Speaking through the hurricane: Southern narratives and the Caribbean, 1920--1960

This paper identifies the place of the Caribbean in Southern writing during the Southern Renaissance as a site cultural and political discourse, challenging accepted notions of the "place" of Southern literature. The works studied are Arator by John Taylor, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym by Edgar Allan Poe, Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner, "Jamaica Journal" by Hamilton Basso, "Haiti" by Truman Capote, "The Governor of Cap Hatien" by T. S. Stribling, and Tell My Horse by Zora Neale Hurston. Examining these works through Caribbean-centered theoretical models as well as within Michael Elliott's concept of "culturalist writing" and Michel Foucault's notion of "fearless speech" develops a concept of a new regional literature and questions ideas about the geography of Southern literature. The presence of the scream, violent contact between the South and the Caribbean, and the act of speaking through the hurricane---using the Caribbean to enact a reflexive South-searching enquiry---reveal a pattern in these Southern narratives of the Caribbean that contributes to the conceptualization of a sub-genre within Southern literature.;By discussing Southern literature in terms of the Atlantic Birth and the Plantation Americas, conventional understanding of the place of Southern literature is expanded, and notions of a fixed culture for the South are replaced with an idea of a perpetually creolizing South. The motif of the scream calls to the foreground missing chapters of trans-Atlantic exchange in the history of the South. The renderings of the Caribbean in Southern literature question cultural concepts of power, hierarchy, race, and gender through a system of difference-based enquiry. This thesis concludes by calling for a shift in the pedagogical tenets of Southern literature, a change that would broaden the scope and appeal of Southern studies.