Local Color

Ken Cooper SUNY Geneseo “Local Color” The C19 keyword “regionalism” has been so rehabilitated that I question its power to elicit much surprise anymore—even when called into service for a more rigorous bioregional... [ view full abstract ]

Ken Cooper

SUNY Geneseo

“Local Color”

The C19 keyword “regionalism” has been so rehabilitated that I question its power to elicit much surprise anymore—even when called into service for a more rigorous bioregional critique—which is why the cringey phenomenology of “local color” seems more interesting. Consider Hamlin Garland’s well-known description in Crumbling Idols (1894): “Local color in a novel means that it has such quality of texture and back-ground that it could not have been written in any other place or by any one else than a native.” Many of the keyword’s limitations are there to see; it aestheticizes nature and culture into “texture,” trades in folk organicism, construes place-bound “natives” as anthropological objects, and effaces the (perspectival) agency for accomplishing all of this. And yet Garland’s essay on local color was intended as an affirmative manifesto of “lovers and doers; of men who love the modern and who have not been educated to despise common things.”            

My seminar paper would use the problematics of C19 local color to identify some of the challenges facing re-localization of cultures in the C21 anthropocene. For example, it’s easy to smile at the pretensions of tiny houses, farm-to-table schemes, “neotraditional” or “sacred” economics —yet doing so sidesteps the aesthetics and poetics necessary for representing a genuinely attractive vision of sustainability. A world in which we’d want to live. Writing about (bio-)regionalism shows a way into this ecological dimension; local color is a necessary complement to that project by identifying the embedded reifications, reincorporations, and cultural obstacles posed by our now-global economy.