(Tara - McPherson) - Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender

Reconstructing
Dixie
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RECONSTRUCTING
DIXIE
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Race, Gender, and Nostalgia
in the Imagined South
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TA R A M c P H E R S O N
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Duke University Press
Durham and London
2003
©2003 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States
of America on acid-free paper
Designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan
Typeset in Perpetua by Tseng
Information Systems, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-
in-Publication Data appear on
the last printed page
of this book.
In memory of
Pansy Wallace Carpenter
and for
Kay Carpenter McPherson
Pamela McPherson
Megan Cassingham
Four generations of southern women
with much to teach me
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CONTENTS
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Acknowledgments, ix
Dixie Then and Now: An Introduction, 1
1. Romancing the South: A Tour of the

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
Index, 311
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AC K N OW L E D G M E N T S
Someone observing my life from the outside might easily have guessed that
I would end up writing about the South, but the need to tell about the
South nonetheless took me by surprise. In the late 1980s, I headed off to a
northern graduate school intent (like countless expatriates before me) on
leaving things southern behind. Born the daughter of a southern mother
and a northern father, saddled with a name like ‘‘Tara,’’ questions of south-
ern identity had long both vexed and animated me, and I was ready for
a change. Still, as I studied feminism, cultural studies and critical race
theory, I often found my thoughts straying below the Mason-Dixon Line,
if only in the landscapes of memory, wondering how to join together my
southern and post-southern lives. The challenge it seemed was to recon-
cile the theories I was learning—powerful but abstract lessons for under-
standing the world—with my complex, messy, often ambivalent feelings
about daily life in the South, a life I had willingly fled. This book is my act
of reconciliation, an attempt to bring together what often felt like oppo-
sitional realities, divergent ways of being. While Reconstructing Dixie is no
memoir, my life certainly informs every word. Throughout that life, I’ve
had much support and owe deep thanks to many.
Through their examples and their insights, several fine teachers have
provided both direct and indirect aid in the completion of this project. At
Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi, Allen Scarboro, Michel Mitias,
and Richard Mallette demanded rigorous thinking and challenged me to
expand my narrow teenage view of the world, encouraging an interdisci-
plinary mode of thought that has served me well. At Centenary College
in Shreveport, Louisiana, Jeff Hendricks and Bruce Allen introduced me,
respectively, to feminist film theory and modern art. Without their friend-
ship and guidance, I might have ended up in law school. At the University
of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, my doctoral committee brilliantly oversaw the
dissertation upon which this book is based. A student couldn’t ask for a
better trio of advisors. Patrice Petro kept me on task, providing sage pro-
fessional and scholarly advice, saving me from more than one wrong turn.
Kathleen Woodward was a gifted reader of my work, asking precise and
insightful questions which jump-started my revisions of this project time
and time again. Finally, Patricia Mellencamp offered both intellectual and
emotional companionship, always insisting that I could do whatever I set
out to do and providing an excellent role model for feminist praxis. I
also profited from the stimulating intellectual environment provided by
UW-M’s Center for Twentieth-Century Studies and learned a great deal
from the scholars who visited there. Particular thanks are due to Meaghan
Morris and John Caughie.
Both my undergraduate and graduate education were enriched by my
fellow students and other friends. In Milwaukee, Connie Balides, Chip
Blackwell, Marie Broussard, Jim Castonguay, Elana Crane, David Crane,
Pam Michener Day, Ann Fitzsimmons, Kathy Green, Amelie Hastie, Kate
Kramer, Natalie Myers Munn, Jon Beasley-Murray, Art Redding, Cam-
mie Robertson, The Shepard House gang, and many others made seminars
more lively or winters more bearable. Jackson, Mississippi afforded end-
less case studies in the finer points of southern femininity and hospitality,
and Catherine Scallan Rimokh, Ruma Haque, and Katie Sibley Gaylord
among others have endlessly illustrated the fun and friendship born of
the region. Necip Alican shared my early love of philosophy, and I thank
him for many long evenings of bourbon and discourse. While many of my
southern friends won’t love this book (and most won’t even read it), I hope
those that do recognize that it honors aspects of the region even as it calls
many founding myths of white southern identity into question.
Other pals and colleagues have offered timely support, criticism, feed-
back, and friendship (as well as good dinner company when needed). These
include Amy Bomse, Bruce Brasell, John Caldwell, Niki Cunningham,
Cathy Davidson, Mary Desjardins, Kathleen Donahue, Anna Everett, Eric
Freedman, Anne Friedberg, Jennifer Gross, Heather Hendershot, Eithne
Johnson, Victoria Johnson, Lynne Joyrich, David Koenig, Pete Limbrick,
Steve Mamber, Anna McCarthy, Ken Molina, Lisa Nakamura, Bethany
Ogden, Edward O’Neill, David Pendleton, Chris Pomiecko, Sally Ross,
Jane Shattuc, Eric Schaefer, Vivian Sobchack, Ellen Strain, Tom Streeter,
Alison Trope, Matthew Tinkcom, Cristina Venegas, Karen Vered, Nina
Wakeford, Mark Williams, Pam Roberston Wojcik, Rick Wojcik, Patri-
cia Yaeger, and Elizabeth Young. Henry Jenkins deserves special thanks;
his early support of my work on the South and of my fledgling career
x Reconstructing Dixie
helped get me started, and I still profit from our friendship. In Los Ange-
les, the Fun Club, especially Kelly Souders, Tiffany Hope, Brian Peterson,
David Clawson, Irene Turner, Vanessa and Mikael Kreuzriegler, and Doug
McLauglin, continues to remind me that life should never be only about
work, and their gentle criticisms about the limits of scholarly life help
keep me sane and happy. Particular thanks are due the wonderful Wendy
West, who read every word of this manuscript despite her fondness for
much livelier prose.
Numerous USC colleagues have also provided friendship and support. I
feel fortunate to be a member of the Critical Studies Division of the School
of Cinema-TV and thank my peers there for setting a high bar. In particu-
lar, Michael Renov has been my avid champion all along and for that I thank
him. Lynn Spigel expressed an early interest in my work. David James and
Dana Polan have offered wise advise again and again. Todd Boyd has refined
my thinking about the South (and many other things). Marsha Kinder has
become both mentor and friend. Sherall Preyer has made life at USC much
more fun, and she and the rest of our staff improve our daily lives in enu-
merable ways. Elizabeth Daley, Rick Jewell, and the cinema school admin-
istration have supported my work with research leaves and kind words.
My interaction with students has also improved my thinking and my life;
I single out for special mention Christine Acham, Steve Anderson, Bob
Bodle, Lindsay Harrison, Evan Hughes, Dan Leopard, Sarah Matheson,
Lauri Mullens, Martin Perea, Elizabeth Ramsey, Hayes Smith, Heather
Osborne Thompson, and Ethan Thompson. Elsewhere at USC, Stephanie
Barish, Amy Binder, Joe Boone, Andi Frisch, Judith Jackson Fossett, Jason
Glenn, Bill Handley, Carla Kaplan, Paul Lerner, Vickie Mendoza, Viet
Nguyen, Panivong Norindr, Chris Robbins, Robin Romans, Vibeke Soren-
sen, Phiroze Vasunia, and Cynthia Young have read my work, entertained
me, and/or generally provided me with a vibrant intellectual and social
community—no easy task in the dispersed geographies of Los Angeles.
Ken Wissoker has waited patiently for this project over the years, and
I thank him for his good humor, his wisdom, and his friendship. Ken and
his staff at Duke University Press were right on target with guidance and
gentle reminders just when I needed them most. Thanks to the manu-
script’s readers; their trenchant criticism certainly improved the book.
The research for this project was supported by many institutions over the
years. I thank the Graduate School of University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
for a Doctoral Research Fellowship; the Center for the Study of Southern
Culture at the University of Mississippi for research support; Duke Uni-
Acknowledgments xi
versity Libraries for a travel grant to visit the Women’s Archives; and the
Special Collections Library at the University of North Carolina-Chapel
Hill for access to Katharine DuPre Lumpkin’s papers. Huge thanks are
due various southerners who talked with me or provided images for this
project, including some whose tales didn’t quite make the final draft. These
include DJ Tennessee, Sherman Evans of NuSouth, Wanda and Brenda
Henson of Camp Sister Spirit, Ross McElwee, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Will
Shetterly, and Rosser Shymanski (aka DeAundra Peek).
Heartfelt thanks to my family, the place where I first learned (and un-
learned) southernness and from which I continue to draw emotional sus-
tenance, guidance and love. My parents Brad and Kay McPherson were my
first and best role models, carefully balancing their dreams for me with
unconditional love. They are also teachers, and I aspire to teach and to
parent half as well as they both do. My sister, Pam, and brother, Joseph,
are siblings par excellence, and their spouses and children now bring new
happiness and love to our family circle.
My deepest gratitude goes to Robert Knaack. For over a decade, he has
encouraged and supported my work while also reminding me of life’s other
pleasures. His generosity, kindness, and essential goodness have made me
a better scholar. His love has made me a better person. Finally, much love
to Dexter Knaack. His arrival near this book’s end sets the course for new
beginnings and teaches me volumes about patience and joy.
Portions of chapter 1 were published as ‘‘Seeing in Black and White: Race

and Gender in Gone with the Wind and Scarlett,’’ in Hop on Pop: The Pleasures
and Politics of Popular Culture, eds. Henry Jenkins, Jane Shattuc, and Tara
McPherson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002). Portions of chap-
ter 2 were published as ‘‘I’ll Take My Stand in Dixie-Net: White Guys, the
South, and Cyberspace,’’ in Race and Cyperspace, eds. Lisa Nakamura, et al.
(New York: Routledge, 1999); and ‘‘Both Kinds of Arms: Gender and Re-
cent Visions of the Civil War,’’ The Velvet Light Trap (winter 1995). Portions
of chapter 3 were published as ‘‘Disregarding Romance and Refashioning
Femininity: Getting Down and Dirty with the Designing Women,’’ Camera
Obscura 32 (September 1993–January 1994). Portions of chapter 4 were
published in the Review of But Now I See: The White Southern Racial Con-
version, by Fred Hobson, American Literature (September 2001).
xii Reconstructing Dixie

DIXIE
T H E N A N D N OW
An Introduction
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The South today is as much a fiction, a story we tell and are told, as it is
a fixed geographic space below the Mason-Dixon line, and thus I begin
here, in the time-honored tradition of southern rhetoric, with a story. It
is not a story intended to illustrate the truth of the South, but rather a tale
that I hope will serve to highlight some of the myriad ways in which the
South travels.
As an expatriate southerner, voluntarily displaced from Dixie, I now
live in Los Angeles, an area much recognized as epitomizing a postmodern
fascination with surfaces and ‘‘an acute disposition toward placelessness.’’ 1
I arrived already familiar with both popular and academic descriptions of
Los Angeles’s penchant for pastiche, so I was not entirely surprised to find
myself on one of L.A.’s warm spring nights squeezed into a simulacrum
of a Mississippi Delta blues joint eating sushi and barbecue and listen-
ing to the new band of an old English pop star. Standing among several
hundred ‘‘friends’’ and employees of the Japanese multimedia giant Sega,
I thought about how much cleaner this place was than any juke joint I
had ever visited in Mississippi and contemplated what an odd combina-
tion sushi and ribs made. The crowd had gathered because Sega had rented
L.A.’s House of Blues for the evening to entertain various businessmen
(and a few businesswomen) during E3, the country’s largest convention
for the electronic entertainment industry.
The House of Blues is a national franchise of music venues (owned in
part by Dan Ackroyd) that are designed to look roughly like ramshackle
Delta blues clubs. They exist in tourist-frequented areas of large U.S. cities
and, in marketing ‘‘authentic’’ down-homeness cut free from an original
local context, could be read as perfect symbols of the postmodern play of
surfaces and an insincere selling of southern culture. But such a reading
would depend on a belief in an originary and pure southernness that is
being ‘‘sold out’’ and that exists (or once existed) in an untarnished rela-
tion to outside forces. One contention of this study is that such an isolated
and ‘‘pure’’ South never existed and that, if one is to understand the many
versions of the South that circulate throughout U.S. history and culture,
one has always to see them as fundamentally connected to, and defined in
relation to, the non-South.
This move to position the South in a wider context is informed by re-
cent work on both globalism and regionalism in contemporary critical
and cultural studies and takes seriously the contention of scholars such
as David Morley and Kevin Robins that, in a world increasingly charac-
terized by global networks and information flows, ‘‘regional culture must
necessarily be in dialogue with global culture.’’ 2 In an era of increasing
globalization, the region circulates as an alternative to the nation-state,
shifting in meaning and content. Reconstructing Dixie explores a variety of
twentieth-century discourses of, from, and about the South beginning
from an appreciation of the impossibility of speaking of the region in iso-
lation, concluding with an exploration of the South’s role in the national
imaginary. The project brings together a diverse array of texts and his-
tories, straying far afield from the usual canonical suspects of southern
studies. My strategic samples encompass literary fiction, southern scholar-
ship, film, television, popular journalism, music, tourism, the Internet,
and autobiography, primarily drawn from the Great Depression forward,
an era largely recognized as central to the South’s move toward indus-
trialization and away from the period often referred to as the ‘‘colonial
South.’’ If, as Franklin D. Roosevelt maintained in 1938, the South was ‘‘the
Nation’s No. 1 economic problem,’’ the intervening six decades have seen
substantial changes in the area. I am interested in the shifting registers
of the representation of region, race, and place throughout this span of
time, in tracking the ways in which ‘‘old’’ Souths were reconstituted at the
moment of the South’s modernization and continue to be reconstructed
today.3 What role do these many Souths play for the nation?
Perhaps a further example of the mediated nature of current discourses
on the South will serve to clarify the necessity of making sense of things
southern. A recent front-page story in the Los Angeles Times recounted in
graphic detail the horrors of the South at the turn of the twentieth century.
The article chronicled the efforts of Atlanta antique dealer James Allen to
mount exhibits of the collection of lynching photographs he had obses-
2 Reconstructing Dixie
sively gathered over a period of years. In querying the mixed reactions that
the white, gay collector has received from both white and black audiences,
the piece managed both to underscore the brutality of race relations in
America, particularly in the South, during the first half of the twentieth
century and to raise questions about our continuing inability to come to
terms, as a nation, with both the period and the region. This inability was
further (and inadvertently) highlighted as I continued to read that Sunday’s
paper. Still reeling from the intense violence recounted on page 1, I was
startled to encounter the magnolia-hued face of Scarlett O’Hara staring
back from the colored layouts of the Parade section. Decked out in ‘‘that
famous green dress she wore to the barbecue at Twelve Oaks’’ was the
Franklin Mint’s reproduction of the ‘‘legendary film heroine’’ who ‘‘took
our breath away’’ in Gone with the Wind.
Together the article and the advertisement serve as a powerful illustra-
tion of our cultural schizophrenia about the South: the region remains at
once the site of the trauma of slavery and also the mythic location of a vast
nostalgia industry. In many ways, Americans can’t seem to get enough of
the horrors of slavery, and yet we remain unable to connect this past to
the romanticized history of the plantation, unable or unwilling to pro-
cess the emotional registers still echoing from the eras of slavery and Jim
Crow. The brutalities of those periods remain dissociated from our rep-
resentations of the material site of those atrocities, the plantation home.
Furthermore, the very figure who underwrote the widespread lynching of
black southern men (and women) during the era of segregation in the South
somehow remains collectible. The white southern lady—as mythologized
image of innocence and purity—floats free from the violence for which
she was the cover story, nicely coifed and safely ensconced in an ‘‘exqui-
site’’ collector’s edition hatbox, ‘‘inspired by the box that Rhett brought
to Scarlett in the film,’’ a late-twentieth-century example of the tenacity
of certain southern images in the national imagination. Reconstructing Dixie
shakes the southern lady free from the carefully arranged shelves of the
collector, examining her appeal while also exploring the various histories
her broad skirts both reveal and conceal.
This project proceeds along four separate but connected paths, frame-
works that weave in and out of the subsequent chapters, sometimes re-
ceding from immediate vision but nevertheless functioning as guides.
First, I pursue a variety of popular (and unpopular) images of the South
from Gone with the Wind to the present, querying in particular the staying
power of many of these figures, particularly the southern lady, the south-
Dixie Then and Now 3

Scarlett as twenty-first-century collectible, part of the vast nostalgia industry that
symptomatizes the nation’s cultural schizophrenia about the South.
ern home, and the southern gentleman. This cast of characters populates
both the realms of mass culture and the more rarefied spaces of southern
academic histories. What do these representations have to tell us about the
South’s role in national culture? How do they encourage specific modes
of identification, sometimes freezing the meaning of southernness, some-
times suggesting varied ways of feeling southern? Do they hint at other
Souths, alternatives that might expand the terrain of southern studies?
Stereotypical images of southernness such as the lady or the belle func-
tion as asymptotes, as cultural limit figures that detail the contours of our
cultural and regional ideals of femininity and gentility. In its investiga-
tions of the mediation of the South through these and other recurring fig-
ures, Reconstructing Dixie examines the endurance of such treasured icons
of whiteness, asking why we remember and enshrine certain Souths and
certain southerners while forgetting others. Such a process allows us to
discern the role popular culture plays in processes of historical amnesia
while enabling a thorough analysis of how these seemingly stock figures of
southernness have subtly transmogrified during the past several decades,
introducing new icons of whiteness into regional (and national) conscious-
ness. Likewise, we can begin to chart the historical variables undergirding
white opacity throughout the twentieth century while also recognizing
the sometimes utopian dimensions latent within even conservative deploy-
ments of these recurring figures. Although the belle, the plantation, and
the southern gentleman recur throughout the twentieth century, there are
important and telling variations between, say, the southern ladies of Gone
with the Wind and the southern ladies of contemporary tourism and popu-
lar literature. These variations might help us to determine new modes of
relation between femininity and feminism, sharpening our insights into
masquerade and the southern performance of femininity and hospitality.
By paying close attention to both similarity and difference within a regional
frame, we come to understand the many routes by which iconic figures of
southernness encourage and underwrite particular ways of understanding
race and gender and of feeling southern.
Second, I push this idea of ‘‘feeling southern’’ further, examining the
recent history and import of ‘‘southern feelings.’’ This book argues that
popular culture provides the scripts for certain emotional paradigm sce-
narios, teaching us how to feel ‘‘properly’’ southern, while also recognizing
the complexity of such scenes of instruction. Mapping the emotional reg-
isters of southernness can help us to access the latent feelings supporting
seemingly straightforward ways of being southern. What emotional labor

do representations of the South perform, and for whom? How do emo-
tions such as guilt and remorse figure into notions of southernness, and
how have different southerners reckoned with this emotional legacy? For
instance, across the chapters that follow, guilt emerges as a central as-
pect of twentieth-century southern feeling, and a variety of approaches
to managing guilt are tracked across the southern landscape. Guilt can
become a kind of self-indulgent fixation, an end in itself that stops the pro-
cessing of emotion, encouraging the endless confession of many southern
memoirs. Guilt might also be masked or covered by a self-righteous anger,
which denies the source of guilt, blaming the other. Within a southern
frame, white guilt is most often a response to the history of racial oppres-
sion in the region, a formative fact of southern life that is still rarely dealt
with in a direct and honest manner. Whereas many of the southern nar-
ratives tracked through Reconstructing Dixie deploy intricate strategies to
manage and displace white southern guilt, others more successfully work
through the emotion, acknowledging the costs of continued denial and
pointing the way toward more complex engagements with the burdens of
southern history. Such tales refuse to deploy encounters with blackness
as mere fuel for the emotional texturing of whiteness, no longer casting
difference as a background that supports imagined white sensitivity and
subjectivity. A sense of hope materializes from these other narratives, a
hope that, with hard work and some new skills, we can spin feeling south-
ern differently, encouraging a kind of affective mobility that moves beyond
nostalgia, guilt, and white racial melancholia toward forms of reparation.
Third, this study seeks to understand how respinning southern feeling
might help us to reconstruct the South’s history of commonality across
racial lines, a commonality that has structured both the South’s obsession
with separating black from white and its long legacy of interwoven tra-
ditions, an interweaving characterized by both disgust and desire.4 This
history of cross-racial connection disappears in the covert racial represen-
tations that characterize southern narratives after the Civil Rights move-
ment, as ‘‘Old South’’ tourist attractions and popular cinema sketch an
often all-white Dixie. Here films like Steel Magnolias inadvertently high-
light our national inability to conceptualize what racial contact might even
look like. Reconstructing Dixie asks what it means, postintegration, to be
faced with so many narratives that cannot begin to imagine how integra-
tion might be part of the everyday South. How might we reconceptualize
racial contact for the new millennium in more progressive ways, access-
ing southern traditions of cross-racial contact, but with new innovations
in meaning? We need new models of cross-racial alliance that also rec-
ognize the dangers laced through dreams of union, dreams that can all
too easily operate strictly via the desires of white subjectivity, erasing the
specificity of history and negating the oppositional power of the counter-
memories of black southerners. Notions of Americanness have long traded
on tropes of union and unity. The progressive possibilities laced through
a history of regional racial alliance must not obscure the excruciating
burdens of history. Indeed, the desire for racial unity in the twentieth-
century South often seems difficult to pinpoint amid a history marked by
lynchings, Bull Connor, and a recalcitrant separatism. Nonetheless Recon-
structing Dixie maintains that this latency does not make the desire any less
real and seeks to mobilize this past toward new models of alliance and a
reconstruction of white southern subjectivity.
Finally, I ask how this history of southern representation and feeling
underwrites particular racial logics and highlight how race is made via nar-
rative and image, examining the degree to which prevalent racial econo-
mies make understanding southern icons, feelings, and commonality diffi-
cult if not impossible. These racial logics join visual and narrative culture,
shaping how the ‘‘truth’’ of race gets produced for both the region and the
nation. The visual economies of race shift across the twentieth century,
moving from the more overt racial (and racist) representations of the pre–
Civil Rights era toward more covert strategies of imaging race, racism, and
racial difference. Whereas early-twentieth-century racial logics tended to
delineate whiteness in sharp contrast to blackness, by midcentury other
modes of framing whiteness were developing, modes that tended to re-
press the relations between white and black. I introduce new models for
understanding how race came to be figured in dominant southern nar-
ratives as the last century unfolded, explaining the varied formations of
what I term a lenticular logic of racial visibility. Put briefly, a lenticular
logic is a monocular logic, a schema by which histories or images that are
actually copresent get presented (structurally, ideologically) so that only
one of the images can be seen at a time. Such an arrangement represses
connection, allowing whiteness to float free from blackness, denying the
long historical imbrications of racial markers and racial meaning in the
South. Lenticular logics can take multiple forms, and Reconstructing Dixie
carefully tracks these variations, highlighting the stakes of these delimiting
optics. But such lenticular logics are not the only game in town. Some nar-
ratives and images break free of such a limiting schema, refusing both the
covert representations of the lenticular, as well as the more overt modes

