Greeson explores the need to pursue and disavow US empire and how the "Plantation South" functions as a repository (3/5)

Greeson addresses the simultaneous need to pursue ("to own") and to disavow U.S. empire and how these needs are expressed by writers such as Noah Webster and Timothy Dwight. The "Plantation South" becomes a repository for the disavowed residue of colonialism as well as an imperial possession to be reformed and reconstructed by the new nation. She also examines a 1787 map published by Webster that reveals early US expansive ambitions that in time will blossom into imperialism.

Owning the Plantation South in the Fiction of the Early Republic

by Jennifer Rae Greeson

http://southernspaces.org/2010/owning-plantation-south-fiction-early-republic

Published on November 22, 2010

In Our South: Geographic Fantasy and the Rise of National Literature, Jennifer Greeson proposes that the “South” may be the key imaginative figure for working through questions of geography and power in the literature of the United States between the founding of the nation and the beginning of the twentieth century. Greeson’s illustrated lecture, presented at Emory University, outlines how the emerging US geographical imagination becomes yoked to an idea of the South in the decades before and after the Revolutionary War.