DEFINITIONS, HISTORIES, AND ETYMOLOGIES OF THE REGIONAL BLOC The term ‘regional bloc’ as it pertains to American cultural and historical studies was coined by Clyde Woods, a scholar of Black studies, in Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta. “Regional” is thought to have come from the Latin regionalis, "of or belonging to a region or province," while “bloc” refers to “alliances in Continental politics, from the French bloc "group, block.” Woods’ creation of the ‘regional bloc’ was inspired by the work of Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci, who conceptualized a ‘historical bloc’ as a “more than a political alliance… an "ensemble of ideas and social relations ‘given a specific historical conjecture’” (Hawley, 586). Historical blocs exist in the context of class consciousness and conflict, wherein the bloc consists of “strata of the subaltern and dominated classes, who have been won over by specific concessions and compromises and who form part of the social constellation but in a subordinate role” (Hall, 36). The regional bloc pulls its context and social relations from the historical bloc. Woods writes that the regional bloc can be “conceived of as an alliance, a bargain, or a contract between disparate ethnic, gender, class, and other elements” (26). While Woods’ distinction of these blocs may appear self-explanatory as groups of like-minded people who share an identity, in reality, the term is used in far more complex ways: to understand how hegemonies form and defend themselves, to earn control over valuable resources, to subsume and conceal resistant blocs, to organize communities along a hierarchy, and to draw alliances and solidarities through a relation to their shared networks, among other things. The regional bloc is especially important in theorizations of racial capitalism, which depend on the continuing differentiation and ‘othering’ of groups like regional blocs. Politics and culture combine in the formation of regional blocs to create the conditions of racial capitalism. Gramsci’s historical bloc contribution can be seen in the ways that the regional bloc assumes the importance of solidarity and social forces in class relations. Unsurprisingly, a regional bloc necessitates an intimate relationship with its spatial and geographical connection, and within that space, the dominant and resisting blocs that are inherently made up by their regionality. Inherent in racial capitalism are regional blocs that vie for power or defy exploitation in the pursuit of profit accumulation. Woods cites Edward Soja in explaining that the ‘regional’ part of the term does not only refer to the physical, functional, or cultural definitions,” but to the processes that differentiate regions from one another: “construction, reproduction, crisis, and the conscious activities of institutions and social movements” (26). Each region is composed of the former, which is informed and shaped by the latter. By their very nature, regional blocs reject the ideas of the monolith imposed by racial capitalism across ethnicities, cultures, states, and generations, and instead represent more intimate and detailed human blocs. They encompass groups of people who, beyond a shared and collective sense of identity, are “bound by deep horizontal networks of kinship, fraternity, sorority, and obligation…” (28). These are connected to the histories, legacies, destinies, and memories of communities distinct in their relationship to a region. Regional blocs are high-stakes in their political character since they strain against other regional blocs who seek to also “gain control over resources and over the ideological and distributive institutions governing their allocation” (26). How have institutions and social movements colored the landscape of the region? What types of people have arisen from these actions? How are relationships between these blocs inextricably linked to their region? How has racial capitalism contributed to the formation of regional blocs? These are all questions that help conceptualize regional blocs, which are formed by their relationships and resistances to the cultural, environmental, political, and economic environment surrounding them. These components and nuances differentiate regional blocs from other forms of community. UTILIZING REGIONAL BLOCS AS AN ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORK Understanding regional blocs provide us with a helpful and contextual framework to comprehend and analyze circumstances and issues of societies at large and the relationships that exist in particular regions, especially under racial capitalism. Used correctly and clearly, they can inform ideas that exist within a range of mediums, including scholarly works, cultural texts, and the various types of pasts that the interdisciplinary and critical American Studies field must deal with. Scholarly works are often linguistically and theoretically complex, and they tend to focus more on power structures and systemic conceptualizations than individual people and their real-life experiences. Attempting to conceptualize regional blocs out of these scholarly works can help readers understand how these seemingly abstract and notional ideas function on the ground for actual people and tangible relationships. Especially in regards to racial capitalism, regional blocs are essential to understanding how and why differentiated groups interact with one another. In “The Blues Tradition of Explanation,” Woods utilizes his concept of regional blocs to interrogate the relationships between the Black working class and white plantation-descendant landowners. Woods argues that the ‘blues’ is not only a music genre, but a powerful African American tradition, philosophy, and aesthetic that was intimately connected to its roots in the Mississippi Delta. We can decipher what the blues epistemology is and how it functioned through its regional blocs. The epistemology was formulated and characterized by the relationship between the distinctly Southern blues bloc and the plantation bloc, which shaped one other through contestation, resistance, identity affirmation, and social relations that were specific to the Mississippi Delta region. The role of regional blocs in this instance is critical to understanding the larger theory at hand. Regional blocs also serve to contextualize cultural texts and reveal nuances and relationships that might have otherwise gone unnoticed or unsaid under the blanketing, other-ing nature of racial capitalism. Cultural texts such as cartoons, movies, books, television, art, and photographs hold meaning beyond their immediate description. While these texts are indeed cultural texts because they convey deeper cultural meanings and explanations, applying the regional bloc concept in their analysis provides specific social and regional contextualization. A cultural text can assume an entirely new meaning through the use of regional