of an earlier period, fashioning new paradigms of vision and visibility and
refusing the comforts of partition and separation.
I am after the relations between representation and how we understand
gender, race, and place, as well as the implications of these understand-
ings for antiracist activism and identities. In short, I want new ways of
feeling southern that more fully come to terms with the history of racial
oppression and racial connection in the South. Is there a progressive way
to value regional pride and identity, and if so, how might that value be
leveraged in new ways? Can that value be accessed while also confront-
ing the region’s history of racial, gender, and economic inequalities? Can
there be a progressive whiteness that recognizes the material advantages
that whiteness has accrued in southern society? Can we track moments of
disinvestment in whiteness and its advantages while recognizing how even
disinvested whiteness still operates from a context of power and privilege?
Southern identity comes from somewhere—it has a history and is located
in geography—yet it is also in flux, under construction, subject to change,
moving between sameness and difference. Reconstructing Dixie investigates
productive histories, speculative fictions, and moments of juncture that
point the way to new, less retrograde, white southern identities while also
examining narratives that lock us into more recalcitrant modes of being. It
urges movement toward more flexible modes of southern identity, think-
ing about what it means to be southern and progressive, unwilling to aban-
don the South to the stasis and fixity of conservative forces.
g S T U DY I N G T H E S O U T H
Where might we find these other southerners? We might begin by recon-
figuring the discipline called ‘‘southern studies,’’ a sometimes interdisci-
plinary endeavor that often encompasses history, literature, religion, and
folklore/anthropology. There are strengths to be mined from this tradi-
tion. The focus on region and place that characterizes much of southern
studies could certainly serve to ground contemporary theory’s general-
izations and abstractions, allowing one to test the claims of theory in a
site-specific frame. The best of southern studies pays careful attention to
detail, to the specific terrain of the local, illustrating a real engagement
with things southern and marking a useful turn to the empirical. Further-
more, the degree to which southern studies usually avoids a highly jargon-
based language could provide a model for a cultural theory that strives for
a less alienating prose.
Southern studies, for its part, could also profit from an encounter with
contemporary critical theory, particularly when one broaches the junc-
tures where the regional meets the world beyond it, or where multiple
versions of one region collide. Southern sociologist John Shelton Reed
writes in the introduction to his One South: An Ethnic Approach to Regional
Culture that his book will devote ‘‘little attention . . . to variation within
the South . . . ; to the ways it is becoming more like the rest of the coun-
try; . . . to the ‘many Souths’ that unquestionably exist,’’ and this approach
is not unlike much of southern studies.5 Though southern studies is by no
means a unified or monolithic category, a tendency prevails within the
field to preserve the South, that is, to focus on those elements that unify the
region rather than to pursue it in relation to national or global contexts.
Such an approach always runs the risk of fixing or freezing southern cul-
ture, often at its most stereotypical moments, even in work that seeks to
overturn these very stereotypes (as subsequent chapters will suggest). This
process tends to impose a stasis or unity on the South, a regional logic that
historian Nell Irvin Painter characterizes as ‘‘ ‘the South’ way of thinking.’’
For Painter, ‘‘there is seldom a [single] ‘the South,’ for simple charac-
terizations eliminate the reality of sharp conflicts over just about every-
thing in Southern culture.’’ 6 Southern studies sometimes ‘‘boutiques’’ the
South, focusing on the unique or colorful elements of the region—such
as culinary habits or speech peculiarities or southern hospitality—with-
out contextualizing these elements in relation to one another or to wider
cultures. A good example of this packaging of the South can be found in
the brochure advertising the Center for the Study of Southern Culture’s
‘‘A Mississippi Voyage.’’ The cssc is a scholarly institute affiliated with the
University of Mississippi and regularly hosts a variety of lively academic
and nonacademic events exploring southern culture, including the one
promoted in this flyer. ‘‘A Mississippi Voyage’’ was a nine-day riverboat
tour of the region designed for ‘‘those for whom the South has always
held a special fascination.’’ For customers with $1,995 to $3,550 to spend,
‘‘the excitement of personally reliving the southern experience’’ and ‘‘the
beauty of antebellum Louisiana’’ were within easy reach. At its worst,
this trajectory can resemble what bell hooks (following Renato Rosaldo)
calls ‘‘imperialist nostalgia,’’ in which ‘‘even politically progressive North
American audiences have enjoyed the elegance of manners governing re-
lations of dominance and subordination.’’ 7 Nostalgia in and of itself is not
a bad thing, for it can function as a wedge to introduce a critical distance
into cultural practices and cultural theory. But the nostalgia that often

tinges southern studies and southern culture is only rarely concerned with
moving forward and with positively reconstructing the past. Throughout
this study, I take the nostalgia that flavors many accounts of the South to
task, asking in whose service such a sentiment finally plays. My aim is to
discern when such a sentiment enables mobility or revisioning rather than
(often mournful) reaction and stasis, underwriting a white racial melan-
cholia.8
We need a reconstruction of southern studies, a study of the South that
can shake us free from those tired old clichés of southernness, taking up the
work of cultural studies and poststructuralist theory without abandon-
ing an appreciation of the specificities of place. Southern studies can seek
out livelier, less nostalgic Souths, challenging a monolithic portrait of the
region, even while recognizing the validity of views of the South as con-
servative, anti-intellectual, impervious to change, and racist. Throughout
the twentieth century, a diverse array of southerners have sketched the
contours of a southern subject who has little truck with the familiar fig-
ures of southern mythologies, structuring the space for a new southern
identity. How can southern studies help us retrieve this past and deploy it
to new ends?
Work by scholars such as Tera Hunter, Glenda Gilmore, Patricia Yaeger,
Elizabeth Young, Grace Hale, Judith Jackson Fossett, Elsa Barkley Brown,
Nell Irvin Painter, and Bruce Brasell points the way. In the years since I
began this project, the contours of an emergent strand of southern studies
have begun to take shape. The best of this work transforms broad theories
via the precision of the local while also taking earlier modes of southern
studies to task. Scholarship on the history of black women’s lives in the
South yields particularly rich insights. Foregrounding race and gender in
the crucible of place revamps the work of theory. Patricia Yaeger writes
that ‘‘southern studies is now marginalized . . . in the academy,’’ largely re-
garded as obsolete and out of touch with contemporary research, and pro-
poses shaking up the categories that the field has long held sacred.9 There is
still much to be learned from studying the South and from bringing these
studies into productive alliances and tensions with cultural studies, post-
structuralism, postcolonialism, and feminist theory. For instance, what
might southern studies learn from expanding its field of vision beyond,
say, the blues, to encompass the emergent forms of southern hip-hop that
have taken the United States and the world by storm? There is room for
much more than The Encyclopedia of Southern Culture in the halls of southern
studies, as weighty as that tome may be. Reconstructing Dixie steers clear
of many of the canonical figures of southern studies, including Faulkner,
Welty, O’Connor, and also Cash and Woodward. Although useful insights
might still be gleaned by reading these works against the grain, we must
also turn to other southern moments, some familiar, others less so. This is
necessary in order to shake representations of the South (including schol-
arly ones) free from a possessive investment in a version of southernness
that makes it hard to account for other Souths. Put simply, we need a
southern studies that is not only for white southerners.
One might wonder why we should study the South at all, particularly
when the academy is on to much sexier topics. Why revisit these old char-
acters as they’re recostumed for contemporary consumption? Precisely
because myths and narrative impact the real, shaping not only personal
memory and perception but also our public and ‘‘official’’ histories. Mu-
seums, battlefields, and plantation homes stage sites at which the real and
the mythic collide, and representations mediate how we know the places
we inhabit. Reconstructing Dixie maintains that the mythic has also impacted
our conceptualization of academic history, our scholarly understandings
of the South. Studying the role of the South in the national imaginary and
in the works of individual southerners illuminates the role of the imagi-
nation in social life, mining the links between imagination and represen-
tation. Culture and representation become nodes in ‘‘which active links
are made between signifying practices and social structure.’’ 10 Such social
structures might be structures of dominance, but modes of cultural ex-
pression can also open the space for imagining other ways of being south-
ern. We can read familiar figures of southernness, particularly the south-
ern lady, as powerful cultural assemblages, assemblages that often serve to
make new modes of southernness more difficult to envision. Yet even the
figure of the southern lady sometimes hints at other linkages, suggesting
the contours of a desire for cross-racial alliance that might be mobilized
differently. The history of the South also points to the ways in which black
women have deployed the lady, recognizing her limits but also moving us
elsewhere. When pressured, many of the texts I consider reveal a nostal-
gic longing for familiar modes of southernness; others begin to point the
way toward alternative modes of being, both personally and collectively.
Some display a yearning for collectivity or racial unity that gets tripped
up by a lingering investment in whiteness or a narcissistic absorption in
the seductions of guilt; others seek to escape the limits of southern iden-

tity without fully coming to terms with the racial dimensions of the self.
And a few come closer to understanding and articulating new models of
southern subjectivity, fashioning new Souths.
g O N M E D I A - M A D E D I X I E , O R J E S S E H E L M S G O E S TO M E X I C O
Old and new images of the South continue to collide in popular represen-
tations. The spring 1996 television season saw the introduction of yet an-
other Aaron Spelling–produced nighttime soap opera, Savannah, a weekly
drama that opened with the return of an expatriate southerner, a twenty-
something female reporter, from New York City to Savannah for the wed-
ding of a close friend. Owing to a string of soaplike mishaps, this budding
journalist decides to remain in Georgia, and the various plotlines of the
series trace the trials and tribulations of the young woman and her girl-
friends. It would be easy to argue that the role of the South in this series
is largely nominal and that Savannah, much like Spelling’s Melrose Place or
Beverly Hills, 90210, limits its concern with the specificity of place to a care-
fully edited title sequence. Yet the generic quality of television’s ‘‘place
shows’’ is not total.
First, the mise-en-scène of southernness that the show carefully (if
stereotypically) constructs allows the series to distinguish itself from simi-
lar fare via a distinct local flavor. Here television operates much like con-
temporary tourism, where, in the words of Morley and Robins, ‘‘there is a
premium on difference and particularity. In a world where differences are
being erased, the commodification of place is about creating distinct place-
identities’’ (119). Paradoxically, the specificity of place structures a com-
petitive edge for a wide, increasingly homogenized global market. Second,
Savannah does not reference a totally generic or stereotypical South; in-
stead, the South it images is the South enabled by global capitalism, the
post-1960s South of economic prosperity, growth, and Ted Turner. Much
of the action of the series revolves around two quintessential sites of south-
ernness, the plantation home and the riverboat, though here these images
are unfixed from their original ties to agricultural economies and refig-
ured as centers of international capitalism, particularly since the river-
boat in the South and in Savannah is now a prime location of one of the
region’s new tourist industries, the casino.11 Both this growing industry
and Spelling’s drama highlight the degree to which specificity and stereo-
type interweave, suggesting the difficulty of isolating ‘‘pure’’ examples of
regional authenticity.
The steamboat reemerges as a
late-twentieth-century site of
southernness in tour packages and
riverboat gambling, as well as in a
television series like Aaron Spelling’s
Savannah. This brochure promises a
‘‘simple authenticity’’ and a glimpse
into ‘‘the Golden Age’’ of Louisiana’s
antebellum period, a view of the past
that must necessarily repress the
memory and legacies of slavery.
I do not want to offer a prolonged reading of Savannah here, but I do

hope that this series, together with my snapshot of the House of Blues,
illustrates both the complex interweavings of the local and the global and
the ways in which a region’s symbolic boundaries are not necessarily de-
pendent on its physical contours. Just as the workings of international
capital finance the casino riverboats that now package local hospitality for
global tourists, so Spelling’s version of the South sells a story of a new,
revitalized, yet still-charming South to television’s viewership.
During the 1970s, the South became a center of growth and eco-
nomic expansion, attracting new industry and stimulating urban growth
by means of a variety of factors including its lower cost of living, im-
proved consumer services, changing racial attitudes, and the spread of air-
conditioning.12 Equally important were the South’s weak labor unions and

right-to-work policies, its cheap labor force, and a widespread campaign
of image-building boosterism by southern cities. Though this growth
brought many benefits to the region, some commentators predicted that
in our increasingly ‘‘global’’ world, the South as a unique spot would cease
to exist and that popular images of the South’s plantation past would van-
ish. For example, in the closing pages of his 1978 study Media-Made Dixie,
Jack Temple Kirby predicts that a search for unique traits of southernness
‘‘in a decade would reveal finally the demise of Dixie. . . . Anyone inclined
toward resuscitation shall have considerable difficulty reviving the Grand
Old South from now on.’’ 13 This prognosis follows Kirby’s tracking of the
shifting images of the South within the national imaginary (and the na-
tional media) from Reconstruction through the early 1970s and is largely
based on two premises. First, he maintains that ‘‘neoabolitionist profes-
sional and popular history’’ as well as media representations of a ‘‘devilish’’
South during the 1960s ‘‘tarnished the sentimentalist image of the planta-
tion and slavery beyond recovery’’ (166). Second, he cites the increasing
urbanization of the South as a homogenizing influence, claiming that the
South, in its ‘‘neonization,’’ has become dull in its similarity to the nation
as a whole (160).
Perhaps, to a degree, Kirby is right. The South has changed. Economi-
cally and culturally, the South fully participates in a global economy that
might easily blunt the registers of difference that once defined the region.
The titans of international commerce have come home to Dixie: Mem-
phis, Tennessee, reigns as the world’s largest air cargo hub, and Federal
Express, Saturn, and Nissan are certainly more crucial to the state’s econ-
omy than are the Grand Ole Opry, Graceland, and Dollywood. Alabama
counts Mercedes and Honda among its new corporate citizens, and South
Carolina attracted more industry in the past decade than any other U.S.
state. Capital investment in the South exceeds that in all other regions.14
Interstate 85, a main transportation artery in the region, garnered the
nickname ‘‘the Autobahn,’’ reflecting the wealth of German automakers
along its stretch. Job growth in urban districts in the South outstrips the
pace in urban districts nationwide, and the once-looming difference in re-
gional per capita income has nearly vanished. Tiny La Grange, Georgia,
was crowned ‘‘Intelligent City of the Year 2000’’ by the World Teleport
Association, the ‘‘premier international award’’ presented to a community
that ‘‘understands technology and its role in the global economy.’’ (The in-
augural 1999 award went to Singapore.) A spate of recent studies predicts
that the South, once perceived as hopelessly backward, will create more
high-tech jobs than any other region of the country in the next few years.
It already orders more take-out fast food.
The new millennium began with southerners in the White House,
southerners at the helm in Congress, and two southerners battling it out in
the presidential race. Selma, Alabama, seared into American memory for
its brutal resistance to integration, began the twenty-first century with
black fire and police chiefs and a city council comprising fifteen African
Americans and four whites. Population flows during the past two years
have consistently boosted the region’s size, and the South claimed six of
the ten fastest-growing U.S. cities in the 1990s. African Americans have
returned to the South at a rate of nearly 100,000 per year during the past
twenty years: Atlanta alone gained 160,000 blacks between 1990 and 1996,
and more than half of the African American population lives in the South-
east, a steadily increasing percentage. From 1990 to 2000, the number of
people of Asian or Latin American origin in the area increased by almost
175 percent; several small Gulf Coast towns now boast the highest per-
centage of Vietnamese citizens of any city nationwide. The 2000 Census
reports an increase in Mississippi’s Latino population of almost 150 per-
cent, and Georgia’s Latino population increased by 329 percent during
the 1990s. The percentage of Latino students in Atlanta’s public schools
has risen to 41 percent since 1991. Predictions indicate that North Caro-
lina will soon be home to the fourth largest number of Latino migrant
workers. Still, the total number of nonblack minorities in the region is
relatively small. The South remains mostly black and white.
Some aspects of Southern living have been more resistant to change.
The area consistently has the country’s weakest minimum-wage laws.
The region still leads the nation in poor educational performance. Forty
percent of Americans without high school diplomas reside in the South,
double the average in other areas. The Southeast still trails other districts
on the federal government’s National Assessment of Education Progress
tests. Of southern states, only North Carolina meets the nation’s reading
proficiency average for fourth- and eighth-grade reading. More than one-
quarter of Georgia’s preschoolers live in poverty, and Memphis’s poverty
rate in 1999 was 18.1 percent. The South also continues its long tradi-
tion of violence, with the region’s murder rate almost double that of the
Northeast. The former states of the Old Confederacy all rank in the top
twenty states for homicide, led by my home state, Louisiana. And although
minorities have made progress on Dixie’s political front, exerting some
influence in local and sometimes state offices, their inroads into federal

and most statewide offices have been quite limited.15 New immigrants are
also getting a taste of the lingering Jim Crow politics of the region, as one
Alabama county recently assessed higher property taxes for non–English
speakers, and the state passed a 1990 constitutional amendment declar-
ing English ‘‘the official language’’ of Alabama. Various Georgia communi-
ties have recently enacted their own ‘‘English only’’ ordinances, and some
counties have begun using obscure old laws in order to arrest Latino day
laborers, the same laborers who have facilitated an enormous building
surge in the area. Spring 2001 saw Senator Jesse Helms traveling to Mexico,
a country he has long criticized; under the guise of immigration reform,
Helms and other senators seem intent on reviving the deadly bracero pro-
gram of the mid–twentieth century.16
Despite the unevenness of change and the unequal distribution of the
region’s new resources among its population, the South still looks more
like the rest of America than it did at the turn of the previous century. Have
Kirby’s predictions about the demise of dear ole Dixie in the American
imagination also come true? Hardly. Kirby’s work highlights the inher-
ent difficulties involved with seeking to forecast the future; within two
decades of his warning, Dixie’s role in the national imagination had not
waned. In fact, a whole crop of ‘‘new Old South’’ images, of which Savannah
is but one example, arose to supplant the ‘‘country cousin’’ representa-
tions of Dixie that Kirby noted as being prevalent in the 1960s and 1970s.
As a recent news article notes, the region’s ‘‘air of mystery, magnolias,
and moonlight constantly intrigues even on the cusp of the 21st century.’’ 17
Reconstructing Dixie seeks to understand this appeal.
The 1980s and early 1990s saw countless television reruns of Gone with
the Wind (with record audiences), the theatrical rerelease of the film, nego-
tiations for and release of the sequel Scarlett, at least six broadcast mini-
series based on romantic interpretations of the plantation myth, several
new television series set in a contemporary yet gentrified southern set-
ting (including Designing Women, Evening Shade, Matlock, Golden Girls, Empty
Nest, and In the Heat of the Night, to name a few), and a plethora of Holly-
wood movies offering up this ‘‘kinder, gentler’’ version of the South (The
Miss Firecracker Contest, Steel Magnolias, Crimes of the Heart, Everybody’s All-
American, Blaze, Heart of Dixie, Shag, Driving Miss Daisy, Fried Green Tomatoes,
and the independent Sex, Lies, and Videotape, among others). These decades
also marked a renewed interest in the iconography of Gone with the Wind,
particularly in Atlanta, where the Road to Tara museum opened and plans
for a Gone with the Wind theme park were announced.18 Of course, these
recent representations of the South are not all equivalent, and they trade
on familiar images of the bygone South in different ways. They frame ide-
ologies of race, place, and gender along a varied register, and some that
might be labeled ‘‘progressive’’ (like the TV series I’ll Fly Away, Any Day Now,
and Frank’s Place) rest side by side with other, more reactionary depictions.
Moreover, many of these images are replete with internal contradictions,
too ambivalent or ambiguous to be easily ordained ‘‘Left’’ or ‘‘Right,’’ sug-
gesting that the South’s role as a symbol for the national imagination is
not a fixed or static one, even within a single film or series.19 The South—
at least since the abolition movement—has long played a variety of roles
within national mythmaking, alternating between (if not simultaneously
representing) the moral other and the moral center of U.S. society, both
keeper of its darkest secrets and former site of a ‘‘grand yet lost’’ civili-
zation, the site of both church bombings and good, old-fashioned family
values.
Still, taken as a whole, the representations of the past two decades I
have noted do signal a discernible shift from the images Kirby ascribes
to the 1960s and 1970s, a shift announcing that Dixie has not died. And
though Kirby does not suggest it, the images of twenty to thirty years ago
echo another moment in the national depiction of the South, that preva-
lent during Reconstruction, when, as Kirby notes, ‘‘the pervasive image
of the South was negative’’ (1). By the 1890s, this darkly negative portrait
of the South had largely been recast in more magnolia-hued tones, as Lost
Cause ideologies paved the way for the pro-Confederate productions of the
Dunning School historians and of popular novelists like Thomas Page.20
This plantation myth served the needs of the nation as well as those of
the South by representing the region, in the words of literary critic Eric
Sundquist, as one full of ‘‘benevolent white employers and happy, sub-
servient black laborers,’’ thus setting the stage for the North’s industrial
investments in Dixie.21 A variety of cultural critics from activist-professor
Angela Davis to historian David Roediger have recently pointed out the
similarities between our current political climate and the period follow-
ing Reconstruction, highlighting the rampant undermining of civil rights
gains characteristic of each of these moments.22
Although less commented on, it is also the case that the South under-
went a comparable improvement of its image during these two periods,
suggesting that figurations of the region serve as a symbolic battleground
in national reactions to issues of race and racial (in)justice. As the nation
struggled to reconstitute itself after the Civil War, a consensual fantasy of

