The Gospel of the Soil: Southern Agrarian Resistance and the Productive Future of Food (original) (raw)

2014, The Southern Communication Journal

The Southern Agrarian movement began with a consortium of writers and intellectuals who argued for Southern sovereignty during the 1930s. Fearing the forces of industrial capitalism, the Southern Agrarians argued that the technocractic mass culture of the Northeast would exterminate Southern identity. The following analysis demonstrates that even though their attempts to establish Southern sovereignty were unsuccessful, these writers reconfigured agrarian space as a sphere of political resistance against growing technologic materialism. This analysis culminates in an exploration of the way that this vision blended heterotopian space and sacred reawakening, creating a new agrarian rhetoric that would influence later generations. In 1977, agrarian activist Wendell Berry published his seminal work, The Unsettling of America, wherein he resurrected localized agriculture as a unique site of both active political resistance and spiritual enlightenment. He asserted that repressive political forces within the United States were driven by a consumer economy and an obsession with mechanization that required political resistance rooted in lifestyle modification. 1 While this work is sometimes identified as the genesis for modern sustainability movements and organic farming campaigns, a deeper look into the turbulent decades of the 1930s reveals that the corrective agrarian lifestyle has much deeper roots in American rhetorical culture. Ross Singer suggests, ''American agrarianism is a philosophical tradition and malleable discursive frame adopting, defending, revising, and reproducing mythic assumptions about the morality of farming.'' 2