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LaFauci, Lauren. "Peculiar Nature: Slavery, Environment, and Nationalism in the Antebellum South," Department of English, University of Michigan, August 2009. Advisor: Susan Scott Parrish
Peculiar Nature makes a tripartite intervention in the fields of American
literary, cultural, environmental, and medical history. It argues, first,
that white southerners in the pre-Civil War period imagined their
environments as regionally distinct from those of the northern states.
Because of contemporary beliefs about the porousness of bodies relative to
external environments, white southerners’ conception of environmental
distinctiveness led to an imagination of bodily distinctiveness. Yet while
white southerners saw the environment as the source of their individual and
collective bodily difference, they did not extend its influence to the
region’s enslaved people, whose difference, they argued, stemmed from their
separate racial origins. As they sought somehow to reconcile these two
contradictory viewpoints, white southerners underwent scientific and
literary contortions in order to justify the institution of race-based
enslavement.
Peculiar Nature also makes visible the ideological production of “the
South” against the everyday experience of “many Souths.” It shows how local
knowledge productions about southern nature worked alongside (and,
sometimes, against) national, ideological productions. Finally, this
dissertation claims that a south-side view of attitudes toward environment,
bodies, and nationhood changes the way we think about “nature” during the
period, uncovering southerners’ materialist imaginations of their region’s
natural resources.
Peculiar Nature explores climatic theories, plants, mineral waters, and
to explain how white southerners’ conceptions of their region’s “natural”
exceptionality strengthened their commitment to an environmentally informed
racism. This environmentalist commitment enabled them to develop a unified
white “southern” identity that preceded the creation of the Confederacy,
elided black bodily difference and presence, and relied upon notions of a
bountiful and materially valuable southern nature. In framing southern
nationalism in relation to southern environments, Peculiar Nature
demonstrates how seemingly benign attitudes toward the natural world
metamorphosed into “scientific” justifications for black enslavement and for
a nation-state founded upon white superiority.
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