the ‘‘grand old South’’ swept through white America, setting the stage for
overturning the civil rights advances of the postwar moment. Similarly,
certain nostalgic representations of the South during the 1980s were facili-
tated by (while also helping to sustain) a national political climate in which
the rollback of the gains of the Civil Rights movement was both possible
and sadly unsurprising. This newly burnished image of the South was also
central to the successful courtship between the region and the titans of
international corporate commerce. To participate fully in the emerging
global economy, the post–Civil Rights South required an image make-
over, and a detour through the Old South helped displace the memories
of Selma at precisely the moment when the country began to dismantle
recent civil rights legislation. This emergence of a new ‘‘Old South’’ co-
incides both with the political agendas of the Reagan-Bush years and with
the economic pressures of late capitalism, reinscribing the region as a site
of authenticity and the local at the very moment that globalization blurs
the boundaries of the nation. Through these processes, the Old South lost
its quality as an index of a particular place in time and was redeployed as a
trope for lost grandeur and gentility. In this way, the South is decentered in
its specificity, loosened from particular moorings. There is no pure South
now—indeed, there never was—so specific understandings of how the
South is represented, commodified, and packaged become key. There is
no simple ‘‘correct’’ representation of the South, a single South, but that
is not to say that all versions of the South are equal or that the critique
of some versions is not a legitimate activity. We need to hold particular
images accountable and think through their complex relations to a politics
of accountability.
To claim that the closing decades of the nineteenth and twentieth cen-
turies bear real similarities is not to argue that the two periods are identical
or that important differences do not exist between their separate mobili-
zations of a mythic Old South for conservative ends. In fact, this project
is less concerned with linking these two eras or with cataloging various
images of the South in the twentieth century than it is with investigating
paradigmatic moments in which the South serves as a point of condensa-
tion for various regional and national narratives of place, race, and gender.
Thus, in interrogating changing representations of the region, I am not so
much interested in fixing a concrete historical truth of the South as I am in
tracking its popular and emotive legacy and in asking what we, as a nation,
continue to make of the South today. How are these representations laced
through and through with specific conceptualizations of race and gender?
How does the South move from abstraction to specific currency, a cur-
rency that hails Americans in particular ways? How do these narratives of
the South and southernness cohere, more often than not, around certain
stock figures, including homeplace, hospitality, and the southern (white)
lady? How might we access alternative Souths, mobilizing different his-
tories less drenched in nostalgia and white racial melancholia? What les-
sons might we learn from these Souths about cross-racial alliance, possible
politics, and the relationship of tradition to change?
g D I X I E , A F T E R A L L , I S A WO M A N ’ S N A M E
Reconstructing Dixie repeatedly returns to the southern lady as a central
player in the aggrandizement of Dixie, a figure who, along with her
younger counterpart, the belle, served as the linchpin of nineteenth-
century revisionist versions of the Old South, in which the Lost Cause ide-
ology of southern nationalism conveniently fused the figure of the southern
lady onto a celebration of the rebirth of a ‘‘nation’’ defeated. The South,
responding to its own feminized position vis-à-vis the North—a femini-
zation that was both literal, owing to the loss of a large portion of the male
population, and figurative, given the South’s status as defeated—turned to
a hyperfeminized figure of the southern woman as discursive symbol for
the region, with the land itself being figured as feminine as well.23 The myth
of the southern lady (which is no less powerful for its status as a fiction) is
central to southern culture, and as literary critic Nina Baym notes, ‘‘south-
ern women, [as] embodiment of [the] graces [of the region], are what the
South as a whole has cultivated; they are Southern culture.’’ 24 Nonethe-
less the emergence of the southern lady as a critical circuit of cultural
meaning for both the South and the nation during the late nineteenth cen-
tury smooths over a complex and contested history. In Mothers of Invention,
Drew Gilpin Faust details the intricate machinations by which elite white
women came to terms with their experiences of the Civil War, forging
new entry routes into the public sphere while simultaneously holding on
to the trappings of the lady. If the patriarchal culture of the postwar South
deployed the figure of the southern lady to discipline both white women
who were enjoying the new freedoms born of wartime and the freed slaves
claiming space and rights in the public realm, many white southern women
were finally unwilling to question white privilege, buying into a return
to the pedestal on which southern femininity was popularly situated. As
Faust notes, these white women were ‘‘inventing new selves erected firmly

upon the elitist assumptions of the old’’ (254). Black women marshaled
the figure of the lady into more imaginative formations, alternately laying
claim to the rights of ladyhood and acting out against the rigid world of
southern manners over which the ‘‘lady’’ presided. Such histories suggest
that the cultural negotiations over womanhood and its meanings are never
complete.
If the figure of the southern woman had its origins in post–Civil War
society, it is no less powerful today and remains a key image around which
other discourses of the South congeal. Still, this image is neither fixed
nor singular, neither entirely woman formed nor woman forming. Recon-
structing Dixie isolates key moments in which the tropes of southern femi-
ninity can be made to yield up the web of other discourses, particularly
discourses of race, region, and gender, that they hold together. I use femi-
ninity as a lens through which other fault lines in southern culture—lines
the South has frequently concealed behind hoopskirted womanliness—
can be traced and pursue the moments of femininity that can be unpacked
to throw the relationships of race, gender, and region into relief. Such
an understanding of southern femininity as a genealogy rather than as a
catalog can also point the way to a more complex understanding of the re-
lationship of southern femininity to masculinity, feminism, and feminist
theory.
For instance, refracting feminist theory through a southern lens can
help resolve the historically vexed relationship between feminism and
femininity. In her 1984 tract Femininity, Susan Brownmiller writes that she
does not intend her volume as ‘‘a wholesale damnation [of femininity].
Femininity deserves some hard reckoning’’ (6). I intend this project to also
‘‘reckon hard’’ with femininity, particularly as Brownmiller’s text was rela-
tively unsuccessful in avoiding a ‘‘wholesale damnation’’ of femininity and
is in many ways characteristic of early second-wave feminist work on femi-
ninity. There femininity slid into discussions of fashion and beauty, with
all three terms posed as oppositional to feminism. This work had strong
moral overtones, and women who were traditionally feminine were seen
as either overly narcissistic or as victims of false consciousness.25
Soon feminists moved to counter such a position, largely because it did
little to help us understand how and why femininity and its representa-
tions took hold and proliferated. One method of challenging the view of
femininity as oppressive simply flipped the value of the term, declaring
instead that femininity was liberatory or transgressive. The most useful
approaches to the difficult terrain of femininity generally fell somewhere
between these two poles, turning to specific histories or to psychoanaly-
sis in their attempts to explain women’s investments in femininity. These
conceptualizations, at their best, moved away from seeing femininity as
‘‘good’’ or ‘‘bad,’’ ‘‘oppressive’’ or ‘‘subversive,’’ and instead attempted to
get at the problematics of femininity as constitutive of a whole complex
of social and psychic transformations. Here femininity was read both as
shaped by women and as shaping women, a formulation that my deploy-
ment of femininity reasserts. Although I want to refrain from offering a
concise definition of femininity (precisely because such a fixing of the term
is finally impossible), I do view femininity as a set of ideas about appro-
priate womanly behavior and feelings that are generally based on cultural
assumptions about female nature.26 As such, ‘‘femininity’’ is a social and
discursive construction that nonetheless has real material effects.
Central to constructions of southern femininity is a notion of masquer-
ade or performance, which has also been a key issue in contemporary femi-
nist theory, particularly feminist film theory as it builds on the insights
of psychoanalyst Joan Riviere. Although the move toward masquerade as
a theoretical paradigm to enrich feminist positions on spectatorship has
been the most prevalent use of the trope in feminist film theory, there has
been throughout this work (particularly in the germinal essay by Mary Ann
Doane) a slippage between the spectator’s masquerade and the character’s
masquerade. My own use of the term is primarily concerned with repre-
sentations of masquerade in texts by and about women, particularly to the
degree they highlight masquerade as a performative strategy, and also with
the possibilities of reclaiming strategies of masquerade (in representation
and in ‘‘real’’ life) for feminism in a southern frame.
In her 1929 essay ‘‘Womanliness as a Masquerade,’’ Riviere structures
an equation between femininity/womanliness and masquerade, writing
that ‘‘the reader may ask how I define womanliness or where I draw the
line between genuine womanliness and the masquerade. . . . they are the
same thing’’ (38). In Doane’s analysis, such a formulation of femininity ren-
ders it ‘‘in actuality non-existent’’ because ‘‘it makes femininity dependent
upon masculinity for its very definition.’’ 27 For Doane, femininity as mas-
querade is both normal and, in the case of Riviere’s patient, pathological.
Such an understanding of normal or aberrant femininity as always a mas-
querade, a performance, echoes my own claim that femininity is a social
and discursive construction, and thus its contours are always sketched in
relation to other markers of difference. But Doane’s argument that this
approach makes femininity always dependent on, derivative of, mascu-

linity—while perhaps true of Riviere’s psychoanalytic model—enacts an
erasure of the other social relations against which femininity takes shape
and is performed. This is an important point, one that underscores the
limits of the psychoanalytic models deployed by both Riviere and Doane;
that is, to read femininity only as a performance (whether aberrant or nor-
mal, conscious or unconscious) of sexual difference is to render invisible
the degree to which femininity also indexes other markers of identity.
Riviere’s analysis of her female patient involves just such an erasure, as
Riviere is only able to read the woman’s performance of femininity as a
reaction-formation against the prohibited assumption of masculinity. Yet
within the text of her analysis, Riviere points out that her patient, who
exaggerates the gestures of womanliness, is a woman from the ‘‘Southern
States of America’’ who repeatedly had dreams and fantasies that ‘‘if a negro
came to attack her, she planned to defend herself by making him . . . make
love to her (ultimately so that she could then deliver him over to justice)’’
(37). That the patient is a southern woman being attacked by a black man
is then dropped by Riviere, who goes on to read the dream as an expres-
sion of the woman’s fear of reprisal for having ‘‘killed mother and father’’
(38), a fear that leads her to then perform womanliness with a vengeance.
Although Riviere no doubt makes a case for her reading, a more compel-
ling analysis would account for the culturally specific racial dynamics at
work in her patient’s dreams. Such a reading would make it impossible to
position the black man as primarily an instrument of ‘‘the retribution of
the father’’; much more likely would be an interpretation that reads this
execution of an exaggerated femininity as a performance of racial as well
as sexual difference, particularly given the fact that Riviere’s patient came
of age in a region and era where ideologies of femininity were deployed
to prop up apartheid-like conditions. The landscape of the South in the
early twentieth century was certainly marked by the ‘‘strange fruit’’ of the
lynching campaigns that swept the region, murders often underwritten by
popular myths of the black male rapist preying on the fragile white south-
ern woman. These lynchings and events such as the Atlanta race riots of
1906 would surely have been familiar to the patient. Moreover, Riviere’s
work might help us to understand the regional valences of performances
of femininity. An ‘‘excessive’’ femininity is not news in Dixie, a fact that
receives much attention from many of the southerners I chronicle. Essen-
tially, Riviere’s reading (and much of the feminist psychoanalytic theory
that follows from it) posits femininity solely against masculinity and thus
cannot discern the racial or regional contours of the masquerade.28 One
goal of this project is to offer up a specific sociohistorical terrain within
which regional performances of femininity can be understood and theories
of masquerade can be tested.
In her study of the politics and pleasures of feminist camp, film histo-
rian Pamela Robertson Wojcik turns to an analysis of the class politics of
the 1930s, and more specifically to the film Gold Diggers of 1933, to suggest
how ‘‘women can use masquerade not only to disavow masculine power
but also to gain strategic access to power and privilege typically denied
them as women.’’ 29 Here Robertson distinguishes between masquerade
as disavowal of the possession of masculinity and masquerade as a sur-
vival strategy. In Riviere’s model, her patient’s assumption of womanliness
works at an unconscious level: Riviere notes that her patient is hardly
aware of her ‘‘coquetting’’ until ‘‘analysis made it manifest’’ (37). Although
Robertson does not foreground this, her reading shifts masquerade from
an unconscious strategy to a conscious, chosen one, which she then ex-
plores in relation to the possibility of female empowerment via various
deployments of camp. Finally, Robertson is unwilling to reify the meaning
of camp, preferring instead to see it as ‘‘complex and contradictory’’ and
often ‘‘deeply complicit with the dominant’’ (16). Throughout this project,
I approach southern femininity and its performance from a similar vantage
point, refusing to assign it a fixed value; instead, I place femininity along a
varied register of meaning depending on its contexts. Such a strategy helps
ground our understanding of the cultural work that femininity performs
within particular regional terrains.
Robertson is not wildly optimistic concerning the progressive political
value of camp, but she does make limited arguments for the viability of a
feminist camp. I am even less optimistic about the possibilities for a femi-
nist deployment of traditional southern femininity. My grandmother was
fond of the old southern adage ‘‘you can catch more flies with honey than
with vinegar,’’ highlighting the strategic artifice of southern femininity,
but femininity in the South is historically secured in very specific ways,
and simply revealing the constructedness of gender does not necessarily
render those constructions (or the other social relations they underwrite)
any less secure. Although putting on southern femininity, that is, playing
the belle or lady, may indeed function as a survival strategy (and one that
has certainly enabled access to the public sphere for many white women),
this survival often renders invisible other powerful social relations, par-
ticularly vis-à-vis race. This is not to say that to deploy femininity is to be
the victim of false consciousness, or to deny other historical uses of south-

ern femininity by women of color, for femininity in and of itself is not
inherently antifeminist. Rather, it is to assert that femininity, like race,
does not exist in a vacuum, and any deployment of it must take other re-
lations into account. Of course, femininity in the South does not have to
mean the traditional ideologies of southern womanhood that have long
held sway in Dixie; for many women, it may not. By paying close attention
to race and place, perhaps a new southern femininity can emerge, though
this will be a difficult task, as chapters 3 and 4 suggest. At the close of
her 1984 study, Brownmiller writes, ‘‘If one fact should be clear, it is that
femininity is used’’ (182). With that much, I can certainly agree.
g CRITICAL BLINDNESS AND LENTICULAR LOGICS

Hazel Carby’s work on early African American women novelists, Recon-
structing Womanhood, underscores that ‘‘we need more feminist work that
interrogates sexual ideologies for their racial specificity and acknowledges
whiteness, not just blackness, as a racialized categorization,’’ highlight-
ing the always racialized dimensions of the white southern lady.30 Critical
writings before and after Carby have insisted that race is not just a ‘‘black
thing,’’ and Reconstructing Dixie continues this project to decenter the ‘‘race
= black’’ binary that permeates much late-twentieth-century thought.31
Although it may seem all too obvious to say that whiteness exists in rela-
tion to blackness, there is real labor involved in training one’s eye (par-
ticularly the white eye) to discern these relationships and their changing
valences in different historical and geographic registers (as feminist work
on masquerade highlights). In Playing in the Dark, Toni Morrison uses the
analogy of the fishbowl to describe this difficult-to-achieve process of rec-
ognition, noting that ‘‘it is as if I had been looking at a fishbowl—the glide
and flick of the golden scales, . . . the tranquil bubbles traveling to the
surface—and then I saw the bowl, the structure that transparently (and
invisibly) permits the ordered life it contains to exist in the larger world.’’
She goes on to insist that is a ‘‘willful critical blindness’’ that allows us not
to see race (17–18). Perhaps one cause of the difficulty in discerning the
interrelations of our cultural constructions of race derives in part from
the changing trajectory of these images over time and space. Thus one of
the aims of this project is to suggest the differing ways in which the figure
of the white southern lady and other iconic southerners get cast against,
beside, or in front of various figures of blackness, highlighting some of the
myriad configurations these relationships have produced. To underscore
that this relationship changes is not to suggest that any connection can
exist at any time but rather to insist that what relationships are visible
is less a function of empirical fact or critical whimsy than of historical
process and shifting economies of the visibility of race. I focus here on
blackness, even as the South as a whole becomes less black and white,
because the black/white axis in southern culture remains so prominent.
Indeed, as Zillah Eisenstein has argued, despite racial and ethnic diversity
in the United States, ‘‘blackness is made the bedrock signifier of race and
racial hatred, and African-Americans stand in for the multirace threat.
Blackness, repressed in the mind’s eye, threads through the process of cre-
ating ‘others.’ ’’ This American obsession with blackness owes much to the
particularities of the South’s role in national history and culture.32
In chapter 1, I detail some of the ways in which the different econo-
mies of visibility that were prevalent in the 1930s and the 1990s structure
different representations of the relation of white and black femininity in
the novel Gone with the Wind and its sequel, Scarlett. To summarize, the
earlier novel in many ways foregrounds the interdependence of its images
of black and white femininity (though critics have rarely read it this way),
if only to insist on racial difference. Scarlett, on the other hand, attempts
a dismissal of black femininity, an erasure that denies the historical webs
that bound black and white southern women (and their representations)
together during the period in which the novel is set. These two modes
of representing racial difference, which might be labeled as ‘‘overt’’ ver-
sus ‘‘covert,’’ differ in that the former brings together figurations of racial
difference in order to fix the categories whereas the later enacts a sepa-
ration that nonetheless achieves a similar end.33 Although the two modes
are not entirely distinct historically and can coexist in any one era, this
covert strategy of representation is more prevalent in the present than it
was in the pre–Civil Rights era. Moreover, these representational modes
are complexly related to politics and to forms of racist practice, structur-
ing particular ways of feeling and acting southern that expand the scope
of the lenticular from a mere visual strategy to a way of organizing knowl-
edge about the world. Reconstructing Dixie explores the workings of these
two logics in various twentieth-century triangulations of race, place, and
gender, tracing the transit loops between ways of seeing and ways of know-
ing, although I move away from the term ‘‘covert’’ as a name for this more
recent logic, preferring instead to designate this frame of reference a ‘‘len-
ticular’’ one.
A lenticular image is composed when two separate images are inter-

laced or combined in a special way. This combined image is then viewed
via a unique type of lens, called a lenticular lens, which allows the viewer to
see only one of the two views at a time. Rotating the picture slightly brings
the second image into focus, displacing the first. The most familiar type of
this image is probably one of those thick, plastic-coated postcards I always
called ‘‘3-D’’ postcards.34 The coating on each card is actually a lenticular
lens, a device that makes viewing both images together nearly impossible.
I have a large collection of these cards, but the reason the phrase ‘‘lenticu-
lar logic’’ struck me as particularly apt for the racial economy of visibility
I earlier denoted ‘‘covert’’ derives from a card I saw a few years ago while
in Mississippi doing research for this project. This particular card, which
was posted on a store wall but was not for sale, most often depicted—that
is, its primary image was—an antebellum mansion on the scale of Tara
complete with a hoopskirted young lady in the foreground, much like the
opening images of the film Gone with the Wind. However, when the card
was rotated or the viewer shifted, this vision of symbolic southern archi-
tecture and femininity was replaced by a stereotypical image of a grinning,
portly mammy. As critics, we can read these two images (and the connec-
tions between them) in a variety of ways, but the structural logic of the
card itself makes joining the two images within one view difficult if not
impossible, even as it conjoins them at a structural level. Like the fish-
bowl logic that Morrison identifies as prevalent today, a lenticular logic
is capable of representing both black and white; but one approaches the
limits of this logic when one attempts to understand how the images are
joined or related. Such a positioning naturalizes images and their possible
meanings, erasing context and connections. Unlike the image of the fish-
bowl, the term ‘‘lenticular’’ also shifts us away from a division between
form and content, container and contained, toward a more flexible model.
I prefer ‘‘lenticular’’ to ‘‘covert’’ because the first term allows one to
move away from an understanding of this logic as an always intentional
one, as strictly a sneaky practice of bad faith. Although racial images in the
late twentieth century can certainly derive from ill intent (one need only
recall the infamous Willie Horton ads of the elder George Bush’s presiden-
tial campaign), this logic is also often an unconscious or unrecognized one,
one of those economies of visibility produced at a specific historic junc-
ture, which can derive from multiple intentions ranging from the naive to
the insidious. The ‘‘additive’’ strategy of racial analysis in much contem-
porary critical theory, a mode that literary critic Robyn Wiegman calls
‘‘integrationist,’’ is one example of a lenticular logic, in which images of
race (and class and gender and sexuality; name your favorite) get tacked
onto an initial image or narrative, but without a framework that allows us
to understand the images or narratives in relation.35 Such a logic is at work
in tales like the one told in Ken Burns’s pbs special The Civil War, one sub-
ject of chapter 2. The television series Savannah deploys another version
of a lenticular narrative, a separatist one that freezes the image in its first
frame, thus erasing blackness from the South at precisely the historic mo-
ment when African Americans are for the first time returning to the South
at a rate faster than they are leaving it. The world of Spelling’s Savannah
is almost exclusively a white one, allowing the viewer to forget that the
service and tourist industry that the series’ riverboat symbolizes would,
in the ‘‘real’’ Savannah of 1996, be run on the labor of low-paid, mostly mi-
nority workers.36 In the words of scholar Michael Eric Dyson, Savannah’s
pretense ‘‘of colorlessness is actually an investment in whiteness.’’ Explor-
ing the varied economies of visibility that structure twentieth-century
representations of the South illustrates the degree to which the cultural
and material meanings of race in America are both definitive and shifting.
As such, Reconstructing Dixie is part of an ongoing project of antiessentialist
racial critique that investigates how race, an unstable category, gets fixed,
particularly in relation to gender, in specific landscapes and temporalities.
Put differently, this project explores how race is made via narrative and
image at precise moments in place and time.
The lenticular is a way of organizing the world; it structures repre-
sentation, but it also has larger moral and epistemological implications.
In post–Civil Rights America, the lenticular often serves to secure our
understandings of race in precise ways, fixating on sameness or difference
without allowing productive overlap or connection, forestalling doubled
vision and precluding alliance. Such a move limits our ability to see associa-
tion and relation or to articulate the workings of racism in the twenty-first
century. The lenticular restricts our descriptions of the places we inhabit
and of the people we meet, and we thus lack a compelling vocabulary
with which to talk publicly about race, racism, and difference, as well as
about their attendant emotional registers. Faced with racial complexity
or inequity, even well-meaning white southerners tend to clam up, often
unsure of what to say or afraid of saying the wrong thing. This silence is
facilitated by the lenticular. Think about the familiar southern admonition
to let sleeping dogs lie, a piece of local wisdom getting new play as recent
criminal trials stir up old racial troubles in the South. For instance, in the
media coverage of the trials of those responsible for the 1963 Birmingham

church bombing, many white citizens expressed a desire to let that past
remain in the past. There is an immobility at work here, a call to silence,
which illustrates the frozen and static terrain of the lenticular at work,
infecting everyday habits of thought and speech. The past is partitioned
from the present, black from white, old racism from new, creating a prob-
lem for the region and the nation. Reconstructing Dixie refuses this call to
silence, talking loudly about new ways of representing the South and new
methods of minding our manners.
g REPRESENTING POLITICS
A lenticular logic is often a separatist logic, as my discussion of the neo-
Confederate secessionist movement in chapter 2 details. These twenty-
first-century Confederates stage a new visibility for whiteness as an in-
jured, wronged, violated whiteness and also underscore the degree to
which we lack compelling narratives or theorizations of successful union.
This inability to think beyond separatism also permeates more ‘‘liberal’’
accounts of today’s South. The best-selling books Dixie Rising: How the South
Is Shaping American Values, Politics, and Culture (1996) and Confederates in the
Attic: Dispatches from an Unfinished Civil War (1998), authored by prominent
liberal journalists Peter Applebome and Tony Horwitz, offer up portraits
of a still racially separate South, but they frame their tales in such a way
as to suggest an equivalence between white and black separatism, over-
looking the historical ways in which white separatism has been supported
by state institutions and given access to, and power over, black bodies. In
many ways, Horwitz and Applebome reinscribe the separatist attitudes
about which they seem so dismayed by presenting current-day segrega-
tion as ‘‘simply the way it is,’’ something that all southerners (both black
and white) really want. Although the two authors hope for a South dif-
ferent from the one envisioned by former Georgia senator Newt Gingrich
or the neo-Confederates, the stories that Horwitz and Applebome pro-
vide of the South do little to challenge the vision of the region as racially
polarized—at least partially because neither pays much attention to his-
torical or contemporary figures who are struggling toward such a different
vision.37
Finally, Applebome takes the problem of the modern South to be a
problem of absolute, insurmountable difference, with black and white
existing in different registers, in different chapters, in fundamentally in-
compatible worlds. The work is tinged with white disillusionment over
the failure of 1960s politics as well as by an inability to imagine other
futures. It is a tone prevalent in many white southern memoirs of the post–
Civil Rights era, texts explored in chapter 4. What these texts share is a
logic of separatism that overrides possibility, a new spin on ‘‘separate but
equal.’’ This tone of disillusionment signals a failure in our critical imagi-
nations, a failure not necessarily delineated along color lines.38 It is also
a bankrupt and reactionary view, a view that willfully overlooks the de-
gree to which people of color in the South have always deployed a doubled
vision, understanding connection in both its prohibitions and its possibili-
ties. Further, it belies the reality of southern history and more than two
and a half centuries of incredible cross-racial intimacy and contact around
landscapes and spaces. Segregation masks the pleasures whites derived
from mastering black others, a mastery tinged with desire. This perspec-
tive also neglects a small minor chord of southern history, those moments
of commonality, sameness, humanity, across racial lines. It is important
to recall this history, not because what a tiny percentage of white south-
erners achieved in the name of antiracism in any way approximates the
labor of black southerners toward that end, but because we need models
of commonality across difference, of shared traditions, of productive alli-
ance. Not just any form of togetherness will do. We need a sameness that
doesn’t constitute itself via the threat of otherness, a sameness that is mo-
bile, staging the possibility for agency and new subjectivities. For both the
neo-Confederates and Dixie Rising, southern blackness and southern white-
ness become pure categories of sameness that cannot intersect, rigid and
frozen in their essential difference. On these grounds, sameness easily re-
verts to southern whiteness. We need other, less intractable ways to figure
the relationship between identity and difference, sameness and otherness,
tradition and change.
Folklorist Charles Joyner begins this process in his exploration of the
‘‘shared traditions’’ among black and white southerners, noting that ‘‘cen-
tral to the richness of southern folk culture has been racial integration.
. . . the American South was multicultural from its beginnings.’’ 39 He
teases out the circuits of exchange between black and white southerners
in music, culinary habits, religion, and political practice, underscoring
mutual modes of influence, limning common ground. Joyner’s work is
limited by his disregard of structures of power, reflected in statements
like ‘‘black and white folk southerners recognized that they were in the
same boat’’ (25), and by a tendency to romanticize folk cultures as some-
how distinct from mass culture, but his research represents an interesting

