Reconstructing Dixie

Tara McPherson is Associate Professor in the School of Cinema-Television at the University of Southern California. She is a coeditor of Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture, published by Duke University Press.

• Index 311Acknowledgments ixDixie Then and Now: An Introduction 11. Romancing the South: A Tour of Lady’s Legacies, Academic and Otherwise 392. “Both Kinds of Arms”: The Civil War in the Present 953. Steel Magnolias, Fatal Flowers, and Designing Women: On the Limits of a Politics of Femininity in the Sun Belt South 1494. Feeling Southern: Home, Guilt, and the Transformation of White Identity 205Notes 257Bibliography 293

“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