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978) and Sara Suleri Goodyear, Rhetoric of English India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). Doing southern studies is thinking geographically, thinking historically, thinking relationally, thinking about power, thinking about justice, thinking back.

About the Authors

Scott Romine is professor of English at University of North Carolina Greensboro. His publications include The Real South: Southern Narrative in the Age of Cultural Reproduction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Universiy Press, 2008). Jennifer Rae Greeson is associate professor of English at University of Virginia. Her publications include Our South: Geographic Fantasy and the Rise of National Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010).