Description
Book SynopsisThe 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. This title explores how ideas about the South function within American culture.
Trade Review“
Reconstructing Dixie is a wonderful book—feisty, original, filled with insights into the circulation of the South in contemporary consumerist and feminist space. With real aplomb Tara McPherson leaps into the fracas surrounding globalization, the new geography, the racialization of ’whiteness,’ and the controversies about the uses of gender analysis. The result is a book that could release ‘southern' studies from its limited academic terrain.”—Patricia Yaeger, author of
Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women's Writing“
Reconstructing Dixie is theoretically sophisticated in its view of southernness as a discursive construct and a cultural fantasy and in its analysis of the work regional nostalgia performs.”—Laura Kipnis, author of
Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America“I was absolutely blown away by this book. Tara McPherson's readings of individual texts, ranging from
Gone With the Wind to the
Captain Confederacy comicbook series and Octavia Butler’s
Kindred, are original, precise, and utterly convincing. She pulls to the surface the radically different ways each work deals with the critical nexus of regional, racial, class, and gender identities.”—Henry Jenkins, director of Comparative Media Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Table of ContentsIndex 311
Acknowledgments ix
Dixie Then and Now: An Introduction 1
1. Romancing the South: A Tour of Lady’s Legacies, Academic and Otherwise 39
2. “Both Kinds of Arms”: The Civil War in the Present 95
3. Steel Magnolias, Fatal Flowers, and Designing Women: On the Limits of a Politics of Femininity in the Sun Belt South 149
4. Feeling Southern: Home, Guilt, and the Transformation of White Identity 205
Notes 257
Bibliography 293