riff on seeking common ground, for it expresses a desire for cross-racial
alliance, a desire Joyner can at least visualize, unlike Applebome. Joyner’s
most useful ideas emerge when he discusses tradition as a living thing and
when he details the possibilities for innovation within tradition. From a
very different academic and theoretical trajectory, Paul Gilroy talks about
the power of ‘‘nontraditional tradition,’’ an understanding of tradition that
moves beyond repetition toward growth and change, where ‘‘the same is
retained without needing to be reified’’ (129). Gilroy cites the example
of black musicians in the New World, building on, while also remaking,
notions of an African-derived identity. In a figure such as Bob Marley (and
in his legacies), Gilroy finds not African authenticity but a ‘‘transnational
image’’ that ‘‘invites one further round of speculation about the status of
identity and conflicting scales on which sameness, subjectivity, and soli-
darity can be imagined’’ (132). I am suggesting that in the South’s legacies,
we might also find productive terrains for envisioning solidarity.
The South has long been a ground for shared racial traditions despite
or perhaps because of the region’s often brutal deployment of the geome-
tries of power. The notion of innovation within tradition suggests a space
of possibility within the common ground of southern cultures. There has
never been a purely white or purely black South, though much political
energy and much blood has been spilled in the assertions that there were
and are such separate categories. This history of commonality is fraught
and difficult, but it does allow the chance to speak and act from some-
where specific, historically and geographically, as we try to articulate a
way to talk about being together, a more complex understanding of rela-
tional cultures and new designs for collective living. This is about an ethics
of both alliance and accountability, about what might be gained by see-
ing ‘‘how an understanding of one’s own particularity or identity might be
transformed as a result of a principled exposure to the claims of other-
ness.’’ 40 Shared traditions can become the ground for other connections—
ethical connections—forged in emotion, transforming emotion to action.
It is precisely from within the domain of representation that the diffi-
culties and possibilities of a politics of alliance begin to emerge. Many of
the texts I will survey are, despite their good intentions, locked into an
easy old-school liberal humanism, most recently packaged as multicultur-
alism. Attempts to bring black and white together in Ken Burns’s The Civil
War, Ross McElwee’s Sherman’s March, and the television sitcom Designing
Women fail because of their inability to sustain a true double vision, to see
a joining that respects both commonality and difference. This failure is
constitutive and, in the final analysis, total, for these texts can’t ‘‘get’’ race
precisely because of the lenticular logics by which they unfold. Still, some-
times in their excesses, sometimes in their margins, sometimes in their
rhetorical strategies, these texts do sometimes long for something else,
for other Souths. From these latent expressions, we might begin to build
up a repertoire that can adequately imagine commonality and mixture.
Other works explored in Reconstructing Dixie, particularly in chapter 4,
more clearly take up the search for modes of subjectivity that are not sim-
plistically locked into the familiar tropes of southernness, illustrating in-
stead mobility and process, refusing the stasis of stagnated tradition. This
movement proceeds beyond a fixed and binary opposition between iden-
tity politics and the politics of difference, recognizing that this tired debate
is a zero-sum game. In a culture that has all too often revolved around
policing purity and guarding against miscegenation, it is crucial to divorce
identity from sameness. We need to think of the South as a dialectic be-
tween tradition and change, a relationship in process, in flux, in move-
ment. We need models of southern mixedness less rooted in the abstrac-
tions of poststructuralism and the politics of difference and more rooted
in the learned lessons of everyday life in the South, a life that is not finally
reducible to the iconic status of certain southern symbols but is instead
fluid and changeable. I want tales from the South where white supremacy
and racism are not inevitable and impenetrable, though these tales may
not be easy ones to find; we need a creative imagining that brings different
people together to move the country’s political center. The history of black
activism and agency in the South offers one vibrant counterhistory. There
are likewise brief flashes of white antiracist agency, fleeting moments that
may offer up models for change, glimpses of productive union. The South
is not inextricably mired in a familiar version of its history. That matters.
g TOWA R D N U S O U T H S
In its pursuit of the relations between representation and strategies for
fashioning antiracist identities, Reconstructing Dixie explores the South as
a region in flux, under constant negotiation, constructed and defined as
much by its excessive performance as by its geographic borders.41 My
focus is largely contemporary, though I operate with an eye always turned
toward history via a vision that is a particularly southern one, for in the
South, as William Faulkner has written, ‘‘The past is never dead. It’s not
even past.’’ 42 I pivot my examinations of Dixie on certain stock figures

of southern history, though the intersections of these figures with those
marked by different configurations of race and class will also be traced,
as all these discursive southerners buttress one another, occupying inter-
twined histories. I also tease out the various paths by which discursive and
material conditions of southernness are connected, suggesting possibili-
ties for change. For instance, chapter 3 explores the ways in which the
trope of the lady shifts in response to both the second wave of feminism
and the new economic forces at work in the Sun Belt South. Chapter 4
highlights the ways in which the material experience of racial and class
difference influenced various women’s narrations of southern womanhood
and political practice, though the relation of rhetoric to materiality across
these writings is never a unilateral or fixed one.
This project brings together an eclectic array of resources, from litera-
ture to television to the World Wide Web. Chronologically, I begin in the
era of Gone with the Wind and move toward the present, with some chapters
(1 and 4) juxtaposing pre– and post–Civil Rights moments, and others
(2 and 3) focusing more fully on the recent past. The thematic concerns
of each chapter form a sort of chronological tour as well, moving from
images of the antebellum South to the Civil War South through the Sun
Belt South toward other alternative Souths. Most chapters pivot on ex-
aminations of southern femininity, but chapter 2 detours through regional
masculinity, linking southern ladies and gentlemen in wartime. Still, as
will be evident throughout, the ‘‘past’’ is a fluid term in Southern con-
sciousness, almost always seeping into and shaping the present. In that
way, this project, while not a history, interrogates the many roles the past
plays in more than seventy years of southern culture. Several concerns
bind the chapters together. First, each chapter delineates the complex im-
brications of gender, race, and history in representations of southernness,
particularly as they are ‘‘placed’’ or ‘‘sited,’’ exploring how place means and
how these meanings shift. This includes an attention to the consumption
of Dixie via tourism and an understanding that the South is a contested
site, doing varied work for the region, the nation, and the world. Next,
all the chapters map various modes of ‘‘southern feeling,’’ asking how our
understandings of the South encourage particular emotional registers. The
emotive power of the South is closely tied to a third interest that guides
this project: the relationship between representation and action. Put dif-
ferently, each chapter seeks to understand the ways in which certain modes
of imagining southernness get connected to stasis or mobility, action or
inaction, continuity or change. Ralph McGill wrote that ‘‘to be southern
is to suffer wonderful agony.’’ McGill’s southerners are white, but I don’t
believe suffering and agony are the only ways for white folks to think about
feeling southern. Emotions provide an orientation to the world, serving
as a key nexus between cultural and political paradigms, and I am inter-
ested in how certain southerners and certain texts have, while recognizing
suffering, narrated other possibilities.
Reconstructing Dixie surveys both mass-mediated and individually au-
thored texts, examining the degree to which both can serve to reinforce or
reconstruct familiar notions of southern identity. I am interested in both
mainstream histories and counterhistories, particularly in those specula-
tive fictions and accounts of activism that reimagine southern selves. The
logic of this study is not simply to rank mass-mediated representations
with their ‘‘other’’ along a vertical axis, thus declaring the former ‘‘retro-
grade’’ and the latter ‘‘progressive.’’ Producing a list of ‘‘good’’ or ‘‘bad’’
images is less my goal than is the attempt to discern how these ideologies
connect various understandings of gender, race, and region, trading in dif-
ferent emotions ranging from guilt to melancholia to anger, and suggesting
how these emotional registers might be mobilized to new ends. In pur-
suing the distinctions between works, I take several to task, recognizing
that they do shape popular perceptions and underwrite particular views
of place, gender, and race. I am also interested in the porous boundaries
between popular versions of the past and what we might call more ‘‘aca-
demic’’ histories, tracing where they converge. The constellations of texts
and practices examined in each chapter do, to a certain degree, produce
their own contexts and defining languages, operating via a logic of juxta-
position, as I strive in each chapter to highlight the constitutive elements
in each distinct moment of southernness.
One such figure of southernness might serve to illustrate the complex
relations of southern symbols and southern identities, drawing this intro-
duction to a close. The past ten years have witnessed a heated debate across
the South about the meaning of that tenacious icon popularly known as
the Confederate flag. Actually the Confederate battle flag, this banner has
come unmoored from its origins, functioning instead as a visible sign of
resistance to a changing South. For instance, the flag was added to the Mis-
sissippi state flag in the 1890s, a tangible marker of that decade’s embrace
of the politics of Jim Crow. Georgia added the familiar icon to its state flag
in 1956, visualizing the state’s resistance to integration. South Carolina
hoisted the flag over its capitol shortly after. The skirmishes over the ban-
ner’s meaning during the past decade illustrate the volatility of cultural

The new Georgia state flag compromise: reconfiguring the ‘‘Confederate flag’’ as part
of history. Courtesy of the office of the Georgia Secretary of State.
iconography. In January 2000, more than forty thousand primarily black

protesters converged in Columbia, South Carolina, demanding that that
state’s flag be removed from the capitol dome and highlighting an naacp
boycott of the state’s tourist-rich economy. Citing the notorious history
of the flag as a tool of white separatism and racism, opponents of the flag
insist that the banner can never serve as a viable symbol of a new South.
Proponents of the flag plead ‘‘southern heritage,’’ arguing that it represents
sacrifice, ancestry, and history. The South Carolina legislature did finally
remove the flag from the dome, resituating it on the capitol grounds. This
decision was less a moral choice than one encouraged by a consortium of
business interests, which recognized that the controversy might reconfig-
ure carefully staged representations of the new ‘‘new South,’’ recalling the
rampant negative images of the region during the Civil Rights era. The
naacp, unhappy with the compromise, continued its boycott.
More recently, the Georgia legislature effected its own compromise
in the design of its state banner: it features the state seal centered on a
blue field as well as small representations of all the flags that have flown
over the state capitol, repositioning the last flag and its Confederate ico-
nography as history. Spring 2001 saw a heated debate in Mississippi over
the status of that state flag, followed by a statewide vote that broke down
largely along racial lines. Despite the encouragement of the business com-
munity to ‘‘move on,’’ the (white) citizens of Mississippi voted to retain
their state banner.43 The move by both Georgia and South Carolina to re-
frame the controversial flag by legislative maneuver (versus Mississippi’s
popular vote) reflects the greater investment of nonsouthern capital in
those states (relative to Mississippi), as well as the appeal of their tourist
industries outside the region. (Mississippi’s Gulf Coast, known as the Red-
neck Riviera, attracts largely southern tourists.) Controversies over this
southern icon reveal the degree to which forces outside the South power-
fully shape the region, suggesting the importance of thinking of regions
as imaginative terrains that shift in space and time, shaped by relation-
ships beyond delimited borders. Regions are not homogeneous, and the
differences across regions are telling. Regions, as imagined places, extend
beyond their geographic borders, not only comprised of the mix of so-
cial and economic relations within but also in tension with those relations
outside. The identity of a place is always multiple, in flux, and change-
able, rather than fixed, unified, or stable. Such an understanding of place
is important, for it opens up new ways of thinking through place and the
articulations of place with notions of gender, race, and class, articulations
tied to notions of identity and difference. It also moves us away from a
binary logic that either overly privileges or unnecessarily vilifies notions
of place, allowing us to see places as always already relational. Thus we
can ask what it means to be ‘‘placed’’ in certain ways, what it means to be
from a certain place, and how we can be from a place in a variety of ways.
Reconstructing Dixie tracks the different ways that sense of place influ-
ences sense of self, for there are many ways of being southern. The chapters
that follow interrogate certain assumptions about the relations of place to
identity, favoring accounts that conceptualize place in its mobility. This
interrogation proceeds via a series of questions: In what ways does being
southern (of being of a place) intersect with being white, being a woman,
being guilty, or being angry? How does being southern condition how one
understands one’s home and its histories? Can southern places move us
elsewhere? A mobile view of place can help us to discern how places travel,
helping to explain the Confederate flags I see dotting the southern Cali-
fornia landscape.
The flag might seem endlessly locked in a fixed and binary circuit of
meaning if not for an imaginative repurposing of the iconic image by two
young African American men in Charleston. In 1993 Sherman Evans and
Angel Quintero reconstructed the rebel flag, casting it in the vibrant reds,

The clothing company NuSouth imaginatively reconstructs the rebel flag in the vibrant
reds, greens, and blacks of the African liberation movement. Photos courtesy of Sher-
man Evans, copyright NuSouth Inc.
greens, and blacks of the African liberation movement. Eventually this re-
tailored banner became the emblem for their clothing company, NuSouth
Apparel, an enterprise they position as a bottom-up response to the ap-
propriations of black culture by corporate commerce. Their creations
received national attention in 1994 when a black teenage girl in South
Carolina was expelled from school for wearing a T-shirt featuring the re-
tooled flag and the slogans ‘‘The future is Da Phlayva’’ and ‘‘The past is the
past.’’ As one journalist noted, ‘‘Evans and Quintero’s shop argues for flying
even more flags—slightly reconfigured ones, Africanized ones, capitalist
ones—and in the process, slowly broadening and then altering the mean-
ing of the premier symbol of the South.’’ 44 It would be easy to dismiss this
altered flag as so much commercial enterprise, as a selling of difference
as style, a commodification of black liberation struggles that domesticates
politics. Such accusations would be accurate, but there is something else at
work here, too, a new style of dissidence that meets corporate culture on
its own terrain, mixing up its terms. This new banner remains an intrigu-
ing cipher, selling a slightly altered form of difference: alliance as style.
The company’s Web page opens with a Flash animation in which the phrase
‘‘for the sons and daughters of former slaves’’ morphs into ‘‘for the sons
and daughters of former slave owners,’’ followed by ‘‘threads that connect
us; words that free us,’’ all dissolving into the NuSouth emblem. The main
page of the site at first appears to depict a Klansman, but closer inspection
reveals a black man in a hooded sweatshirt. The ‘‘History of the NuSouth’’
section details the philosophy of the company: ‘‘NuSouth tackles the age
old issue of racism between blacks and whites in America by integrating
two ‘opposing’ symbols. . . . NuSouth forces us to look at what makes us
uncomfortable. It awakens the mind. It generates energy, dialogue, deep
thought. It evolves as we evolve.’’ This is a boutiquing of the South with a
difference, moving us past the House of Blues.
Two impulses are at work here. First, NuSouth creatively reclaims the
South for African Americans, insisting that southern heritage extends be-
yond the imaginary borders of the region so carefully patrolled by the
neo-Confederates. Black labor built the South, and Evans and Quintero re-
claim that terrain. Second, and perhaps more importantly, NuSouth stages
a model of unity across difference, initiating an address to those in different
spaces below the Mason-Dixon line and beyond, calling them together.
As Quintero notes in an article featured on the Web site, ‘‘NuSouth is
for everyone. It’s not a black thing. It’s not a white thing. It’s common
sense.’’ In this ‘‘common sense,’’ we might read the contours of a kind of
in-between location that hints at an important doubled consciousness, a
self-awareness that transcends the politics of identity and points us toward
new Souths.

1.
RO M A N C I N G
THE SOUTH
A Tour of the Lady’s

Legacies, Academic and
Otherwise
g
Femininity, in essence,
is a romantic sentiment.
—Susan Brownmiller,
Femininity
The lenticular postcard described in the introduction juxtaposes the

southern belle or lady and the mammy, a positioning that is familiar from
a wide variety of sources from the novels of William Faulkner to films
such as Imitation of Life (1934) and its remake (1959). But the relationship
of white lady to black woman is not the only one the card depicts.1 It also
places the lady within the confines of the plantation home, reenacting a
spatial logic with a long and commonplace history in the region. If, as my
introduction maintains, the southern lady was a key image around which
the South constructed (and still constructs) its postbellum identity, this
lady was (and is) most often situated within a particular southern land-
scape. In fact, throughout southern literature and culture, southerners,
in the words of literary critic Diane Roberts, ‘‘extended their imagery of
the sacrosanct white lady . . . to the land itself.’’ 2 And on the ‘‘land itself’’
was, not surprisingly, none other than the plantation home, a place that
continues to be as central to representations of the South as the lady her-
self. This chapter tours a range of early- and late-twentieth-century texts,
tracking the interrelated trajectories of the southern lady and the planta-
tion home, intent on understanding their articulation of particular modes
of southernness and of specific racial logics. We will see that the south-
ern lady is not fixed in her meaning, endlessly circulating the same, but
neither is she easily mobilized toward more progressive modes of south-
ern feeling. Such a journey permits us to discern not only the background
figures that prop up the lady and her genteel home but also the very per-
meable boundaries between official and popular histories. Along the way,
we will discover a complex set of relations between black and white, past
and present, love and hate, relations that deploy a variety of strategies to
distance or work through the trauma of slavery and of contemporary race
relations. Finally, we will discern new structures of southern feeling, ex-
amining the latent desire for cross-racial alliance that informs a wide array
of Dixie’s documents.
We might begin our tour aboard a Grayline sightseeing bus, departing
from New Orleans for a seven-hour sojourn designed to let us ‘‘feel the
gentle breeze of Southern hospitality on a [trip] . . . back to the glory of
the Old South!’’ Alternately, we might choose to steam ‘‘up a lazy river’’
aboard a paddleboat, stopping to visit the plantations along Louisiana’s
River Road, ‘‘a most gratifying way to experience the past.’’ Such travels
need not be confined to south Louisiana. All over the South, ‘‘heritage’’
tourism has been enjoying a resurgence in popularity, fueled by the growth
of casino gambling and coastal recreation across the region, as well as by
dramatic increases in state tourism budgets. Throughout the past decade,
as American popular culture embraced a return to Old South imagery,
the southern tourism industry worked to counter, in the words of one
‘‘hospitality’’ publication, older ‘‘redneck images’’ with ‘‘bright spots’’ like
‘‘plantations and Civil War sites.’’ In Columbia, Tennessee, the Athenaeum
Rectory, a ‘‘unique’’ Moorish-Gothic antebellum home and girls’ school,
offers biannual ‘‘southern belle’’ courses. Teenage girls from around the
country dress in period costume and study ‘‘etiquette, penmanship, art,
music, dance, and the social graces.’’ Even Dolly Parton’s Dixie Stampede
Dinner Theater and Show moved away from its country-cousin, mountain
theme to ‘‘completely new scenes taking you back to [an earlier time as]
genteel beaus and beautiful belles in exquisite gowns bring to life romance
and pageantry from the past.’’ 3
Dixie’s thriving tourist industry provides crucial documents that illus-
trate the instrumental role that the plantation home and the southern lady
play in the selling of the South. One such tourist attraction is the biannual
Natchez Pilgrimage located in Natchez, Mississippi, an occasion hailed as
‘‘one of the top 100 [tourist] events in North America,’’ as well as ‘‘one of the
This 1990 Natchez Pilgrimage
brochure promises a Confeder-
ate pageant that will ‘‘transport
the audience to the days of long
ago.’’ The ‘‘local performers in
elaborate costumes,’’ along
with the tours of antique-filled
houses, help to create a mise-
en-scène of romantic southern-
ness that whitewashes the past.
top 20 events in the Southeast.’’ 4 This affair centers around a series of tours
of antebellum southern homes and a dance recital known as the ‘‘Confeder-
ate Pageant.’’ On the cover of the brochure for the 1990 Spring Pilgrimage
is a photograph of an elaborately dressed belle standing on a large porch
covered in lush foliage. She flirtatiously looks over her fan at a young man
in period costume who occupies the lower portion of the photo. The pam-
phlet’s last pages picture rows of dancing southern couples, hoopskirts
swirling, images drawn from the Confederate Pageant. The copy for these
pages ensures the tourist that this ‘‘brilliant’’ pageant ‘‘will transport the
Romancing the South 41

