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

What is the relationship between patterns of conventional narrative and social change? Tara McPherson's book takes the position that popular culture narratives of the South are frightfully stuck, and advocates narrative reform as a step towards imagining and inventing cultural change—the reconstruction of Dixie. She begins with the premise that the South is "a fiction, a story we tell and are told" (1). Familiar story patterns suggest how the South functions within American culture, how the narrative South influences our national imagination, making it more difficult to establish new modes of southerness. She longs for and appreciates new narrative patterns that might rewrite southern feelings "beyond nostalgia, guilt and white racial melancholia," and might reconstruct the "South's history of commonality across racial lines" (6). Reconstructing Dixie "asks what it means, post-integration, to be faced with so many narratives that cannot begin to imagine how integration might be part of the everyday South" (6).

Dr. McPherson, who teaches at the University of Southern California School of Cinema-Television and is a coeditor of Hop on Pop: The Politics of and Pleasures of Popular Culture (with Harry Jenkins and Jane Shattuc), examines the representation of the South since the 1930s in popular fiction, film, tourism sites, academic southern studies and histories, music, autobiography, and t-shirts. Her range is as disparate as Gone with the Wind and Captain Confederacy comics, Hollywood's Steel Magnolias, television's Designing Women and Ken Burns's The Civil War, and women's autobiographical narratives. She surveys both mass media and individually authored texts and is interested in porous boundaries between popular culture representations and academic ones. She is attentive to the contradictions of our cultural encoding of the South as both the "keeper of [the nation's] darkest secrets" and the landscape of civilized elegance, of both "church bombings and . . . family values" (17).

Her central thrust is toward "how race is made via narrative and image" and how our popular narratives both conceal and disavow racial history. McPherson attends to "how the 'truth' of race gets produced for both the region and nation" (7). She develops a bit of home-made jargon around the term "lenticular" to evaluate the apartheid habits of narratives that never show Black and White in quite the same frame. Lenticular is a grandiloquent word for the gee-whiz, eye-seizing image technology we see on novelty items and advertisements and political buttons: move your gaze, and the image you saw at first shifts into another. McPherson's application of the term emerges from her memory of a postcard in which the image of a southern (white) lady alternates with the image of an African-American mammy. McPherson argues that much American narrative works this way, never quite allowing Black and White to be seen in the same frame, and she argues that despite good intentions, contemporary popular culture texts such as Ken Burns's The Civil War or the sitcom Designing Women fail in attempts to bring Black and White together, failing at integration in the important story of the causes and effects that cross the color line.

McPherson is particularly good on the interconnection between the figure of the southern lady and the ways that southern femininity is underwritten by racial inequities. She undresses the familiar myth of the lady: "the fault lines" of the culture concealed under the hoop skirt (20) and our seemingly endless nostalgia for the lady as emblem of the graces of the region. She takes on the important feminist readings—such as Anne Goodwyn Jones's—of Margaret Mitchell's Gone With The Wind: readings that value Mitchell's decision to have Scarlett deploy a drag masquerade of "feminine" in order to gain entrance, subversively, into the "'male, public, economic and competitive world'" (53). McPherson asks, however: subversive of what? She instead concentrates on Mitchell's association of woman with the home place, and division of white...