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Since the turn of the millennium, if not before, much of the research in southern studies has been devoted to reassessing the standard interpretation of regional literature as exceptional or unique to the canon of American literature. Instead of basing literary readings on a North/South model, scholars now search for literature that connects the United States South to the world. The Rose Tattoo (1951) features a group of Sicilian immigrants living on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, where the dynamic of migration suggests a way to interpret the play in a global context. Tennessee Williams positions his characters along a trajectory that crosses regional and national borders, thereby expanding the geographic field of reference that frames his imaginative landscape. If the North/South dualism fails to account for the flow of migrants in the play, then this dramatic composite points out a conceptual boundary where regional and national frameworks yield an incomplete reading. James Peacock, author of Grounded Globalism, might well be understood as describing the grounded globalism of Williams's Gulf Coast,
when the national framework is replaced, relations within the nation, including long-standing intranational conflicts, become less central in one's cognitive map. On a global cognitive map regions such as the South and the North appear smaller - no longer the elements or dualistic division but some elements among many within a much wider horizon (7).
Removing the linchpin that exclusively joins south to north, we encounter region and nation as partial structures in a more elaborate framework that requires a transnational lens to grasp its meaning. Peacock continues, "a global perspective can emancipate at various levels, not only mentally, the way one thinks and views the world, but also in more embodied modes, such as in . . . one's sense of place, how space is experienced, and how that experience is embodied" (7). So a global model reorients the South away from the North and toward the world, meanwhile transforming time-worn, insular concepts of place. From this perspective, the immigrant figure urges the audience to rethink the traditional image of the South on a much broader scale. In doing so, the sense of place imagined in The Rose Tattoo draws attention to the U.S. South as a crossroads of the world.
Williams scholars have...