audience to the days of long ago . . . [to] that romantic era of the past.’’ The
interior of the pamphlet includes glossy photographs of thirty plantation
homes, all available via a variety of tour packages for ‘‘lovers of history
and the romantic traditions of the Old South.’’ The images of the homes
are thus structurally framed by figures of ‘‘gracious’’ southern femininity,
but it is not necessary to read between the lines to discern how lady and
landscape are linked. The brochure itself foregrounds that southern femi-
ninity and southern architecture are symbolically joined as it assures the
reader that ‘‘ladies in hoopskirts will welcome you to . . . these gracious,
time-mellowed dwellings [wherein] is enshrined the history of Natchez
County.’’ Southern mythology lives on where the belle meets the planta-
tion (and beyond).
In a similar vein, a booklet provided by the Mississippi Division of Tour-
ism Development calls on ‘‘graceful curved staircases, lush gardens, . . .
[and] the soft rustle of hoopskirts’’ to highlight the ‘‘idyllic aura of elegance
and grandeur . . . of an era that has assumed an almost mythical quality.’’
The brochure for Louisiana’s Great River Road Plantation Parade visu-
ally evokes a magnolia-drenched bodice ripper, collapsing belle, beau, and
plantation home within the billowing waves of the Confederate battle flag.
Its ‘‘river of riches’’ proves that ‘‘excellence withstands the test of time.’’
Of course, houses make good tourist sites, for the tourist needs some-
thing to look at, somewhere to be. Tourism is all about ‘‘making place’’
via intense and orchestrated marketing with a consciousness about the
spectacular. The ubiquitous brochure racks in hotel lobbies and visitors’
centers may appear incidental, unimportant, and ephemeral, but they sell
what one scholar has called ‘‘a comprehensive, abridged version of the [re-
gion’s] past.’’ 5
During December 2000 I toured several plantations along Louisiana’s
River Road, roaming from New Orleans into the countryside, interested
in what modes of address these excursions crafted for the tourist. At home
after home, tours focused loving attention on the architectural grandeur
and period furnishings of the mansions we moved through, encouraging
the visitor to, in the words of the Grayline pamphlet, listen ‘‘to the fas-
cinating history’’ of a bygone era’s wealthy lifestyles. Hoopskirted tour
guides and brochures alike stressed the authenticity of the objects on dis-
play, as well as the ‘‘spectacular’’ settings. In this relentless privileging
of authenticity, a select array of the material culture of the Old South
came to overshadow narratives of social relations, as objects displaced
most subjects. The ‘‘loveliness’’ of the homes became the overarching ratio-
Oak Alley’s brochure emphasizes
the role of the plantation venue
in creating a nostalgia for the
antebellum area, noting that the
visitor can ‘‘experience a bygone
era in the South’s most beautiful
setting.’’ A carefully orchestrated
backdrop of gentility helps mobi-
lize powerful fantasies about the
plantation past ‘‘when Southern
aristocracy ruled the land.’’ Gone
with the Wind and Scarlett also
depend on such nostalgic settings,
but race figures quite differently
across the two works.
nale for the tours, as the period’s interracial past disappeared along with
the history of slavery. My tour guide at Oak Alley repeatedly referred
to slaves as both ‘‘service boys’’ and ‘‘servants,’’ only mentioning slaves
near the end of an hour tour when she noted that the slave cabins had
once been located where the gift shop now stood. When describing the
home’s ‘‘authentic’’ and lavish holiday decorations, she often detailed the
labors of the lady of the house, noting how busy the plantation mistress
would have been at Christmastime, again displacing slave labor as inte-
gral to the plantation household. During these explorations, the visiting
tourist is powerfully positioned within a southern mise-en-scène of imag-
ined hospitality, an immersive experience underwritten both by the man-
sions’ high ceilings, ornate furnishings, and lush garden settings and by the

erasure of slavery, an address structured for the white (and, increasingly,
the Japanese) tourist. Strolling down Oak Alley’s magnificent tree-lined
path toward the veranda, the unsuspecting visitor is swept into a stage set
ripe for fantasy, creating a powerful scene for the projection of romance
and structuring a sort of mobility through an imagined space of history.
This fantasy unfolds in an isolated temporal zone narrativized as separate
in time, a lost era sometime before the ‘‘conflict,’’ but an oddly white one.
Within these sets, slaves exist largely as open secrets, ghost presences kept
at bay lest they disrupt the tranquil atmosphere of gentility and grandeur,
disturbing the tourist’s pleasure.
In this discourse of southern tourism, the houses are more than simple
artifacts of the past. Rather, they serve to freeze the possible meanings
of the South within a very narrow register, especially when yoked to the
mythic figure of the southern belle or lady. By reifying the plantation home
as the privileged site of southern history and femininity and then coding
this history as elegant and grand, such representations erase the history of
oppression that such homes could just as easily symbolize and encourage
a nostalgic form of southern history. Had my tour groups included any
African Americans, surely their affective response would not have been
one of awe or nostalgia; however, my groups were comprised entirely
of white Americans and European and Asian tourists, underscoring that
these plantation tours do not include the descendants of slaves within their
imagined audience. The stakes of such a nostalgic and segregated touristic
history will be explored at greater length in chapter 2, but here it is useful
to focus briefly on the plantation home and the symbolic place it occupies
in southern mythologies both old and new.
Although plantation homes have come to represent southernness in the
years since the Civil War, such mansions were not widely prevalent in
the antebellum South. During the decades preceding the war, fewer than
2,300 families out of a population of 8 million owned substantial numbers
of slaves, thus constituting the planter aristocracy. Expansive plantation
houses certainly existed in that period, but they were not as widespread as
current tourist industries would suggest. As historian John Boles noted in
1995, ‘‘The mythical owner of Tara—the plantation in Gone with the Wind—
was less common in the South of 1860 than a millionaire is today.’’ 6 Much of
the glorification of the plantation home began in the late nineteenth cen-
tury, concurrent with other Lost Cause ideologies. In a well-documented
article on postwar southern architecture, historian Catherine Bishir ar-
gues that at about the turn of the century, upper- and middle-class white
southerners turned to an architectural style designed to glorify the ante-
bellum period as the ‘‘golden age’’ of the South. This newly emerging
‘‘southern colonial’’ style revamped older forms for a new era and was char-
acterized by ‘‘a large and symmetrical house [with] . . . a portico of great
white columns.’’ 7 This new housing trend was more than a mere homage to
the past. As Bishir points out, ‘‘In the South, identification of the colonial
style with Anglo-Saxon American culture appealed not only to nativist
pride but also to white supremacy’’ (29). Thus architecture became one
field in which a battle over popular memories of the past was waged.
One resident of Raleigh in 1905 maintained that these houses ‘‘re-
inforced a way of life in which . . . ‘women were fine hostesses, [and
where] the relations between old Raleighites and their black friends were
beautiful,’ for many of the servants . . . ‘scarcely knew they had been
set free’.’’ 8 This comment locates white femininity as a crucial element
of the imagined plantation home, and thus of the maintenance of racial
oppression; but unlike the lenticular postcard of my introduction or late-
twentieth-century tourist sites, the plantation mythologies of the early
twentieth century were almost always populated by the requisite ‘‘happy
darkies,’’ content to labor in the cotton fields and big houses of ‘‘dear ole’’
Dixie. These myths functioned as a kind of escape scenario, simultaneously
underwriting and disavowing the early twentieth century’s fierce lynching
campaigns, insisting on a more perfect past, where paternalistic race re-
lations ensured the good behavior of loyal servants. Slaves were figured as
natural (and content) elements of the landscape, key props in the produc-
tion of a southern mise-en-scène. Today the happy darky largely disappears
from newfangled plantation legends, clearing the way for new deploy-
ments of old southern images. Of course, neither era revealed the actual
conditions of production on the plantation, which in itself is hardly sur-
prising, but it is nonetheless important to understand the different modes
of racial visibility operative in the early and late twentieth century. Such
an understanding suggests that the racial logics of our time still operate
as cover stories, stories designed to enable white fantasies uncluttered by
the messy realities of slavery. The contemporary plantation tour functions
as a displacement, reflecting dominant culture’s inability to imagine the
traumas of slavery in a manner that connects slavery to its historic locale
and context: the plantation home and its white inhabitants.
These houses continue to carry a great symbolic weight, even after
many people have called into question the Lost Cause ideologies that
fueled their construction. The continuing reference in contemporary

The South travels in myriad ways.
Tara, ‘‘a world class country inn,’’ is
located in Clark, Pennsylvania, but it
too promises to allow its guests to
‘‘relive the graciousness of southern
hospitality in its truest form.’’
tourist discourses to the ‘‘grandeur’’ of plantation life underscores the

power of romantic narratives in the construction of popular histories. This
late-twentieth-century South extends well beyond the geographic bound-
aries of Dixie, both via tourists from elsewhere in America and the world
and in the proliferation of a variety of southern ‘‘place names’’ in areas both
in and out of the South. Gated communities and upscale housing devel-
opments across the country deploy names like ‘‘Plantation,’’ ‘‘Tara,’’ and
‘‘Oaks’’ to symbolize gentility and charm, tapping into southern myths for
national consumption. There’s even Tara, a ‘‘World Class Country Inn,’’
‘‘inspired by the greatest movie of our time, Gone With the Wind; Tara recre-
ated is in a real sense an embodiement [sic] of the Old South. Tara offers
you a lasting impression of Southern Hospitality and a chance to enjoy
the luxuries of days gone by.’’ Each of the inn’s twenty-seven rooms fea-
tures a southern or movie-based theme, ranging from ‘‘Belle’s Boudoir’’
to ‘‘The Confederate Getaway’’ to the ‘‘Fiddle Dee Dee.’’ Tour guides in
period attire will happily ‘‘explain the history and significance of the an-
tiques and object [sic] d’art’’ and also point out the gift shop, which features
Gone with the Wind memorabilia. Tara, Country Inn, is located in Clark,
Pennsylvania.9
As this geographically unmoored plantation makes clear, these tourist
sites inhabit a circuit of exchange that includes other forms of southern
history, forms that range from the popular to the scholarly. These forms
reimagine the South, sketching new forms of relation between some stock
characters, including the southern lady and her home. The remainder of
this chapter continues to pursue the relationship between these figures
and various racial logics, exploring how certain southern icons repeat-
edly block new modes of southern feeling. Gone with the Wind, with its
(in)famous example of southern femininity, sketches a powerful triangu-
lation of frozen imagery: the lady, the mammy, and the plantation. In Gone
with the Wind, the belle and the lady emerge in relation to each other and
to a variety of other figures, revealing as well the changing terrains of
southern history and southern feeling. Our tour then continues, follow-
ing the legacies of the plantation and the lady up through the Sun Belt
South, tracking her longevity despite attempts in both academic and popu-
lar discourses to call the resiliency of her image into question. Although
the meanings of these icons shift across time, responding to cultural and
economic changes, the movement of the lady or the plantation is rarely
toward a progressive or multifaceted vision of race.
g G E T T I N G B AC K TO TA R A
The past . . . hangs upon Southern women as if they were dispossessed royalty.
—Shirley Abbott, Womenfolks: Growing Up Down South
Although the plantation novel certainly existed during the nineteenth cen-
tury, Margaret Mitchell’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel Gone with the Wind
and the immense industry it spawned—from the film version to countless
series of collectibles to the recent sequel—are undoubtedly key elements
in the continued force of Old South mythologies. The novel, a best-seller
virtually from the moment of its publication in 1936, has sold nearly 30
million copies to date and has been issued in nearly two hundred edi-
tions in forty countries. Although the film has been central to the novel’s
continued popularization, the book is important in its own right, for it

documents one southern daughter’s response to a changing South, and it
is primarily on the book that I will focus.10
Margaret Mitchell, born in 1900, came of age in a South that was ex-
periencing the onset of industrialization, a process that was rife with hard-
ships, but also with possibility. In the early twentieth century, southern
cities, including Mitchell’s native Atlanta, were challenging rural areas as
the center of the region, and racial violence and widespread lynching char-
acterized the area. In the words of Mitchell’s biographer Darden Pyron:
Conflict defined [Atlanta’s] nature. . . . Urbanity was often more ap-
parent than real . . . [and] tradition howled against the future. . . .
Virulent negrophobia, violent anti-Jewish prejudice, and rabid anti-
Catholicism . . . reflected itself even in the urban core. . . . Complex
and paradoxical, Atlanta told a tale with the most mixed morals. . . .
The young Margaret Mitchell imbibed these contradictions, and they in
turn defined and exaggerated the conflicts in her own life and values.11
Mitchell’s early years coincided with moments of sharp increases in lynch-
ing throughout the South and with the Atlanta race riots of 1906. These
years were also marked by a black resistance to such violence, includ-
ing the efforts of Ida B. Wells and the naacp. From 1882 to around 1930,
lynching was woven into the very fabric of southern society, a normalized
aspect of subjugating the black minority, and Georgia and Mississippi had
the highest rates of lynching. The practice began to decline around the
time Mitchell was revising her novel, largely because as the South moved
toward increasing modernization, lynching was seen as bad for business,
both because it was driving away a cheap labor force as African Americans
migrated north and because it hindered southern efforts to court northern
business, damaging the South’s image.12 I am interested in how Gone with
the Wind might be situated vis-à-vis this history.
Mitchell’s novel can be read as a story about the South in its transition
to modernity, a tale about the formation of the regional as material con-
ditions unevenly shifted in the 1920s and 1930s, even if the novel’s subject
matter focuses on an earlier period. Central to Mitchell’s concerns was
the role of the woman in this move to modernity, an issue Mitchell was
fully aware of from early childhood. Her mother, May Belle Mitchell, had
been an active participant in southern suffrage campaigns, and Margaret
Mitchell once wrote, ‘‘My earliest memories are of my mother and the
women’s suffrage movement.’’ Mitchell displayed mixed feelings about her
mother’s political activism, and Gone with the Wind becomes a platform on
which to play out the author’s deeply conflicted feelings about women’s
progress. Of course, women’s rights in the South have never been only
about gender, for southern suffrage campaigns often staged their popu-
list appeal by offering white women’s votes as a counter to the black male
vote.13 The figure of Scarlett embodies the contradictions of the South in
the early twentieth century, interweaving issues of race, class, gender, and
region.
We can also see in Gone with the Wind Mitchell’s response to the per-
sistent tradition of linking the southern landscape to femininity. Equally
important, we come to understand that this habit is not only about male
desire. Although it is tempting to read the reconstruction of regional iden-
tity in the South after the war as a process in which white male desire
figures the woman as object of masculine fantasy (hence placing the south-
ern lady within the veranda or on a pedestal, requiring protection from
marauding black men), white women also played an active role in this pro-
cess, staging ‘‘interventions’’ into the construction of southern history and
southern spaces through their widespread memorializing efforts. Southern
white women took an active role in crafting popular histories of the South
after Reconstruction, working to ‘‘transform public spaces into memory
theaters where white southerners told their history to themselves and
others.’’ To claim the right to construct history via shrines and memorials
also gave these women access to the public sphere, paradoxically allowing
greater visibility and authority for white women at the same time that the
Lost Cause ideologies these women supported insisted on their fragility
and need for protection by white men. If these women might be seen as
willing architects of the past, Mitchell’s novel extends such a role, building
a new monument to earlier times.14 Mitchell’s ‘‘monument’’ also rests on
a paradox, reflected in her conflicting longings for old and new, rural and
urban, lady and ‘‘new’’ woman. Although Mitchell insisted that her novel
debunked old ‘‘moonlight and magnolia’’ myths, moving away from plan-
tation mythologies, her break from this past is neither clean nor total. She
never fully shakes Scarlett free from her plantation home (a connection
the film visually reinscribes) or from a longing for the old ways. Mitchell
does fluctuate between equating the belle with Atlanta and with rural life
at Tara, but the novel finally secures Scarlett and the South within famil-
iar stories and architectures, if for slightly different ends. As we shall see,
within Mitchell’s verdant landscape, old plantation mythologies are re-
fashioned in response to a changing South but remain tied to the era of
lynching during which she came of age.

The film version of Gone with the Wind remythifies the plantation home, creating a
grander Tara than the home described in Mitchell’s novel. Nonetheless, both film and
novel feature an Old South rich in grandeur and romance, a lost past to be mourned.
Scarlett is linked to Tara and the land early in the novel in a tie that is
never completely broken, even while Scarlett lives in Atlanta (albeit in a
grander plantation-style home) and manages her own sawmill. In fact, the
narrative trajectory of Gone with the Wind works precisely to fix Scarlett’s
place within the plantation household. The initial fusing of Scarlett and the
land of Tara occurs in the second chapter when her father, Gerald O’Hara,
insists, ‘‘ ’Twill come to you, this love of the land. There’s no getting away
from it’’ (25). It is a refrain that echoes throughout the novel, especially
when Scarlett is troubled or distressed, for the land ‘‘brought a measure of
quiet’’ to her in times of unrest (19). The imagery of Gone with the Wind fig-
ures Tara as the site of home and of family, of origin, and thus of Scarlett’s
very identity. She loves the land intuitively, for it is like her mother (25).
‘‘She could not desert Tara; she belonged to the red acres. . . . Her roots
went deep into the blood-colored soil and sucked up life, as did the cotton’’
(294). Like cotton, Scarlett is a product of the South, and all true south-
erners (at least the landowning white ones) have ‘‘common roots going
down into the same red earth’’ (710). It is no mistake that Mitchell’s sym-
bols for the source of southern identity slide back and forth between Tara,
the plantation, and the acres of red earth that surround it. Such a slippage
serves to naturalize the relationship between the earth (as nature) and the
cultivated fields of the mansion, so that ‘‘this beautiful red earth . . . which
so miraculously grew green bushes starred with white puffs was one part
of Scarlett that did not change’’ (304). This land is, finally, ‘‘worth fighting
[wars] for, and she accepted simply and without question the fight’’ (304).
The novel enacts a metonymic slippage by which Scarlett comes to stand
for, to equal, the land and its symbolic architecture.
Here Tara is more than just the house in which Scarlett was born. Like
the southern colonial homes popular during Mitchell’s lifetime, Tara be-
comes a symbol of the old ways of the antebellum South, and Mitchell’s
mythic imaging of those landscapes works to naturalize the relationship of
landowning southerners to their property. Of course, what such a process
erases is both the initial seizure of the land from its original inhabitants
and the system of slave labor that allowed Tara to ‘‘miraculously’’ produce
cotton in the first place. It also justifies the Civil War on the basis of saving
the land, dismissing slavery as an issue in the conflict. There is no room in
Mitchell’s imagery for James Baldwin’s description of the deep red earth
of Dixie:
I could not suppress the thought that this earth had acquired its color
from the blood that dripped down from these trees. My mind was filled
with the image of a Black man . . . hanging from a tree, while white
men . . . cut his sex from him with a knife.15
In order for Gone with the Wind to forestall such images, relations be-
tween whites and their slaves must be naturalized as well, and this effect
is achieved by representing the plantation as home to a large and happy
family, ‘‘black and white’’ (222), where childlike slaves are tended by kind
masters. The lines of power on the plantation are further obscured by
Mitchell’s tactic of figuring the slaves as the ones with the actual power.
Thus ‘‘Mammy felt that she owned the O’Haras body and soul’’ (15), and
she is also described as the ‘‘owner’’ of her own ‘‘ponderous’’ frame (383).
Indeed, Mammy knows Scarlett’s mind ‘‘as if by magic’’ (382), suggest-
ing that the slave exercises control over ‘‘her Scarlett.’’ White needs and
perspectives entirely define the black characters, their specificity denied
even as they are used to mark the white characters’ uniqueness. For ex-
ample, ‘‘Uncle Peter,’’ the ‘‘dignified mainstay’’ of the Hamilton family, is
valued precisely because he has kept a watchful eye on Miss Pittypat, his
white charge. His character is solely limned via his relations to the Hamil-

tons—his ‘‘subjectivity’’ sketched to the degree that he serves their desires.
Countless examples of a similar delineation of the novel’s slaves could be
cited. Here I focus on the degree to which the novel’s construction of
Mammy becomes intricately tied to that of Scarlett in at least two ways.16
First, the figure of Mammy provides the (dark) background against
which the (white) image of Scarlett can take shape. Throughout Gone
with the Wind, representations of white femininity, particularly as em-
bodied by Scarlett and her mother, are sketched in contrast to those of
black femininity. On the opening page of the novel, Mitchell details Scar-
lett’s ‘‘magnolia-white skin—that skin so prized by Southern women’’; of
course, such white skin was ‘‘so prized’’ precisely because it was not dark
skin. In and of itself, white skin would signify little; it only takes on value in
contrast to darker skin, which in the antebellum South signaled low class
status or ‘‘mixed blood.’’ This precise value is never directly marked by
the novel (though, clearly, whiteness is privileged), but through a running
series of contrasts, Scarlett’s (white) femininity gets set up as the oppo-
site of Mammy’s blackness. The darkness in the text demarcates the white
characters, and this darkness serves as a central feature of almost every
description of Mammy afforded by the novel.
Mammy enters the story ‘‘shining black, pure African’’ with a ‘‘lum-
bering tread,’’ ‘‘huge . . . with the shrewd eyes of an elephant’’ (15). She
is consistently described as either old and gnarled, as gigantic, or as ani-
malistic, all images that portray her as unfeminine and desexualized.17
She is not, of course, ever called a ‘‘lady’’; rarely is she even designated
‘‘woman,’’ although she sometimes serves as a source of maternal comfort,
an image to which I will return. She is often like ‘‘an old ape’’ (701) or a
‘‘restless bloodhound’’ (15); her ‘‘mountainous figure’’ waddles and quakes
(701); she wears huge men’s shoes, and her ‘‘shapeless body overflows’’ into
the spaces it inhabits. Mammy is figured via ‘‘metaphysical condensation,’’
which, in the words of Toni Morrison, ‘‘allows the writer to transform
social and historical differences. Collapsing persons into animals prevents
human contact and exchange.’’ 18 This constant barrage of imagery point-
edly contrasts Mammy’s ‘‘figure’’ to that of the ‘‘feminine’’ ladies, who
are identified as contained, petite, high-class, and, it goes without say-
ing, white. Hence Gone with the Wind is a novel that defines femininity,
and this definition has everything to do with how Mitchell conceptualizes
and focuses on race. Mitchell deploys blackness as a background against
which she elaborates the details of white female subjectivity in the South
at precisely the moment the region begins to recover (from a white per-
spective) both economically and politically from the years following the
Civil War. Of course, this recovery operates in both senses of the word: as
a recouping of the losses of the war for white southerners, and as a cover-
ing over of the brutalities during and after Reconstruction for the former
slaves.19
Mammy’s role in defining who counts as a lady does not end at the level
of descriptive detail. As the narrative unfolds, she will also come to play
a key role in the actual production of white femininity. The novel’s first
sentence asserts that ‘‘Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful,’’ underscoring
that it is not beauty but something to do with appearance and perfor-
mance that defines (white) southern womanhood. A certain ‘‘veneer of
femininity’’ is key (42), and we soon learn of Scarlett’s consummate skill in
manipulating this veneer, as she proceeds to snare the Tarleton twins with
her charms (1, 6).20 Throughout the novel, Scarlett deploys her feminine
wiles to mask her growing access to the public sphere. Her performances
echo those of the patient of Joan Riviere described in my introduction,
as Scarlett wields a flirtatious womanly excess as a cover for her desire
to enter the masculine world of commerce. Still, Scarlett is portrayed as
quite consciously using her charms, not needing the analyst to reveal her
womanliness as a masquerade, and certainly her excessive femininity is
very much a product of her southernness. Gone with the Wind also under-
scores that to be a southern lady required the observance of certain strict
codes of etiquette and decorum, and many feminist critics of the novel
have praised the character and the narrative precisely because they subtly
push against the established codes of ladylike behavior. Although Scarlett
ultimately longs to be a lady, a point to which I will return, she does at vari-
ous moments resist her training in proper femininity. Much as in feminist
valorizations of Madonna during the 1990s, these optimistic critics read
the moments of Scarlett’s (or the text’s) performance as a campy subver-
sion of the rigid boundaries of southern femininity. For example, literary
historian Anne Goodwyn Jones praises Mitchell’s decision to have Scarlett
deploy feminine wiles in order to gain entrance into ‘‘the male, public,
economic and competitive world.’’ Literary critic Ann Egenriether reads
Scarlett as ‘‘the quintessential American heroine’’ because ‘‘she capitalizes
on her womanliness,’’ and Harriet Hawkins goes further, calling Scarlett’s
masquerades ‘‘radically, breath-takingly liberating.’’ 21
What such evaluations never demonstrate is exactly what such femi-
nine play subverts. Scarlett’s ‘‘play’’ with femininity works in the service
of capitalism and chain gang labor as she uses her feminine wiles to main-

