Shelton, Allen
2007 Dreamworlds of Alabama. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Notes: xxv, 197 p. : ill. ; 23 cm. ISBN: 9780816650354Reviewed 28 Mar 2008 by:
Daniel S. Margolies <dmargolies@vwc.edu>
Batten Associate Professor of History, Virginia Wesleyan College, Norfolk, Virginia, USAMedium: Written Literature Subject
Keywords:Farm life - Alabama - Jacksonville
Teachers - New York (State) - Buffalo - Biography
Shelton, Allen (Allen C.) - Childhood and youth
Shelton, Allen (Allen C.) - Family
Pelham, John, 1838-1863 - Influence
Benjamin, Walter, 1892-1940 - Influence
Hubbard, Elizabeth, d. 1938 - Influence
Jacksonville (Ala.) - Biography
Jacksonville (Ala.) - Social life and customs
Alabama - History - Miscellanea
ABSTRACT: A lyrical rumination on landscape, identity, memory, and commodity which considers the connections between the physical, economic, and cultural, and familial worlds in a singular American place.
This oddly seductive little book meanders through the author's life and memories of a life rooted in then thrust out of Alabama, coupled with wide-ranging explorations in all directions: past, future, theoretical, genealogical, and geographical. Complicated and evocative, Dreamworlds of Alabama is hard to characterize or generalize yet beautiful and even arresting to read. To fully codify the many aspects of the book would be to drain much of its appeal as a literary work. Yet there are insights here worth pondering for scholars in the many disciplines concerned with place, identity, memory, and history. The book should be read and considered as literature as well as scholarship, its language savored, and its meandering followed fruitfully to a broad appreciation of the politics of culture.Dreamworlds of Alabama covers a wide array of topics while evoking a sense of Shelton's family history built upon Walter Benjamin's concept of dreamworlds, described here as "a hybrid space made from dreams, commodities, and memory compressed together under pressure" (p. xv). Shelton combines this concept with other, local attempts to reconstruct the Alabama landscape of his memory and to refract it through his wide reading of many scholars. At times more prose poem than essay, Shelton includes often surprising and generally tasteful interruptions from Foucault, Fernand Braudel, Marx, Proust, Weber, and Kafka, and, often, Benjamin. The book cycles back and through the writings of Benjamin, his life, his criticism, and his evolved sense of place, commodity, and place. All of these ideas are meshed with the sometimes erratic lives of Shelton's forebears and a thick description of their dreams, lives, homes, and even their tools. The book concludes that "the consolation for Benjamin or K. or me is the mirage that haunts the Minotaur; the next labyrinth will fit more closely" (p. 164).
As he recreates a childhood in Alabama and a life of reading, Shelton considers consciousness, ghosts, the Holy Ghost, violence, death, farming, beekeeping, animal husbandry, religious conversion, the persistence of the Confederate dead, and various other 'scapes of all descriptions. As is true across the South, Shelton writes "I grew up where the past mixed openly with the present" (p. 32). He variously reassembles the shards of life, thought, readings, myths, fictions, and realities, and shatters them anew. The physical landscape and the interaction with the history, individuals, and cultures overlaying it are a central focus. He writes "rivers and institutions both work as sorting machines in the creation and maintenance of hierarchies" (p. 9).
One core objective of this book is to plumb the layers not just of personal experience and rippling memory but the many layers and connective tissues of commodity, identity, and place, and the links between them. Within each focused essay, Shelton's text effortlessly jumps topics, time periods, and themes. At times this can be disorienting, and deliberately so. "I was left," he writes in this regard, "with the lure of arriving at the beginnings of a memory I never had" (p. 109).
This is a book of the senses as much as of the mind, extending laterally from a deep and abiding sense of place in hardscrabble Alabama, with its enveloping layers of history, toward developing all the senses, culminating in the sense of the dreamworlds that underlay it all. Memories are overlaid and intersected with theoretical discussions. Shelton describes himself as inscribed on the landscape of his home despite having moved far away both physically and temporally. He calls himself "a time traveler looking back for a moment I can't describe except in the awkward word home." (p. 153).
Because this is in part a collection of previously published pieces, there is at times some overlap. Given the topics, and especially Shelton's approach and writing, this thematic recurrence comes across less as repetition and more as a sifting through a lattice of ideas and interpretative approaches. However, Shelton does at times get a bit caught up in his own language -- there is nothing wrong with a lyrically written book, of course, though they are all too rare in academia -- but the effusive writing and episodic treatment can at times obscure or even overshadow his message.
There are some marvelous pictures of Shelton's family throughout the book, but they are not discussed in detail and one wishes there were many more of them. Shelton alludes to the existence of his grandmother's trunk, filled with the detritus and treasures of generations. Greater excavation of the trunk would have been welcome, and one gets the feeling that Shelton may yet return anew to the rich landscape he has plumbed in this fascinating book.
Given its interdisciplinary scope, this book will be useful for a wide array of advanced classes in sociology, anthropology, cultural geography, southern regionalism and history, American studies, and literary journalism, among others. This book is certain to yield interesting discussions and serve as an opening to other studies of family, region, and identity.
To cite this review, the American Anthropological Association recommends the following style:
Margolies, Daniel S.
2008 Review of Dreamworlds of Alabama. Anthropology Review Database. March 28. Electronic document, http://wings.buffalo.edu/ARD/cgi/showme.cgi?keycode=3165, accessed February 9, 2010.© Anthropology Review Database
(available online: http://wings.buffalo.edu/ARD/)