blocs to understand and analyze it. In “Rural Dependency and Intimate Tensions,” Nayan Shah provides readers with a 1909 photo of men working the fields of San Joaquin Valley. A regional bloc analysis of this cultural text sheds light on who these men were – largely South Asian migrants who had formed a small community among themselves, based not only in their shared identities, but also their struggles with American immigration policies intending to disenfranchise them, intimate work relationships with one other and landowners, and their immigration to California due to its “rapid capitalization and intense economic development post World War II” (Shah 94-95). We discuss this regional bloc in further detail later on. Viewing cultural texts through this lens organizes surface-level, differentiated relationships under racial capitalism into complex regional blocs that show important cultural, historical, political, economic, and communal relations precise to their spatial and temporal state. Finally, regional blocs can help readers understand the “social, political, economic, and environmental past and present with which American Studies must reckon.” One such way we can see how regional blocs have presented themselves in aspects of American Studies is through the organization of labor in American history. Understanding regional blocs and how they form and interact gives us an inside look at all of the relationships that occur within American society. “LATINOS PARA TRUMP” The term ‘regional bloc’ can be used to analyze the work of Nayan Shah in “Rural Dependency and Intimate Tensions.” In the chapter, Shah discusses the relationships that formed in the agricultural regions of the Western United States in the 1920s. During this time, South Asian migrants were concentrated in three California agricultural regions. Success in the agricultural realm required that workers form communities. In other words, the “ability to organize capital demanded all kinds of associations and ties” (96). The South Asian workers were bound together when leasing equipment, working together, and when they needed formal and informal agreements for tenancy and land. Although not all of these workers were South Asian or of South Asian descent, they mixed together with other ethnicities. One example of this is when Punjabi men began to marry Mexican women. When they began to mix their families together, they were better able to secure farming land and business partnerships, they pooled resources together in order to gain capital. This demonstrates the way that these ethnic ties and associations helped with organizing capital and moving forward in a capitalist society. One significant regional bloc can be found in the Miami metropolis area of Florida, which is home to a high concentration of Cuban immigrants and their Cuban-American descendants - in fact, “of all the Latino groups, Cubans are the most regionally concentrated, with nearly 70 percent of the population in Florida”(Matropasqua). Politics are inherent to the nature of a regional bloc, and Cuban-American politics have repeatedly been in the national spotlight due to the group’s tendency to vote Republican. Despite the fact that ‘Latinos’ are thought to vote for Democrats across the board, the Cuban-American regional bloc in the Miami metropolitan area repeatedly votes Republican at all government levels. The “Latinos Para Trump” sign has become a source of national confusion, as the bloc has also been active and vocal in its support for President Donald Trump to the shock of Democrats, who mischaracterize specific nationalities as monolithic entities. The Cuban-American regional bloc in Miami was formed in direct contestation to what they perceive to be a leaning towards socialism and communism in the Democratic party. History offers an explanation to the workings of this regional bloc. The majority of the original Miami bloc left Cuba at the beginning of Fidel Castro’s Marxist-Leninist revolution, which saw the nationalization of private land and its redistribution, as well as the introduction of communism in general. This first wave was largely the white, upper class, land-owning elite who had supported the military dictatorship of the Batista government – Cubans who could afford to leave their country and had lost the most during the revolution. The U.S. government was sympathetic to anti-communists, and established the Cuban Adjustment Act to support those fleeing once they arrived in the U.S. The act allowed Cubans to obtain their residency within a year of arriving in the United States, a process that would have taken longer for any other Latino group. These histories, memories, and actions, as well as a deeply untruthful propaganda campaign meant to convince diasporic Cubans that Democrats belong to a Castro-aligned party, have resulted in a distinct regional bloc that handed Trump the state of Florida in the 2020 election. This connects back to our definition of regional blocs because not only does the Cuban population gain capital from the relationships they have made in the area, but so does everyone else from all different kinds of backgrounds. Their close relationships and interactions with the Cuban population has become a way for them to also gain capital because of the regional relationships they have built. WORKS CITED Hall, Stuart. “Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity.” In Journal of Communication Inquiry, vol. 10, no. 2. June 1986. Hawley, James P. “Antonio Gramsci's Marxism: Class, State and Work.” In Social Problems, vol. 27, no. 5. 1980. Fulwood, Sam. “The Complex American Response to Castro’s Death.” From The Center for American Progress. 2016. (Link) Krauze, León. “Trump Is Trying To Win Florida By Turning Biden Into Fidel Castro.” From Slate Magazine. 2020. (Link) Matropasqua, Kristina. “Cuban-Americans: Politics, culture and shifting demographics.” From Journalist’s Resource. 2015. (Link) Swenson, Jeff. “Latinos Para Trump.” Getty Images. 2009. From Politico. (Link) Shah, Nayan. “Chapter 3: Rural Dependency and Intimate Tensions.” In Stranger Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sexuality and the Law in the North American West. University of California Press, 2012. “This Day in History, January 01: Batista Forced Out By Castro-led Revolution.” From History.com. 2009. (Link) Woods, Clyde. “Chapter 2: The Blues Tradition of Explanation.” In Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta. London: Verso, 1998.
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AuthorsS.B. is a junior at Williams majoring in Environmental Studies, with a focus on environmental equity in regards to climate change. She is most interested in the social science and humanities aspects of the field. S.B. is from Fort Lauderdale, Florida and works as a veterinary technician during the academic off-season, where she continuously waves off the idea of going to vet school. Categories |