tain her lumber business, while simultaneously allowing Mitchell to ap-
propriate for women larger social spaces within the organization of urban
and public spheres. But this appropriation serves only upper-class white
women. Then, at the narrative’s end, rather than overturning or challeng-
ing southern codes of behavior, the novel ultimately reinforces them as
Scarlett embraces tradition and returns home. Furthermore, celebrations
of Scarlett’s manipulations of femininity and entry into public life also miss
what has historically shaped and supported her masquerades; a whole geo-
graphic system of social and economic production—the slave system—
has enabled her play. Or as literary theorist Cora Kaplan has explained in
relation to The Thorn Birds, ‘‘The reactionary political and social setting [of
the novel] secures . . . a privileged space where the most disruptive female
fantasy can be ‘safely’ indulged.’’ 22 Scarlett’s performance as a ‘‘strong’’ yet
feminine woman is possible because it is situated within a scenario that
romanticizes the Old South, revamping plantation mythologies. Further-
more, the novel’s figuration of femininity relies on race—as both blackness
and whiteness—for its delineation of this scenario.
In her reading of both The Thorn Birds and Gone with the Wind, Kaplan
details the mechanisms of identification at work in fantasy scenarios, par-
ticularly romantic ones. Her insights, which draw on the psychoanalytic
theories of Sigmund Freud and those of Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand
Pontalis, underscore that identification ‘‘may shift in the course of a fan-
tasy scenario’’ and that ‘‘scenario thus takes precedence over any fixed
identification of the subject with any one character in the scene’’ (150).
Hence readings that valorize the liberating effects of Scarlett’s feminine
performance (for readers) fail to recognize that the reader’s relationship
to the character does not occur solely via a process of one-to-one identi-
fication. Scenario is key. It is therefore crucial to investigate the role of
setting when analyzing fantasies and the narratives to which they become
bound, whether in a novel like Gone with the Wind or in present-day sites of
tourism. On doing so, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to dissociate
the curtain-wielding masquerades of Scarlett from the plantation econ-
omy that first enabled them. Here, as in the Lost Cause resurrection of an
imagined Old South architecture, the plantation home surfaces as the pri-
mary environment of memory and desire. This genteel landscape enables
a powerful fixing of white identity within a very particular mise-en-scène,
a setting that structures the possibility for the novel’s racial performances.
Late-twentieth-century tourism will whitewash this Old South landscape
while still celebrating grandeur and elegance.
A focus on historical and social contexts and the racial relations they
underwrite makes reading Scarlett’s masquerade as subversive guilty of
the same slippage that my introduction highlights in the work of feminist
theorists of masquerade. That is, a privileging of Scarlett’s performance of
sexual difference renders invisible the degree to which feminine perfor-
mance is also about region, race, and class. Scarlett’s masquerade may be
about survival, particularly given the novel’s setting during and immedi-
ately after the war. But in situating her performance of femininity within
the terrain of the South—particularly within the plantation home that
that implies—the novel provides little cause for celebrating (as do Mitchell
and many of her critics) Scarlett’s masquerades.
This symbiotic relationship between Scarlett’s strategic femininity and
the reactionary social setting that supports it is best illustrated by return-
ing to the figure of Mammy and her role in producing white femininity.
Throughout the narrative, Mammy’s physical labor and ‘‘supporting’’ role
allow Scarlett to perform femininity. For instance, when Scarlett wants to
dress up in curtains to work her feminine wiles on Rhett, it is Mammy
who sews the dress and thus ‘‘assists’’ in Scarlett’s performance, taking care
of her ‘‘whether Scarlett wished it or not’’ (386). Likewise, as Scarlett’s
‘‘maid,’’ Mammy laces her into her corset, pulling and jerking vigorously,
and ‘‘as the tiny circumference of whalebone-girdled waist grew smaller,
a proud, fond look’’ comes into Mammy’s eyes (55). As the novel pointedly
asserts, ‘‘What a young miss could do and what she could not do were as
different as black and white in Mammy’s mind’’ (54). Mammy also escorts
Scarlett along the ‘‘jammed’’ sidewalks of Atlanta, monitoring her progress
and protecting her from ‘‘a black buck’’ and impudent ‘‘black trash’’ (389).
Paradoxically, Mammy is here figured as a chief coconspirator in the pro-
duction of a system of femininity that simultaneously works to deny her
own status as a bearer of privileged womanhood. Mitchell consistently
represents Mammy as the enforcer of southern etiquette, thus supporting
her narrative claim that Mammy has authority over Scarlett and the whole
plantation. But Mammy’s ‘‘power’’ is only the power to labor in the main-
tenance of white femininity. Her ‘‘power’’ is the power to police Scarlett
(at home and on the streets of Atlanta), thus producing Scarlett as a lady
(i.e., as not Mammy) and simultaneously maintaining Tara as the space of
the family and of white rule.
This wishful figuration of Mammy as keeper of white femininity echoes
life in the early-twentieth-century South while erasing the networks of
power that controlled black women’s bodies and mobility in that era.

Mammy polices the borders of white southern womanhood, lacing Scarlett into proper
femininity.
Margaret Mitchell grew up in a South where the comforts of white do-

mesticity and femininity were quite literally built on the labor of black
women, who largely worked as domestics caring for white homes and
families. A growing set of social regulations sought to curtail black move-
ment through towns and cities. In Atlanta and across the Jim Crow South,
etiquette increasingly functioned as a form of social control; the power
to name someone ‘‘impudent’’ or ‘‘trashy,’’ assigning particular character
traits, reinforced class and race hierarchies, recoding resistance as laziness.
From Reconstruction through the 1950s, public spaces such as sidewalks
became key contested terrains, stages on which black men and women
asserted their freedom. Sidewalks functioned as social interfaces, bring-
ing together blacks and whites, and as such, they were carefully policed.
Urban planning began in Atlanta around 1913, intent on controlling the
movement of African Americans through city spaces. Violations of these
codes of mobility functioned as symbolic threats to the social order and
could exact a great cost: lynching records verify that minor sidewalk trans-
gressions could be punished by death.23 The South developed a system of
etiquette that was closely tied—integral—to the terrorism of lynching.
Here the ugly underside of southern hospitality during Mitchell’s lifetime
becomes all too evident. Gone with the Wind rewrites this history and erases
the deadly politics of the sidewalk that Mitchell undoubtedly knew well.
Rather, it figures Mammy not as claiming her own space on the sidewalk
but as intent on securing a space for Scarlett, shuttling her through the
‘‘dangerous’’ interracial public spaces of a growing Atlanta.
Of course, this policing of white femininity has everything to do with
class, as well. Scarlett is not just any white woman; she is also a woman of
the planter class, and whiteness, proper femininity, and class position are
all closely bound in Gone with the Wind. One need only recall the novel’s
representation of the Slattery family to understand that true femininity is
little more within the reach of the average lower-class white woman than
it is achievable by Mammy. In fact, each of the tale’s ‘‘white trash’’ women
functions as a degraded third term that holds the novel’s black-white equa-
tion in place. Emmie Slattery’s description as an ‘‘overdressed, common,
nasty piece of poor white trash’’ serves as a nightmare image underscoring
the effect on the social order of not maintaining clear distinctions between
black and white. Emmie’s very touch had killed Ellen O’Hara, and her at-
tempts at proper femininity miserably fail her, revealing as they do her
‘‘rabbity face, caked with white powder’’ (376), calling into question her
very claims to whiteness. Scarlett’s successful masquerades are not avail-
able for Emmie, and the novel’s representations of the lower classes only
serve to underwrite its black-white logic.
To privilege Scarlett’s uses of femininity or to read her masquerades as
being only about sexual difference is to forget that this narrow view of the
southern belle erases the historical specificity of the lives of many poor and
working-class white women in the South. It also denies the suppression
of black femininity that helped produce Scarlett’s masquerades while also
ignoring the historical resistance that slave women waged against their
cultural positioning as ‘‘unwomanly.’’ 24 Finally, such a reading overlooks
the degree to which the narrative punishes Scarlett for her transgressions,
highlighting what happens to independent women in the postbellum (and,
by extension, the modern) South.
The novel’s final scene firmly reinscribes the power-crossed triangula-
tion of race, gender, and place that structured both the antebellum and
the postbellum South while simultaneously naturalizing those connections
and their class connotations. On the last page, after losing Rhett, Scarlett
realizes she must go home to Tara, and ‘‘it was as if a gentle cool hand were
stealing over her heart’’ (733). The narrative paints an Edenic picture of
Tara, a portrait that, of course, includes Mammy:

[Scarlett] stood for a moment remembering the small things, the avenue
of dark cedars leading to Tara, . . . vivid green against white walls . . .
And Mammy would be there. Suddenly she wanted Mammy desper-
ately, as she had wanted her when she was a girl, wanted the broad
bosom on which to lay her head, the gnarled black hand on her hair.
Mammy, the last link with the old days. (733)
Scarlett’s (and the text’s) desire to return to Tara is a desire for a space
undisturbed by racial difference, a space where Mammy becomes part of
the landscape of southernness, one of the ‘‘small things’’ allowing white
safety and white privilege within the secure space of home. Such a mem-
ory cannot include the history that lies behind the image of Mammy’s
‘‘broad bosom,’’ the history of enforced wet nursing.25 From its early pages,
Gone with the Wind stages an inevitable return of Scarlett to Tara, to a uto-
pian, safe space of white southern identity that can allow no memory of
how white safety has been secured by practices of omission, exclusion,
or violence. Such a vision also freezes the origins of white southern iden-
tity within the physical and mental geographies of the past, situating the
plantation home as an essential landscape of desire and escape. Margaret
Mitchell and her heroine, Scarlett, in the words of film critic Thomas
Cripps, ‘‘remained ever Southern’’ in a familiar southern landscape that
modernity neatly altered to its own ends.26
Still, Scarlett’s longing for a return to the safety that Mammy symbol-
izes points toward a contradictory impulse in Mitchell’s portrait of the
slave. While Mammy repeatedly emerges in the text as dark, animalistic,
and dehumanized (one recalls her ‘‘lumbering tread,’’ her ‘‘elephantine’’
form), she simultaneously comes to connote the maternal, as the foregoing
passage strongly suggests. In these moments, white and black womanhood
are no longer cast in strict opposition but joined via the desires of white
feminine subjectivity. Hence Scarlett and Mitchell are at once repelled by
Mammy’s blackness and also powerfully attracted to it, a doubling that
points to the complexity and ambiguity of southern racial experiences,
particularly as they unfold for white women.27 For the white woman (as
character and as author), blackness becomes a shadowy source of comfort
and security, a desirable space of safety. The presence of Mammy under-
writes Scarlett’s fantasy of a return to the world of childhood and also
allows Mitchell to explore her character’s capacity for love. If Scarlett has
failed at loving Rhett, Melanie, her children, and her mother, Scarlett’s
devotion to, and desire for, Mammy enables Mitchell to reveal her charac-
ter’s worthiness and humanity as the novel draws to a close. Thus this black
presence sets the stage for Mitchell’s playing out of the often contradictory
and complex imperatives of power, guilt, and desire.
Gone with the Wind exhibits a desire for commonality or connection that
we might term a white southern structure of feeling, a latency in the text
that is in tension with the novel’s overtly racist expressions. Although the
dominant culture in Mitchell’s South deployed Jim Crow tactics to dis-
avow and guard against this commonality, the culture’s visual logics con-
tinually joined black and white, defining each race via and against the other.
Beneath the surface of this logic coursed a subterranean desire for con-
nection, a hunger for the other. Cultural critic Raymond Williams notes
that ‘‘structures of feeling’’ are ‘‘concerned with meanings and values as
they are actively lived and felt, . . . characteristic elements of impulse,
restraint and tone, specifically affective elements of . . . relationships.’’ 28
He singles out art and literature as having a particular purchase on struc-
tures of feeling and further argues that these structures ‘‘can be defined as
social experiences in solution’’ (133). We might say that Mitchell’s latent
longing for cross-racial connection is an affective mode still ‘‘in solution,’’
hovering as it is at ‘‘the very edge of semantic availability’’ (134); the novel’s
precipitated meaning is its overt racism. Very few whites in Mitchell’s
time had moved beyond this affective suspension, although some had, as
chapter 4 will detail. Of course, reading the mammy as a maternal figure
of comfort for whites is a tricky game, and Mitchell offers an array of
harsh images to distance the figure of Mammy. Mitchell’s representations
range from monkey faced to maternal, and Mammy also functions as a
shadowy substitute for Scarlett’s mother, Ellen. This ambiguity hints at a
longing for racial union even while it labors to hold black and white apart,
a familiar pattern across southern history and racial representation. For
whites, Mammy could be a ‘‘great mother’’ (via the psychic and cultural
mechanisms of nostalgic fantasy) and also absolutely not the mother (via
the dictates of language and the law: she is black and beastly), inhabiting
two seemingly contradictory modes at once. This fantasy of union is too
unsettling to be simply presented; rather, it is contextualized via the de-
humanizing images of Mammy that permeate the text, framed strictly via
white desire. Let me be clear: though the novel does reveal a desire for
union, this latency in no way mitigates the novel’s racism. It does, how-
ever, signal a current that might be accessed differently by a more radical
white subjectivity.

Historian Deborah Gray White has written that the mammy image de-
veloped from an attempt by pro-slavery propagandists to demonstrate
that the plantation South benefited slaves by providing moral instruction.
Hence the mammy was figured as capable, content, and nurturing, an ex-
ample of slavery’s good effects, and her large, desexualized form countered
claims that white masters might be attracted to slave women. One could
read Mitchell’s Mammy simply as an extension of this ploy, as a Lost Cause
justification for ‘‘the benevolent institution’’ of slavery. Certainly, her por-
trait of the excesses of freed field hands as wild, terrifying, and out of
control supports such an interpretation, as does her insistence that ‘‘good
darkies’’ like Mammy and Peter ‘‘stood loyally by their white owners’’ after
the war (476). But the relationship of Scarlett and Mammy also reveals
Mitchell’s simultaneous desire to picture a more harmonious version of
women’s relationships, particularly interracial ones. Of course, this rela-
tionship is only figured via white longing, for Mammy’s own interiority is
denied by the novel. Although Mitchell amply explores Scarlett’s perfor-
mances of white femininity, the text never attributes a similar mimetic ca-
pacity to Mammy. Critics such as Hazel Carby have repeatedly noted slave
women’s own performative strategies, skills that allowed them to ‘‘play’’
the mammy while resisting the white definition of that image. But the
Mammy of Mitchell’s world is content to serve white power, always work-
ing to ensure it. Thus while Mitchell represents black and white femininity
coming together in the space of Tara at the novel’s close, this (re)union
must be read as a white fantasy.29 Other potential affective possibilities
of longing and union are short-circuited, rewired back into the planta-
tion and the landscape, trapping Mammy and Scarlett within Tara’s deep
verandas.
That Mitchell is ultimately unable to envision black female subjectivity
as existing in any relationship to white women beyond a supporting one
suggests a limit to her critical imagination while also highlighting the
contradictory movements of her text. But Mitchell’s failures do not mean
that we should simply dismiss this impulse toward union in the novel. Lit-
erary critic Minrose Gwin points out that fictional re-creations of south-
ern women’s interracial experiences offer ‘‘a powerful lens through which
we may envision new critical relationships, new illuminations,’’ an insight
that suggests we can explore the contours of Mitchell’s vision to under-
stand how she uses black womanhood in her delineation of white southern
femininity.30 The longing for interracial unity that the novel sometimes
expresses will resurface in many of the white women’s texts that Recon-
structing Dixie examines. Chapters 3 and 4 will again take up the ways in
which the words and work of white southern women deploy figures of
black femininity. Many of these texts display a drive to unity similar to that
of Gone with the Wind. Often the dual cycle of repulsion and attraction that
Mitchell enacts is in evidence as well, though it is frequently less overt.
g R AC E I N B L AC K A N D W H I T E
Yes, Mitchell admitted, we Southerners are racist—and in this respect no different
from any other Americans.—Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, ‘‘The Anxiety of History’’
Gone with the Wind is not particularly subtle in its delineation of whiteness
in relation to blackness.31 It is a novel that proceeds in black and white,
foregrounding the mutual dependency of the two terms. In an essay on an-
other early-twentieth-century tribute to the Old South, D. W. Griffith’s
1915 film The Birth of a Nation, film theorist Richard Dyer notes that ‘‘Birth
knows that it is about racial purity or, to use a contemporary phrase, ethnic
cleansing.’’ 32 He also argues that the film’s representation of race ‘‘includes
the whites just as much as blacks, something Birth itself is clearer on than
most current white discourse about race’’ (167). Both of his observations
could be applied to Gone with the Wind (as novel and as film), for it is a
text that proceeds via the more overt of the two logics of racial visibility
I outlined in my introduction. Mitchell writes, for example, that ‘‘[Scar-
lett] knew what Reconstruction meant. . . . The negroes were on top and
behind them were the Yankee bayonets. She could be killed, she could be
raped and, very probably, nothing would be done about it’’ (456). Mitchell
thus writes in the service of an ideology of which she is fully aware and
supportive. This is not, moreover, a visual logic that holds black and white
apart. Rather, her construction of racial difference is overt and pointed.
Mitchell’s defense of the Ku Klux Klan’s slaughter of black men and women
(in the name of white women’s ‘‘protection’’) underwrites and justifies the
racial violence of her own era.33
To understand how the racial logics of Gone with the Wind function, we
must once again return to the context of early-twentieth-century Atlanta
and the South. Atlanta was a crucible for change during this period, bring-
ing together many of the contradictory trajectories of southern culture.
Across the South, races and classes were thrown together in growing cities
as both increasingly moved to urban areas, especially during the 1920s,
and blacks and the working classes were on the move. Blacks boycotted

streetcars in at least twenty-five cities from 1900 to 1906, the naacp was
founded in 1909, and black-owned businesses grew along Atlanta’s Auburn
Avenue. The teens and twenties saw labor strikes and scattered attempts at
unionization. These attempts at change were met with fierce resistance. By
1930, the South, like the rest of the nation, was reeling from the economic
devastation of the Great Depression. Farm incomes fell, manufacturing
plummeted by 50 percent in cities like Atlanta and Birmingham, and un-
employment in southern cities exceeded the national average. Southern
politicians voiced a rhetoric of states’ rights but soon turned to an initially
enthusiastic embrace of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.34
Amid this ferment, Mitchell worked on her novel, completing a first
draft between 1926 and 1929, and revising the novel during the early years
of the 1930s. In 1933, after deciding that her epic ‘‘lagged’’ in the middle,
Mitchell revised the work to include the Klan raid on the shantytown, the
chapter in which Scarlett’s husband, Frank Kennedy, is killed. Although
Darden Pyron and others have followed Mitchell, labeling this change an
‘‘aesthetic’’ choice, a more telling interpretation places the novel’s embrace
of the Klan in the context of the economic despair that gripped Atlanta as
Mitchell rewrote. Furthermore, her resurrection of the Klan makes par-
ticular sense given the Klan’s designation of Atlanta as its ‘‘Imperial City’’
and the widespread presence of the group throughout Atlanta. The Klan
contributed millions to the city’s economy via its Buckhead robe factory
and counted tens of thousands of Atlantans among its membership.35 Al-
though Klan activity (and lynching) was on the decline by 1933, Mitchell’s
hailing of the kkk at this particular moment suggests her discomfort with
the changes afoot in contemporary Atlanta.
This unease is all the more telling given the nascent interracial coali-
tions that were emerging across the city, including a racially mixed group
of labor organizers who were arrested and dubbed the ‘‘Atlanta Six’’
(Rutheiser, 35). The Atlanta-based Commission on Interracial Coopera-
tion began in 1919 and ‘‘was a bold departure in the field of southern race
relations.’’ Clark Foreman, a friend of Mitchell’s, joined the cic in 1924 and
agitated for change throughout the city during the next two years. In 1933
he was appointed by the federal government to study race relations under
the aegis of the secretary of the interior.36 Groups like the cic marked the
nascent beginnings of a progressive undercurrent in southern society, a
time Foreman later called the ‘‘decade of hope’’ and dated from 1938 to
1948. Given Mitchell’s position within Atlanta society and her knowledge
of Foreman, she would have sensed this emerging paradigm. Her novel
reacts against it. The progressive era began to imagine a new set of re-
lations between blacks and whites, challenging the overt racial logics of
Jim Crow. Gone with the Wind still depends on this fiercer, overt logic, the
logic of the reign of lynching, marking the end of an era. This logic para-
doxically defined blackness and whiteness via relation (think of Scarlett
and Mammy, and the ‘‘happy darkies’’ as plantation backdrop) at the same
time that segregation attempted to police interracial connection, insisting
on separation. Precisely because the meaning of whiteness and blackness
were so interwoven, overt racism and brutality were deployed to sepa-
rate the races. This racial strategy began to lose its sway throughout the
1940s. Over the next two decades, covert strategies of racism and racial
representation gradually came to replace these more overt logics, partially
because of the hopefulness of the progressive era but largely because the
South began to recognize the need for an image makeover. By the 1960s,
Atlanta would pitch itself as the city ‘‘too busy to hate.’’ 37
Interestingly, Selznick’s film version of Mitchell’s opus, released in 1939,
begins a shift toward a slightly more covert logic of racial representation
as he attempted to excise the novel’s more pronounced racism. He elimi-
nated the Klan sequence from the film and insisted that he had ‘‘no desire
to produce any anti-negro film,’’ claiming that he hoped the film would
avoid serving as ‘‘an unintentional advertisement for intolerant societies
in these fascist-ridden times.’’ 38 Nonetheless, despite his stated intentions,
the epic film powerfully conjured up the glories of the plantation past by
inserting Scarlett into a Technicolor white-columned landscape borrowed
straight from the pages of Lost Cause plantation myths, an estate much
grander than the Tara of the novel. In attempting to mitigate the novel’s
racism, Selznick failed to understand the complex history and powerful
pull of the mise-en-scène of southernness he sculpted. Presenting such a
lush southern landscape while eliminating the novel’s most overt racism
helped soft-sell an image of the Grand Old South to those who might have
reacted against Mitchell’s more overt strategies. While his film doesn’t
separate black from white in the manner of the lenticular postcard (it still
has Mammy lacing up Scarlett into proper femininity, powerfully con-
trasting black and white womanhood while figuring them as interrelated),
it does begin to move away from Mitchell’s racial logics, moving us a bit
closer to the terrain of the Sun Belt and Scarlett, the sequel.
Since it seems quite evident that Gone with the Wind is a novel about
race, racial difference, and racial representation, it is at first surprising
to learn that until recently most critics denied that the novel was about

