  Local Color  Lucinda MacKethan, North Carolina State
University  29 February 2004 Southern local color in the post-
Reconstruction era provided the region with one of its most
effective pathways back into national prominence through its
appeal to northern curiosity and nostalgia. Like other regional
varieties, southern local color could both celebrate the way
that different cultures affirmed nationally favored
similarities, and it could also make separatist claims more
palatable through the charming presentation of difference. A
regional affinity for this genre grew out of the South's
plentiful unusual accents and vernacular vocabularies and its
association in the national mind with a unique plantation
economic base. Most importantly, the South had race, America's
most visible metaphor of human difference, so that southern
practitioners of local color, writing out of backwoods Georgia,
James River plantation Virginia, or Creole New Orleans could
adapt regional peculiarities of all kinds to plots that frequen