The South has long played a central role in America's national
imagination--the site of the trauma of slavery and of a vast
nostalgia industry, alternatively the nation's moral other and its
moral center. "Reconstructing Dixie" explores how ideas about the
South function within American culture. Narratives of the region
often cohere around such tropes as southern hospitality and the
southern (white) lady. Tara McPherson argues that these discursive
constructions tend to conceal and disavow hard historical truths,
particularly regarding race relations and the ways racial
inequities underwrite southern femininity. Advocating conceptions
of the South less mythologized and more tethered to complex
realities, McPherson seeks to bring into view that which is
repeatedly obscured--the South's history of both racial injustice
and cross-racial alliance.
Illuminating crucial connections between understandings of race,
gender, and place on the one hand and narrative and images on the
other, McPherson reads a number of representations of the South
produced from the 1930s to the present. These are drawn from
fiction, film, television, southern studies scholarship, popular
journalism, music, tourist sites, the internet, and autobiography.
She examines modes of affect or ways of "feeling southern" to
reveal how these feelings, along with the narratives and images she
discusses, sanction particular racial logics. A wide-ranging
cultural studies critique, "Reconstructing Dixie" calls for vibrant
new ways of thinking about the South and for a revamped and
reinvigorated southern studies.
"Reconstructing Dixie" will appeal to scholars in American,
southern, and cultural studies, and to those in African American,
media, and women's studies.
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