Weird South Post Four: Critical Text
Sombreros and Motorcycles in a Newer South:
The Politics of Aesthetics in South Carolina’s Tourism Industry
by P. Nicole King
“The systematic study of human society, especially present-day societies. Sociologists study the organization, institutions, and development of societies, with a particular interest in identifying causes of the changing relationships among individuals and groups.” The American Heritage® New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy
Like a sociologist, P. Nicole King is interested in identifying the various forms “southerness” takes shape in societies. King studies “tourist landscapes… to better understand place and identity — two things deeply intertwined in the US South and beyond.” King is asking “what places mean, how that meaning is negotiated over time, and how to use the built environment and material culture as a lens through which to view change and continuity within local, national, and global aspects of place.”
What makes King’s research on southerness so refreshingly different is that she uses “campy” tourist attractions like “South of the Border” or Atlantic Beach, SC as perfect case studies “to expand the contours of what we mean when we study the region [of the South].”
King develops many concepts in an effort to explain the ways/aspects that the two sites’ tourism industry have in defining and complicating the South’s regional identity. The ones most intriguing and relatable to my own project are:
- “Touriscapes:” a place rooted in geographical location, but also possesses the mobility to transcend physical and social boundaries. Visions of the past, present, and future are integrated within the touriscape. Touriscapes are created in the space where fluid categories of identity and various views overlap to produce an insider/outsider perspective, a shifting and transformative means if seeing and understanding space and time. A place-based model of analysis, tracing the different ways Southern places have interacted with Southern identity (King, 15).
- “The Newer South:” represents a shift into a post-1970's consciousness that has emerged to embrace the increased mobility of Southern culture after WWII. Encompasses an economic shift toward the hospitality industries and the vernacular landscapes of tourism, all portrays a refashioned and more inclusive (and complicated) regional identity (King, 16).
- “The Critical Tourist:” (in the Newer South) means feeling at home in a place, while still possessing the consciousness and vision of an outsider. The vision entails not being too familiar or too detached to see the social structures at work (King, 19).
“Applying a postmodern lens to touriscapes can open up the boundaries of southern identity and provide space to move into the Newer South (King 19).”
“Sombreros and Motorcycles in a Newer South tells the multi-dimensional stories of two specific touriscapes. The commercialization that some critics-as far back as the Agrarians- see as killing southern distinctiveness actually moves this distinction to new places, engaging new identities in dialogue with old ones. …tracing their, [the South’s commercial development and commodification] inevitable effects on people and places on South Carolina’s margins (King 20).”
King’s use of the tourism industry of two unique South Carolina attractions to explain how they exemplify a narrative of the South: past, present and future; highlights the scholarly backbone and significance I want to illustrate in my research of unique or out of the ordinary Southern attractions. Studying “campy but historic tourist sites” such as Civil War reenactments or Helen, Ga, can, in fact work “as important texts for understanding how [“Southern”] culture evolves.”
The text’s strengths include the author’s ability and depth in explanations of abstract concepts, ranging from a variety of subject matter, in connection to funny tourist “traps” like South of the Border, and how these traps embody and map the Southern identity.
The text’s only weakness is one that I’m actually grateful for; King restricts her study of tourism, (and successfully defends this decision) as a lens to understanding the complications and dynamics of Southern identity and culture to those attractions that are widely regarded as very commercialized and in my opinion, post-mainstream tourist stops.
My hesitation with tourist attractions that have achieved this level of concentrated “mass appeal and fun for the whole family” is that the distinction between the site being a product of a Southern narrative and a product of a commodified global narrative becomes convoluted. The distinction is most evident in the differences/similarities between Dollywood (Pigeon Forge, TN) and Six-Flags, two successful theme parks that both have locations in the South but attest to two very different narratives about the South’s regional identity. I am grateful for King’s hyper focus on the seemingly ‘mainstream’ tourist locales because it allows me to open up her loaded concepts like touriscapes, and the connections made about the South as a unique cultural region, and implement them in my own research of lesser known Southern tourist sites. The sites that I am drawn to for research are more (in my opinion) under the radar or more locally/regionally popular and therein, will harvest a more genuine, or concentrated discourse on the South.
