SEPARATION ANXIETIES - Lsu - Louisiana State University

all seem interested in why separatist communities form, how well these revisionist structures
might work under different circumstances, and how and why they might break down.
For instance, in his work The Narrative Forms of Southern Community, Scott Romine
examines communities as represented in works of southern literature. Reflecting Susan Stanford
Friedman’s ideas in the epigraph above, Romine says
I mean to suggest that community is enabled by practices of avoidance, deferral,
and evasion; in a certain sense, as [Allen] Tate implies, community relies not on
what is there so much as what is, by tacit agreement, not there. Hence a new
definition of community: a social group that, lacking a commonly held view of
reality, coheres by means of norms, codes, and manners that produce a simulated,
or at least symbolically constituted, social reality. (3)
Romine goes on to say that the works he studies are representative in that “they demonstrate how
a hegemonic social order in a given place and time attempted to resolve its internal conflicts and
legitimate its hegemony” (4). The borders constructed in each text, he argues, represent “not
merely an already ordered social space, but a space inside of which order can and must be
actively maintained” (Romine 6). This argument reflects a truism about the communities that I
study in this project: the borders between separatist communities and mainstream America
reflect an attempt at social differentiation; however, they also act as the line of demarcation
between two remarkably similar sets of conflicts based on gender, racial, economic, sexual,
religious, and experiential issues. Furthermore, though Romine is examining textual
representations of specifically southern communities, a focus I do not share, his conceptions of
the general term “community” informs my own. In each of the texts that I will study herein, a
community defines itself according to what its members are and what, by contrast, members of
the dominant society are not. 1 These groups seek a resolution to internal conflicts, a legitimation,
and “ordered social spaces” distinct from America proper.
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