Katherine Anne Porter’s Familiar Countries

AbstractIn a career that spanned nearly half a century, Katherine Anne Porter developed a transregional, transhistorical consciousness marked by the multiple, iterative contagions of modernity. Considered mainly a Southern writer—despite marginal claims to both the region’s territories and its elite genealogies—Porter habitually displaced a complex Southern imaginary onto unlikely places and times. This essay locates Porter’s most “Southern” meditations in remote contexts, including her commentaries on postrevolutionary Mexico, where she spent much of the 1920s; her lifelong work on a never-completed biography of the Puritan polymath Cotton Mather; her unpublished Bermuda poems; and her only completed novel, Ship of Fools (1962), which charts a transatlantic voyage on a second-class cruise liner. Porter protected her South fiercely but dialectically; her stake in a Southern narrative would emerge only circuitously, by way of alternative geographies and narratives where she identified variously with the elite and the dispossessed. In the end, Porter’s South poses an instructive challenge for the scholars still attempting to define and deconstruct the region: it is at once everywhere and nowhere; an agent and an inheritor of colonial-capitalist trauma; a refuge and a nightmare.