race at all. This reinforces the claim that much current white discourse on
race does not understand whiteness as itself a racialized category. In a 1984
essay, literary critic Kenneth O’Brien argues that ‘‘as extraordinary as it
may sound, Mitchell’s novel would . . . still make sense if all the . . . black
characters disappeared. . . . Race, and politics too, are essentially negli-
gible elements’’ in the book.39 O’Brien’s sentiments are typical of those of
many commentators on the novel, all of whom read it as being about issues
of survival, tradition, or womanhood. In fact, only a small and very recent
percentage of the mass of critical articles written about Gone with the Wind
focus their remarks on issues of race.40 Instead, critics such as O’Brien
and Anne Goodwyn Jones maintain that the novel is about ‘‘the struggle
of one individual against the confines of Southern womanhood’’ (O’Brien,
163), and each traces the various ploys of Scarlett as she attempts to outwit
southern tradition and its ideals of femininity. Such interpretations frame
Gone with the Wind as a struggle between ‘‘tradition’’ and ‘‘change’’ and read
Scarlett as sympathetic to, and representative of, change or modernity.
Hence both Jones and O’Brien must view Scarlett’s (and Rhett’s) return
to tradition at the novel’s end as a ‘‘strangely ambiguous and unsatisfy-
ing conclusion’’ (O’Brien, 165). Rather than a mystifying ending, this final
scene (where Scarlett leaves ‘‘modern’’ Atlanta to return to tradition at
Tara) makes perfect sense if one carefully examines the role of race and
place in the novel and in Mitchell’s Atlanta. Indeed, rather than being a
‘‘negligible element’’ of the relationship of gender to region, race is the key
to understanding both the narrative trajectory of Gone with the Wind and
its final return to a fairly conservative figuration of Southern womanhood.
In arguing that race is not an issue in Gone with the Wind, analyses like
O’Brien’s repeat an ingrained pattern of Western thought that sees ‘‘race’’
as only applying to people of color; in such thought, whiteness remains
a category somehow unmarked by race.41 This type of thinking also de-
nies the historical triangulation of gender, race, and region in the U.S.
South. Specifically, it overlooks the degree to which the social construc-
tion of white southern womanhood in the antebellum period depended
on a simultaneous definition of black women as unfeminine and unwom-
anly. In their explorations of racial dynamics, feminists from Sojourner
Truth to Angela Davis to Hazel Carby have long recognized that ideolo-
gies of black and white female sexuality ‘‘only appear to exist in isolation
while actually depending on a nexus of figurations that can be explained
only in relation to each other’’ (Carby, 20). As the preceding section illus-
trates, this relationship is evident in Gone with the Wind, for Scarlett’s role
as the ‘‘transgressive belle’’ and her relationship to southern society are
both played out on a racialized and highly charged terrain.
Given the highly detailed racial contours of Mitchell’s novel, it is par-
ticularly fascinating that critics could have ‘‘overlooked’’ its racial content
for so long.42 Certainly, this oversight has more to say about the shifting
economies of racial visibility at the close of the twentieth century than
about the racial politics of Margaret Mitchell or the 1930s. As such, this
refusal to see the structures that shape our understanding of race stands
as a prime example of the covert racial logics that characterize post–Civil
Rights discourse on race. This economy of visibility, which operates quite
differently than the overt economy deployed by Mitchell, can be traced
across a variety of contemporary texts ranging from the River Road tourist
excursions that continue to grow in popularity to the limning of Scarlett
as newly minted ethnic other. And popular culture is not the only ter-
rain on which we might track new figurations of the southern lady, for if
Gone with the Wind helped reinvigorate this image for the early twentieth
century, other, sometimes surprising, sources sustained her legacy as the
century drew to a close.
g N E X T S TO P : B E L L E S A N D L A D I E S I N T H E 19 8 0 S
Just as there’s a New South, there’s also a new Scarlett.
—Maryln Schwartz, New Times in the Old South
Scarlett, Alexandra Ripley’s 1991 sequel to Gone with the Wind, was, much
like its predecessor, an instant best-seller, with many stores’ stock selling
out as soon as it arrived. More than two million copies were sold in the
novel’s first year, before the book’s paperback issue in 1992. The sequel was
later remade in seventeen languages as a television miniseries, which, on
its premiere in 1994, garnered a worldwide television audience of more
than 275 million and was the top tv movie of the year in several coun-
tries, including the United States, Germany, Spain, and Japan.43 Although
Ripley was praised by a few critics for capturing the essence of Mitchell’s
style (and roundly hated by most), the two novels deploy strikingly dif-
ferent economies of visibility in regards to race. Much like the television
series Savannah, Scarlett finally deals with the interrelation of black and
white by erasing blackness. In the end, Ripley, who no doubt faced quite a
dilemma in deciding how to capture the ‘‘essence’’ of Mitchell’s overt de-
fense of racism during Reconstruction, displaces the text’s considerations

of blackness onto an entirely new geographic terrain. In a striking dis-
avowal of both the horrors and the possibilities of the Reconstruction era,
Ripley insisted in several interviews that the period ‘‘was the dullest time
in the history of the United States,’’ simply too boring to sustain either
Ripley’s or the reader’s interest (although clearly not Mitchell’s) for very
long.44 But before this displacement occurs, Ripley first constructs a view
of ante- and postbellum southern race relations that retains all the nos-
talgia of Mitchell’s accounts with none of the vituperative defenses of the
Klan that might today serve to warn readers away from Mitchell’s rosier
portraits.
More specifically, Ripley reconfigures an old tale familiar from Gone
with the Wind and other Lost Cause ideologies about the tight bond be-
tween former slaves and their masters. Throughout the first half of the
novel, casual references to former slaves ‘‘still loyal to old pre-War owners’’
(243) paint a picture of these ‘‘servants’’ as longing for the ‘‘early days at
Tara’’ (34). These slaves are incorporated into the white family much as
the ‘‘good’’ slaves were in Mitchell’s novel, again erasing their specificity
beyond the confines of white society, and rehabilitating the plantation
household for contemporary tourist consumption. Mammy is once more
deployed as the key figure who justifies master/slave (or, more accurately,
mistress/slave) relations, and much as in Gone with the Wind, her char-
acterization underscores her love for the white characters. Early in the
sequel, Scarlett returns home to Tara, hoping to ‘‘rest her wounded heart
on Mammy’s love’’ (9), only to find the former slave on her deathbed. In an
odd reversal of the caretaking sequences of the first novel, Scarlett nurses
Mammy until her death, watching with loving eyes as Mammy dreams of
‘‘those . . . happy times’’ before the war when, as a slave, she cared for
Scarlett’s mother, Ellen O’Hara (15). Although Mammy is occasionally fig-
ured as (at least formerly) ‘‘big’’ and ‘‘fleshy,’’ and once referred to as a
‘‘creature,’’ the conscious depiction of her as representative of blackness
is missing in the sequel, as are characterizations of blackness and blacks
as ominous and lethal. The only monkey-faced character in the sequel is a
feisty white southern lady with serious United Daughters of the Confeder-
acy credentials. Furthermore, Scarlett is no longer repeatedly delineated
via images of pale whiteness. Whiteness is given meaning in other ways.
The novel’s primary linkage of black and white femininity is thus less
pronounced than that of Gone with the Wind, resting as it does on a subtle
equation of Mammy and Ellen O’Hara, as both women are drawn as ob-
jects of Scarlett’s deepest daughterly affection and are, at Scarlett’s insis-
An advertisement in The
Hollywood Reporter illus-
trates the move of Scarlett
to relocate its heroine to
Ireland, away from the
messy realities of race in
America. The ad also
celebrates the success of
the tv miniseries world-
wide, citing top ratings in
several countries.
tence, buried side by side. Still, Mammy dies within the first thirty of
nearly nine hundred pages, and the novel quickly moves on to define femi-
ninity without the dark background of Gone with the Wind, thus naturaliz-
ing the whiteness of southern femininity. When in part 2 Scarlett heads to
Charleston in pursuit of Rhett, she enters an oddly white world, a world
the reader views via Scarlett’s tourist vision. Although the novel sketches
vibrant portraits of the street life and markets of this new southern ter-
rain, the menacing threat of blackness and miscegenation that prowled the
streets of Atlanta in Gone with the Wind has conveniently disappeared by
the time our revamped heroine arrives in South Carolina. The threat on
the sidewalks of Charleston is instead the Yankee soldier, and Charleston
becomes a convenient setting given that the city was held under northern
military occupation for much longer than cities like Atlanta.
In turning to Charleston as a new backdrop for exploring southernness,
that city’s historic resistance to those ‘‘damn Yankees’’ allows Ripley to
figure the Civil War as largely about states’ rights and southern pride, con-
veniently displacing both slavery as a cause for the war and the presence
of freed blacks in the city. Mitchell’s own portraits of the era were obses-
sive in their attention to blackness in the South, but this tone disappears
in Ripley’s sequel. This erasure of the newly mobile black subject from
the city streets masks the city’s (and the region’s) shift from the spatiality
of slavery to the spatiality of white supremacism, a process much more
overtly chronicled in the earlier novel.45 Ripley also pictures Charleston
as awash in consumer wonders, as Scarlett strolls down King Street, imag-
ined as a ‘‘revelation and a delight,’’ simply dripping fine hats, ostrich plums
and painted fans (132). This snapshot of Charleston references the city’s
past as a key port city, one that traded in rice, indigo, and slaves, a center-
piece of the Old South economy. Thus Ripley justifies moving Scarlett away
from Atlanta into a new southern geography.
If Atlanta had allowed Mitchell to operate doubly, exploring Atlanta
both as an Old South hub and as a city embracing modernity during the
author’s lifetime, Charleston serves a similar function for Ripley. A native
of Charleston, Ripley has repeatedly used the city and the surrounding
Low Country as a screen on which to project a late-twentieth-century
vision of a genteel lost South. In many ways, Ripley stages a kind of tour of
Charleston, taking the reader back in time to a world that seems remark-
ably like the tours with which this chapter opens. The city is introduced as
‘‘the symbol of the mysterious and magical, moss-hung, magnolia-scented
South’’ (167), rich with ‘‘brightly polished brass door knobs’’ and ‘‘flowers
blooming behind garden walls’’ (135). We visit the finer homes of Charles-
ton, mansions with ‘‘shining white columns’’ that make Scarlett’s knees
feel weak, and careful attention is paid to the tasteful and elegant antiques
that fill their rooms, including the exquisite sofas and quality silk uphol-
stery (137). These lovingly described venues provide shelter to Charles-
ton’s finest, and Scarlett longs to join the ranks of the ladies of the city’s
Old Guard. Once again, setting functions to underwrite white desire, here
allowing a certain elegance of manners and scenario to structure the space
for white fantasies of transcending the messiness of race and globalism at
century’s end. Gentility trumps reality.
If from the vantage point of the 1990s, Charleston, with its ‘‘Old World’’
charm, seems a more likely terrain for southern nostalgia than does Ted
Turner’s sprawling Atlanta, Ripley’s Old South portrait of the city actually
masks its emerging centrality in the global economies of the end-of-the-
century South. South Carolina actively began recruiting both foreign and
northern investors during the closing years of the Civil Rights movement,
and by the end of the 1970s, the state was drawing nearly 40 percent of
its industrial investments from outside the United States. Investors from
Japan, Italy, France, Austria, and West Germany poured into the state,
with South Carolina capturing more West German capital than any other
area outside of that country. The state’s weak labor laws, industry-friendly
tax incentives, and fierce recruitment efforts paid off, and South Caro-
lina soon stood as a key Sun Belt success story. Although the economic
slowdown of the 1980s affected the state, by the time Ripley was writ-
ing her novel, Charleston was a center of global investment. Today it is
the country’s fourth-largest container port, echoing the city’s Old South
status as shipping hub, but dealing in a new array of industrial and con-
sumer goods from rubber to textiles. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s,
increasing numbers of South Carolinians began to work for foreign cor-
porations; today only Hawaii has more international companies per capita
than South Carolina.46 State officials are busily recruiting new capital, in-
cluding the emerging Chinese and Korean markets; Charleston is also the
largest export port to South America. Thus Ripley reframes Charleston as
the genteel heart of Dixie at precisely the moment global capital flows are
transforming the economic structure of the city and the region. Although
Ripley would certainly claim otherwise, Scarlett’s attempts to delineate
the proper contours of the southern lady reference this new Charleston,
occupied by foreign dollars, as much as they reference a Charleston once
besieged by Yankees.

As the novel begins to take up the question of the southern lady most
forcefully, blackness fades further from view, erasing the historic inter-
relatedness of constructions of black and white womanhood in the era of
the novel’s setting. Black and white are thus held apart as Ripley dispatches
Scarlett to Ireland in the novel’s second half, conveniently expunging black
characters from her text. If Gone with the Wind and The Birth of a Nation
foreground racial representation, the second half of Scarlett seemingly en-
acts a blanching in which whiteness is the implicit but unspoken telos or
goal. Still, the very necessity of this narrative displacement of the racism
of the South during Reconstruction—a displacement compelled by the
text’s own separatist logic—simultaneously serves to highlight racism’s
intractability. At first glance, Scarlett may hardly seem to be about race
at all, but a closer look reveals a tale deeply concerned with securing the
meaning of whiteness in an era of multiculturalism.
Indeed, the specter of the first novel’s overt defense of plantation
owners’ rights reappears in Ireland’s seemingly white landscape at the
novel’s close. Although Scarlett is, at first, sympathetic to the fight for
Irish independence, and the text initially figures the plight of Ireland as a
conquered land as similar to that of the South (658–62), the narrative tra-
jectory of the novel finally figures the Irish revolutionaries as ungrateful
and rebellious laborers, unable to appreciate ‘‘a good landlord’’ (860). The
characterization of the Irish peasants as ‘‘so inhuman, so like . . . yowling . . .
wild beasts,’’ echoes Mitchell’s portrayals of ‘‘evil negroes,’’ collapsing her
disdain for white trash and evil blacks into the figure of a riotous tenant
farmer. Finally, the moral force of both novels rests with the propertied
landowner, for all is fair in defense of the plantation.
Interestingly, in The Wages of Whiteness, historian David Roediger points
out that early Irish immigrants to the United States were often considered
‘‘black,’’ and he tracks the process by which the working-class Irish came
to claim whiteness as an appropriate label by distancing themselves from
blacks. To the degree that it maps the ascent into the landed gentry of Irish
immigrant Gerald O’Hara, Gone with the Wind can be seen to trace a similar
‘‘whitening’’ of the Irish. Scarlett reverses this process, again ‘‘blackening’’
the Irish, who come to represent a threat to white southern femininity,
as the marauding hordes attack Scarlett, Rhett, and their daughter in the
final chapters of the novel. Still, this threat is covertly figured—that is, the
racial displacement is not foregrounded—and it is not the primary inter-
est in femininity that the text displays. Indeed, the novel selectively re-
claims aspects of Irishness, as it links Scarlett’s vitality and independence to
her Celtic roots. When mediated through Scarlett’s white southern femi-
ninity, the ‘‘wilder’’ aspects of Irishness are tamed and repurposed, severed
from their class associations. If Gone with the Wind plumbed its heroine’s
depths via associations with, and appropriations from, black characters,
the sequel’s Scarlett finds her humanity and depth via the text’s theft of
ethnic, and not racial, difference. Thus rather than mobilizing the earlier
novel’s latent and suppressed desire for cross-racial alliance, illustrating
a new capacity to imagine integration in the post–Civil Rights era, the
sequel flees from a vision of racial union, sketching instead the contours of
a blindingly white American subject, dolled up via strategic raids into the
emotional textures of ethnicity. Such an inability to imagine racial union
is a failure of many recent southern texts, illustrating our continued in-
ability as a nation to come to terms with the meaning of race in southern
history.
Although race is suppressed in the novel, Scarlett’s overt narrative ques-
tion is an inquiry into the viability of the southern lady for a new era (our
own as much as the one of the novel’s setting). On its surface, Scarlett ap-
pears to call the ideal of the southern lady into question, echoing the early
ambivalence to this figure displayed in Gone with the Wind, but like the
earlier text, Ripley’s novel finally resolves the dilemma of femininity in
favor of the lady, albeit a newly skilled and managerial version of the icon.
Early in the novel, Scarlett strives to be a lady, recalling the example of her
mother, who was ‘‘always occupied with the perpetual work required to
produce the orderly perfection that was life at Tara under her guidance’’
(33), for ‘‘Ellen O’Hara had quietly ruled the plantation’’ (39). When an
aunt comments that Scarlett had ‘‘grown up to be the image of Ellen,’’ the
narration assures us that ‘‘there was no greater compliment in the world
that anyone could pay [Scarlett]’’ (124). The novel also offers a surrogate
for Ellen in the figure of Eleanor Butler, Rhett’s mother, who smells of
lemon verbena, ‘‘the fragrance that had always been part of Ellen O’Hara’’
(130). Eleanor ‘‘was a Southern Lady . . . [and] ladies were trained from
birth to be decorative . . . [but] they were also trained to manage the in-
tricate and demanding responsibilities of huge houses . . . while making
it seem that the house ran . . . flawlessly’’ (130). This new southern lady
picks up on the earlier Scarlett’s ‘‘New Woman’’ spunk, transforming her
into a slightly veiled version of the career woman of the 1990s.
Once Scarlett moves to Ireland (where she manages her own estate),
she begins to question certain aspects of the ideal woman her mother and
Eleanor each appeared to be. Well into the story, Scarlett is enraptured

by her new daughter, redeemed from the bad mothering traits evident in
the first novel, when she realizes that she loves her daughter, Cat, more
than her mother loved her. Her insight propels her to think, ‘‘Being a
lady like her isn’t the only way to be. It isn’t even the best way to be’’
(629). Scarlett then rejects the superficial and hypocritical standards of the
people in Atlanta who deemed her unladylike, seemingly dispensing with
an interest in being a lady at all, but the text itself redeems the finer traits
of ladylike behavior for a more modern Scarlett. Indeed, Scarlett’s new-
found sense of self-worth derives precisely from her position as the head
of a new plantation, a landscape she manages with all the efficiency of the
classic plantation mistress. Thus Scarlett, much like its predecessor, ini-
tially critiques the social restrictions heaped on the southern lady, only to
triumph the ‘‘time-honored’’ traits of ideal womanhood—maternal love,
quiet strength, serenity—merging them with a strong dose of 1990s lib-
eral feminism. Scarlett insists that the ideal woman can have it all: she can
run the show, have her Cat, and get Rhett, too.
Scarlett’s gentle refiguring of the lady as self-reliant and managerial
might seem a welcome change to her status as ‘‘decorative’’ object, but
this is not an entirely new configuration of the southern lady. Through-
out the postbellum South, the ideology of the Lost Cause trumpeted the
strength of the southern lady, exalting her hard work and courage while
firmly securing her place on a pedestal. For instance, in a speech delivered
to the graduates of Franklin Female College in June 1873, the Honorable
J. W. Clapp warned that ‘‘the time may come when, like so many hapless
daughters of the South . . . you may be thrown entirely upon your own
resources; when there shall be no . . . male . . . to stand by your side.’’
Clapp urged the young women ‘‘to renounce all ostentatious display’’ and
resort to ‘‘those lessons of energy and self-reliance’’ that are the hallmarks
of each ‘‘cultivated southern woman.’’ 47 Although Clapp also hoped that
the girls would remain pure, his celebration of southern women’s man-
agement skills and inner strength coincided perfectly with the figure of
ideal southern womanhood popular in that period, a figure that both Gone
with the Wind and Scarlett rework and finally triumph. And as the popu-
larity of Scarlett and several television miniseries like The Blue and the Gray
suggest, it is precisely this figure of southern womanhood who enjoyed a
late-twentieth-century renaissance.
In my introduction, I noted historian Jack Kirby’s 1978 prediction that
visions of the Old South were waning and that Dixie’s demise within a
decade was inevitable. His forecast, of course, proved wrong, and as ma-
terial conditions in the South improved, so too did Dixie’s national image.
Central to this process was a selective racial logic that allowed for a re-
visionary revamping of southern mythologies that conveniently displaced
the racialized context of the past while cherishing the images a previous
racial economy had supported. Thus both Gone with the Wind and Scarlett
privilege the figure of the southern lady, but they do so through quite dif-
ferent narrative strategies. While I do not mean to suggest that an overt
(and often racist) racial visibility is at all preferable to the lenticular (and
still often racist) logic deployed in the post–Civil Rights era, it is crucial
to recognize that these two logics each strive to give whiteness a mean-
ing. If, as Toni Morrison suggests, whiteness is mute, meaningless, and
empty, both novels illustrate their authors’ (and their respective cultures’)
attempts to fill the category with meaning, to give it voice. Gone with the
Wind carves out whiteness’s definition by foregrounding difference and
what whiteness is not, overtly staging its fear of, and desire for, blackness.
Scarlett also struggles to give whiteness contour and content but does so by
highlighting Irish ethnicity and that mythic figure of an equally mythic all-
white past, the southern lady. We could simply dismiss the two epic tales as
racist, if differently so, and insist on the emptiness of whiteness, but little
is gained in such a move. Instead, in exploring the different ways in which
whiteness comes to voice in these stories of twentieth-century women,
we might also hear the expression of a need to understand whiteness as a
category that is not meaningless.
Scarlett’s travels to Ireland thus become not only a way to avoid rep-
resenting blackness and slavery but also an attempt, in an era that ‘‘cele-
brates’’ multiculturalism, to discern the heritage of whiteness, reclaiming
select aspects of Irishness in order to give Scarlett both spunk and a history
that is not tied to slavery. We can recognize that drive (and try to spin it
differently) while also underscoring those aspects of race that the novel
will not acknowledge. Ripley’s sequel is very much about the inability of
the United States to come to terms with the legacies of slavery and to pro-
cess the emotional registers evoked by that era. Much as in the Old South
tourism thriving in Charleston and throughout the South, the ghosts of
slavery (and its terrors) lurk beyond the margins of the story, haunting its
passages, transforming the Irish. Scarlett is driven by a desire for romance
and resolution (Scarlett finally gets Rhett), but this is ultimately a resolu-
tion without accountability or respect for a host of historical figures from
the Irish tenant farmer, to the southern slave, to the low-wage laborer in
Strom Thurmond’s 1990s South. We need new ways of imagining white-

