Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined South

by Tara McPherson

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.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Race, Academic, American Civil War

336 pages, Paperback

First published March 10, 2003

About the author

Tara McPherson is an Assistant Professor of Gender Studies and Critical Studies in USC's School of Cinema-TV, where she teaches courses in television, new media, and contemporary popular culture. Before arriving at USC, Tara taught film and media studies at MIT.

Reviews

[Eva · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tara McPherson's work has long been so critical and essential in providing deeper examinations of race and gender particularly with Black American history -- in the past, I expressed sentiments to the effect of how a work like this, even though it came out in 2003 (I believe), was still alarmingly relevant and that it warned so thoroughly of things we saw came to pass since 2016 with names and political groups I won't mention. But the fact is, this has never stopped being relevant. Many people were not paying attention to this in 2003 and were dismissing it as "Oh, those Lost Causers are harmless. They're just a bunch of guys in each other's hunting lodges. They had their heyday and their K rallies, but their time is over." And it is *precisely* that cavalier and horrifying attitude, coupled with (mainly) white people in 2016 saying "How did this happen?" Meanwhile, Tara McPherson along with bell hooks and so many other Black academics and thinkers had been sounding alarm bells for decades, and no one listened. This book is essential for understanding the 'How did this happen' and 'how did we get here.' It's not just some theoretical "Look at this thing in the past." It takes all of those things from the past that never went away and explains them, how they proliferated, the devastating harms they caused, the beliefs that some of these horrendous people had then and how for too many, the views have not changed, and... it's a lot to process. For those who haven't read this text and especially who look at things like Southern nostalgia and 'Gone with the Wind,' this book is essential reading.

[Brandon · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book provides a very good analysis of exactly what it promises: race, gender, and nostalgia. As with most scholarly publications, great for research but something short of a page-turner.

[Marcy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although this is an academic book, it is quite intriguing. I picked it up because I'm wanting to understand how the culture of Dixie finds its way into global cultures, which McPherson doesn't exactly touch, but given the ways in which she talks about how it continues to rear its head in the U.S. one can certainly extrapolate a bit from there. I found some of the texts she discussed--especially the visual art work of Kara Walker and the fiction of Randall Kenan--to be quite interesting. Her analysis of the racism inherent in "Gone with the Wind"--and the ways in which it continues to shape an American (and I would add non-Americans too!) sense of race relations (and the erasure of racism) is quite compelling. The book certainly speaks to what's continuing to develop in the south from Mississippi to the Carolinas.

[Mary Rizzo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Whip smart analysis of the South through the lens of popular culture--from Gone With the Wind to Designing Women . Her framing device is the concept of the lenticular, a visual logic that refuses to see the interconnections between different racial images in the same historical moment. What surprised me was how much of the book was about public history, from historic sites to documentaries. She doesn't seem to have any knowledge of the public history literature on any of these things, however, which is a minor complaint for an otherwise very well-done book.

[Tamara Harris · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a must-read if you are interested in attempts to rehabilitate and glamorize the image of the antebellum South. Be warned, the writing is very academic, though still compelling. This is not necessarily an easy read, but it is a good. You won't want to miss McPherson's take on both "Gone with the Wind" and "Designing Women."

[Mary · Rating 3 out of 5]

Honestly, it gets really dull towards the end. This is one you could read the first 3/4 of and get the entire gist. Once she starts talking about Steel Magnolias it's kind of repetitive and downhill from there.

[Elise · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really engaging, interesting study. Makes me want to find the "Captain Confederacy" comic book.