ness and femininity in a southern frame, ways that reckon honestly with
the region’s troubled past and familiar icons.
While exploring the racial logic of each novel does suggest that to re-
claim the southern lady is a dangerous move, blinding us to other histories,
understanding the impulses behind each logic also points the way toward
better understanding the varied meanings whiteness and blackness have
had throughout the nation’s complex racial history. Neither the original
myth of Scarlett nor her sequels can account for the myriad possibili-
ties for femininity that the two tales excise, tales told by other southern
women. We might begin our explorations of race and femininity by ex-
amining these omissions, asking what other ways a southern woman might
be. What stories might Prissy or Belle Whatling or Emmie Slattery tell us
if we were to listen to them? Surely the social relations of race, class, and
gender are more complex than two figures trapped in a postcard would
suggest. These complexities may be good or bad, but nothing is gained in
not addressing them.
A whitewashed Sun Belt South conceals the extremely unequal distri-
bution of wealth across a state such as South Carolina, where counties
racked by intense poverty gain little benefit from the foreign dollars flow-
ing into the state, revealing the tragic underside to the region’s booster-
ism.48 It is easy today to recoil from the lynching of James Byrd in Texas
or from the overt racial violence that plagued areas like North Carolina
in the 1980s, but it is harder to see the connection between these acts and
the seemingly innocent embrace of a hardworking Scarlett O’Hara (or her
flesh-and-blood equivalent giving tours at Natchez’s Pilgrimage).49 What
cannot be overemphasized is that these two moments share a history and
support each other, even as they strike different registers of visibility. Al-
though the meanings of the southern lady across the twentieth century are
not fixed within a single temporal register (as some critics might suggest),
she remains an icon largely located within certain histories and certain
scenarios. To cut her free from today’s limiting and monocular racial optics
is no easy task, certainly not one achieved by Ripley’s novel. Such a real-
ization suggests the importance of turning a skeptical eye on the return
of the southern lady in contemporary culture.
I say ‘‘return’’ here because Kirby was right to predict at least a momen-
tary disappearance of popular Old South imagery. When he was writing
in the 1970s, such representations were not widely prevalent. Interested
in the fate of the southern lady in this period, I surveyed several south-
ern newspapers from the late 1960s through the early 1990s, searching for
popular journalism’s take on the southern lady and belle. I expected to find
some vestiges of the lady even in the 1970s, but I was a bit surprised by the
uniformity with which these sources erased her. Although there are several
articles about beauty contest winners, the overwhelming majority of the
1970s press items related to southern womanhood speculate on the pos-
sible fate of the Equal Rights Amendment in the South or detail interesting
‘‘firsts’’ achieved by local women (including the first female firefighters
and policewomen). While the coverage of the era certainly references
conflicts between change and tradition for southern society (with many
articles detailing local women’s feelings that the era contradicts south-
ern values), these debates are seldom framed via a discourse of Old South
femininity, and there are scant references to the belle or the lady.50 How-
ever, by the 1980s and the South’s successful recruitment of global capital,
the belle and lady have returned with a vengeance. Articles with titles such
as ‘‘A Definable Species: The Southern Lady,’’ ‘‘The Southern Belle: She’s
Alive and Well and Headed for the Presidency of IBM,’’ ‘‘Lace Is the Look
for the Well-Dressed Belle,’’ and ‘‘The Southern Belle: Not Yet Gone with
the Wind’’ abound.
Unsurprisingly, these articles send mixed messages, sometimes sug-
gesting that the belle cannot survive in modern times, sometimes insist-
ing that many southern women are ‘‘proud to be called belles.’’ In such
ambivalence about the ideals of the belle and lady, the journalistic dis-
course echoes both Gone with the Wind and Scarlett, dismissing the frivolity
of the lady in favor of the steel magnolia (a term popularized in the 1980s
by the film of the same name, a subject of chapter 3). This is not to sug-
gest that the newly emerging discourse on the belle and lady was mono-
lithic or uncomplicatedly conservative, simply an element of the decade’s
backlash against 1970s feminism, but this widespread resurgence of the
belle’s popularity would not have been possible without a simultaneous
shift toward an economy of visibility that could privilege older models
of white femininity without reference to race. Such a lenticular logic,
familiar from Scarlett and Savannah, was at once a response to the previ-
ous decades’ civil rights (and feminist) gains and one method by which the
necessity of such gains could later be called into question.
An examination of one particular article will serve to underscore that
the resurrection of the belle arose on many fronts, not all of which were
traditionally ‘‘conservative’’ ones. An April 1984 article in the New Orleans
Times Picayune shares many elements with both Scarlett and the other
articles of the 1980s: it details at great length the hard work that the south-

ern lady confronted on a daily basis, noting that she was the ‘‘archetypal
iron magnolia’’ who was ‘‘expected to take care of everything’’ on the plan-
tation. The article takes pains to stress the excellent management skills
of the mistress, particularly as it was not unusual for the master to be
away for long periods of time, leaving his wife to run things. What distin-
guishes this article from many of the others is that it explicitly identifies
this view of the southern lady—a view not too different from Scarlett’s—
as a feminist and an academic one.
The main source for the article is a ‘‘feminist . . . assistant professor’’
from Harvard, Catherine Clinton. Clinton is one of several feminist histo-
rians of the 1970s and 1980s who turned their attention to white southern
women after, in Clinton’s words, feeling ‘‘frustrated by historians who have
ignored the contributions of women to plantation life.’’ These historians
produced important work, adding a southern perspective to the wave of
feminist histories produced in the 1980s, and I do not intend to denigrate
the difficulty of the work they undertook at that particular moment. Still,
it is important to acknowledge the degree to which this work reflected
social discourses wider than those of second-wave feminism, including an
emerging logic of racial representation that narrowed the frame of refer-
ence in which they labored, separating black from white.
An example of this process surfaces in the work of Clinton, and we
might turn to her studies of the southern woman during the past twenty
years in order to highlight the limits of a historical approach that re-
mains within a lenticular frame.51 Reconstructing Dixie has repeatedly illus-
trated that the South is figured via a stock set of recurring icons, charac-
ters inhabiting stage sets of an imagined gentility and charm that makes
other mobilizations and other emotional scripts difficult to imagine. These
familiar figures certainly infuse popular mythologies of the South, from
Gone with the Wind to plantation tourism, but they also perform central
work within the halls of more academic history, shaping how scholarly
work narrates our plantation past. If Lost Cause ideologies inflected aca-
demic histories early in the twentieth century, illustrating a kind of perme-
ability between popular and ‘‘official’’ histories, how do powerful images
of southernness continue to impact more recent historical endeavors?
Clinton’s The Plantation Mistress (1982) is a richly detailed account of the
lives of white women on plantations in the South before the war. The book
draws its portrait by turning to a vast wealth of letters, diaries, and mem-
oirs produced by antebellum women. In her portrayal of these women’s
lives, Clinton stresses the difficulty of their existence, pointing out the
hardships they faced and the regular and difficult work they undertook.
Clinton sees the book as a corrective to the myths of southern femininity,
as a challenge to the moonlight-and-magnolias South, but the book finally
serves to reinforce these very myths. Although a fascinating record of ante-
bellum women’s own words, The Plantation Mistress is flawed to the degree
that it takes these women’s words at face value, reading them as accurate
depictions of daily life unmediated by cultural ideologies of the time, in-
cluding popular understandings of womanhood. What such an approach
cannot get at is the imaginary force of southern femininity as an ideal that
influences these women’s understandings and narrativizations of their own
lives. This force of southern femininity is also the very force that sets the
stage for Clinton’s book to feed into another era’s (our own’s) popular-
ization of the ideals of the belle and lady. In not acknowledging that such
myths shaped the tales that the women it chronicles told, The Plantation
Mistress is unable to recognize the limits of their experiential accounts,
particularly when the women raise race as an issue.
For example, in elaborating on the hard work that plantation mistresses
performed, Clinton uses the women’s own versions of the labor performed
by slaves to argue that ‘‘the institution of slavery made the domestic work of
plantation mistresses more difficult’’ (21) and goes so far as to suggest that
in reality, the mistress was ‘‘the slave of the slaves’’ (16). Hazel Carby has
pointed out that memoirs and diaries should not be accepted at face value
but should instead be read ‘‘as representing and reconstructing history for
us from particular viewpoints under specific historical conditions’’ (23).
Carby goes on to argue that work like Clinton’s is ‘‘not situated within the
wider webs of social relations in which the ‘everyday’ is embedded’’ (30)
and calls for a recognition of the dialectical relationship that existed be-
tween slave women and white women. Because Clinton never posits black
and white women’s experiences as dialectically connected (and rarely ad-
dresses African American experiences at all, except as they appear in white
women’s accounts), The Plantation Mistress denies the reality of racial dif-
ference. When the experiences of slave women are mentioned, it is via
a leveling move that equates black and white women under the univer-
sal sign ‘‘woman,’’ arguing that all women were uniformly oppressed by
slavery, thus figuring slavery as largely the evildoing of white men.
Of course, much second-wave feminist scholarship could be faulted for
failing to take account of racial differences or to address the lives and con-
cerns of African American women. The point here is not simply to critique
this scholarship for ‘‘missing race’’ but to suggest that this ability to miss

race derives from a larger cultural shift that helped produce race’s invisi-
bility. The same logics of racial visibility that cut the southern woman free
from her historical ties to blackness in novels such as Ripley’s or in post–
Civil Rights era tourism also impacted the emerging histories of southern
women characteristic of much of second-wave feminism. They are of the
same moment and often exhibit a similar inability to imagine racial union,
even while driven by different political agendas. Clinton’s more recent re-
search strives to rectify the shortcomings of her first book but remains
trapped within the racial paradigms of that earlier work.
In 1995, nearly fifteen years after The Plantation Mistress, Clinton pub-
lished Tara Revisited: Women, War, and the Plantation Legend, an endeavor that
in many ways can be read as a corrective of the earlier volume. If her first
book is structured via a racial logic in which the postcard is frozen on the
white woman (the logic of Savannah and the Irish portion of Scarlett), Tara
Revisited presents both the postcard’s images—the plantation-bound lady
and the mammy—but is still unable to hold these two images together in
a dialectical relationship, to merge them within one frame. Almost every
chapter of the work obeys the structural logic of the lenticular postcard,
first recounting white experience, then tacking on the experiences of Afri-
can Americans, an additive strategy that cannot explore the linkages be-
tween the histories it explores. Clinton refers to her text as a mosaic, but
the economies of visibility that frame the work, while holding each piece
in individual sharp focus, can never push the overall interconnected image
into view. At moments in this work, particularly its last chapter, Clin-
ton does begin to unpack the power of discursive constructions of gender
and race, but often the work of popular culture serves only as illustra-
tions for the ‘‘real’’ history she charts. The South as a rhetorical figure is
hardly explored, particularly in its power to join various interpretations
of the past.
Chapter 1, ‘‘Before Fort Sumter,’’ provides a precise example of the
additive strategy at work in much of the book. Although the section be-
gins with the insight ‘‘that a complex interdependency developed between
myth and reality’’ in the antebellum South (27), this perception does not
affect the remainder of the chapter. After this quick nod to the power of
myth, Clinton quickly moves on to detail the lives of ‘‘outstanding women
of the South’s early days’’ (29), turning once again to the diaries and mem-
oirs of The Plantation Mistress. Unlike her earlier book, Tara Revisited in-
cludes the words of slave women as well, for Clinton does cite the slave
narrative of Harriet Jacobs in ‘‘Before Fort Sumter.’’ But simply adding in
the voices of black women (while certainly an improvement on the first
book) does little to help the reader understand the complex interaction
between myth and reality that shaped both black and white women’s nar-
rative strategies. Given the wide availability of research by scholars such
as Carby and Painter, this neglect seems particularly telling.
Additionally, Clinton’s latter work continues to suggest that the rape
of slave women by white masters constituted ‘‘affairs’’ or ‘‘liaisons,’’ im-
plying an act of choice or free will on the part of slave women. Likewise
Clinton’s linguistic style replicates the first book’s equation of white and
black women’s plights as she repeatedly highlights the ways in which white
women ‘‘were forced into partnership’’ with white men in the Old South.
Although she briefly points out that to see the plantation mistress as ‘‘the
most complete slave’’ of all overlooks the reality of black women’s lives,
her chapter lovingly details the hard work and great skill of the plantation
mistress. Thus the narrative drive of the book is to highlight once again
the strength of the southern lady and to insist that in the Old South, ‘‘Cot-
ton was king, white men ruled, and both white women and slaves served
the same master’’ (42). Because Clinton’s work never explores the dialec-
tical paths by which white and black women’s lives were intertwined, her
account can never adequately acknowledge white women’s complicity in
the degradation of their male and female slaves. Ironically, it is easier to
discern this interrelation in a work such as Gone with the Wind.
Clinton’s final chapter, ‘‘The Road to Tara,’’ provides the most detailed
examination of the myths that shape our popular memories of the past. If
earlier chapters reference popular culture largely by including film stills as
supplementary (and unconnected) ‘‘illustrations’’ of historical ‘‘fact,’’ this
last section does begin to explore the longevity of the plantation myth,
from its origin in antebellum novels to its perpetuation in twentieth-
century films. The chapter also provides a strong reiteration of the degree
to which the figures of lady and mammy are linked in this mythology. Yet
even when Clinton focuses on popular ideologies of the Old South, she
continues to insist that ‘‘they remain fictional rather than historical rep-
resentations’’ and urges a turn to ‘‘the wide range of documentary sources
available to illuminate women’s endurance and adventure’’ (212). Here
popular culture and the ideologies it fuels remain distinct from ‘‘real’’ his-
tory. They cloud our perceptions of ‘‘actual’’ plantation life and can form
fascinating histories in their own right, but their intricate influences on
that history remain unexamined. This inability to envision the circuits of
exchange between popular and academic versions of the South parallels

an additive strategy of representing race and gender that fails to discern
the deeply connected registers of race and gender in southern contexts. In
the introduction to Taking Off the White Gloves (1998), Clinton, along with
coauthor Michele Gillespie, maintains that ‘‘we have diminished racism
through raised consciousness and serious commitment to inclusion and
changing values during the past quarter century. We must demand equally
strenuous efforts to eradicate sexism, which scars and distorts our appre-
ciation of our past.’’ 52 This tendency to rank oppressions along a sliding
scale not only denies the reality of racism today but also exacerbates at-
tempts to see racism and sexism as complex, connected, and continuing,
as much issues for today’s South (and today’s historians) as for Souths past.
Robyn Wiegman has argued that contemporary ‘‘feminism has been
itself tied to an integrationist ethos that likewise carries, as in the popular
realm, its own narrative of historical transcendence’’ (American Anatomies,
16). In such an ethos, race is a category to be tacked on to gender, an ex-
ample of a lenticular logic that can never understand ‘‘either the cultural
dynamics of race and gender or their various and contradictory historical
productions’’ (9). In the trajectory from The Plantation Mistress to Tara Revis-
ited, Clinton clearly seems motivated by a desire to bring black and white
together, a desire for a racial union we have already seen evidenced in Gone
with the Wind and other artifacts of twentieth-century southern culture.
Nonetheless this desire gets tripped up by an inability to imagine a con-
nection that moves beyond the contours of white desire and emotion. In
a fairly autobiographical essay published in 1995, Clinton notes her work
organizing panels where black and white scholars might come together
and calls for more open discussion on difficult questions of race and gen-
der in southern studies, hoping to overcome ‘‘our inability to share’’ across
races.53 However, the article focuses extensively on Clinton’s own pain at
experiencing ‘‘constant and persistent reverse discrimination’’ (242) as a
white woman working in African American studies, equating her situation
with that of ‘‘a black man trying to hail a cab in Manhattan’’ (239). She en-
courages the exploration of complex issues around stereotypes and racism
but largely situates this endeavor on a personal terrain, failing to examine
larger institutional structures that prevent such work or the long tradition
of work by black scholars who preceded her. Here her own agency is fore-
grounded at the expense of a larger analysis of the workings of power, a
move that replays the limits of much 1980s feminist scholarship that seeks
to resuscitate the white southern lady. In that work, the drive to claim
historical agency for white southern women focuses on their skill, hard
work, and inventiveness to such a degree that it overshadows how larger
networks of power are also at work. As Drew Faust’s work has amply
illustrated, white women’s historical agency in the South supported other
racial and racist power structures, even as it worked to amend those sys-
tems vis-à-vis gender. In celebrating the plantation mistress’s cunning,
Clinton and other feminist historians and literary scholars offered up a
deracinated southern lady who was uncannily similar to the lady who was
being widely embraced across popular culture.
An interesting example of the porous boundaries between academic
and popular histories occurs in that court of public opinion known as
Amazon.com, amid the readers’ reviews of Clinton’s The Plantation Mis-
tress. Whereas Clinton insists that her research is a challenge to the myths
of the old plantation South, her readers instead deploy the work to re-
imagine that myth. Connie Boone writes: ‘‘I am positive that the next
time I watch Scarlett threaten Miz Ellen’s portieres, I will applaud her
tenacity for taking charge of her life instead of thinking ‘the green dress
is coming.’ . . . After reading The Plantation Mistress I want to compliment
Scarlett for her determination, instead of slapping her for being a selfish
brat.’’ Another reviewer notes that ‘‘far from a life of leisure, women were
really prisoners of the southern male system.’’ Rather than dismiss these
readers as incorrect, as failed analysts, we might instead see within these
reviews a bit of the staying power of the figure of the white southern lady,
a figure that cannot be challenged or fully understood without a focus on
her complex racial and popular history. Simply celebrating the managerial
skills of southern womanhood won’t take us very far. We need to think
long and hard about what this drive to recuperate the plantation mistress
reveals about 1980s feminism. In an era marked by a powerful lenticular
logic that cannot frame black and white together, the New South focus on
the Old South’s feminine ideals, even when motivated by feminism, plays
into a dynamic that helps secure the continued invisibility of race and race
relations in both their social and their discursive dimensions. In this par-
ticular tour through the southern past, the plantation home once again
overshadows the slave quarters as the romantic lovers of history dance
on by.
g R E C A S T I N G T H E O L D P L A N TAT I O N H O M E
If racial representation in the post–Civil Rights era seems categorized by
two forms of a lenticular logic—the separatist (as in Scarlett’s all-white

Charleston) and the additive (as in Tara Revisited )—this is not the only
game in town, even if it’s the dominant one. Historians such as Tera
Hunter, Glenda Gilmore, Drew Faust, Robin D. G. Kelley, Nell Painter,
and Elsa Barkley Brown refuse such figurations, instead mining the com-
plex interrelations of race, gender, and place in southern experience.
Artists too offer powerful counternarratives, creatively reconfiguring the
lines of power in the plantation household. If popular narratives and schol-
arly narratives exist in continuum, cutting across low-, middle-, and high-
brow forms, this continuum also offers up alternative images, images
deeply engaged with mainstream representations of the Old South. Such
work powerfully reimagines familiar southern terrain, forging new access
routes to the past that need not repress the national traumas over slavery.
I first encountered Kara Walker’s high-art cutouts as I toured the world
of the modern art museum, hallowed halls quite far removed from the
River Road plantations I’d also wandered. Nonetheless Walker’s imagery
speaks bluntly to those other tours, directly engaging the South’s plan-
tation past and staging a confrontational encounter with the repressed
desires, fantasies, and longings embedded in that history. Walker revisits
the past via both her technique and her subject matter, installing large
tableaux of the antebellum South comprised of black cutouts, referenc-
ing the popular nineteenth-century art of the silhouette. But this is the
past with a difference, for Walker vividly foregrounds the repressed di-
mensions of our recent, deracinated, genteel encounters with dear ole’
Dixie. Her tableaux function as immersive environments, drawing the
viewer into a world starkly cut from black and white, speaking loudly
back to Scarlett. Details from her Emancipation Proclamation, 2000 forcibly
limn the relationship between the southern lady and her slaves, taking up
the interrelation of black and white in a novel like Gone with the Wind and
drawing new conclusions. In one section, a black cutout of a slave woman
quite literally supports the plantation mistress, carrying her aloft on her
head, billowing skirts and all. Another section shows a southern belle lean-
ing pensively against a tree trunk that also supports an ax. Littering the
ground about her feet are the severed heads of nine slaves. In both these
images, the white woman gently rests a hand on her face, highlighting her
fragility and sensitivity, feminine emotions wrought from the bodies and
lives of the black ‘‘supporting’’ characters. In the 1997 installation, Slavery!,
Slavery!, a haughty belle prances away from her plantation home across a
moss-drenched landscape; a small black child follows behind her, spraying
perfume up her skirt, presumably covering her stench. In her hand, she
carries a mask in the shape of a black woman’s face. Across these works, the
lady’s masquerades are positioned in tableaux that violently reveal their
stakes. No need to read between the lines (or images) here: Walker’s art
is blunt, in-your-face, and controversial.54
Still, the work is not simple. The controversy arises largely from
Walker’s complex portraits of the antebellum South. While the violence
of southern society is clearly registered, particularly as it impacts the black
body, her projects also explore the psychosexual dimensions of south-
ern race relations, moving beyond an essentialist notion of black victim
and white oppressor to engage the messier, less politically correct forms
of desire crisscrossing the master/slave relation. From the seeming sim-
plicity of the silhouettes, Walker extracts the complicated contours of the
love/hate relationship that characterized cross-racial connection in the
South. Born in California, Walker grew up in Atlanta, in the shadow of
Stone Mountain, and lived the complexity of the South’s interracial past,
including her own 1980s encounter with the kkk as a black teen with a
white boyfriend.55 Amid the orgy of violence and the strange fruits of the
southern mise-en-scène, the artist asks us to confront the myriad ways in
which we consume the other, thus reconfiguring the minstrel show for a
new time and place.
In his astute study of nineteenth-century minstrelsy, Eric Lott unpacks
‘‘the haunted realm of racial fantasy’’ that such performances masked. In
their intricate enacting of love and theft, desire and hate, these shows
allowed white audiences both to consume and to distance the other,
powered as they were by a ‘‘roiling jumble of need, guilt and disgust.’’ 56 Be-
cause the minstrel performance constantly evoked the threat of transgres-
sion, the comedies ‘‘went great strides to tame the ‘black’ threat through
laughter or ridicule.’’ Walker slices away the possibility for such a comic
release, refusing the pleasures and escapes the minstrel show offered the
white spectator. Rather, her images assault viewers head-on, bringing
(white) museum-goers face-to-face with the histories of their unconscious
and repressed racial fantasies, skillfully detailing the stakes of a national
refusal to acknowledge either interracial desire or its repression.
Walker’s figures powerfully and painfully undermine the lenticular
logic of the 3-D postcard. She releases the hidden images behind the
smiling faces of Scarlett and Mammy, violently integrating black and white
—a process literalized in the starkly scissored black-and-white choreog-
raphy of her cutout installations. There’s an explicitness unleashed by the
seeming simplicity of her outlines, abstractions recalling Rorschach blots

Scenes 18 and 26 from Kara Walker’s The Emancipation Approximation (1999–
2000) powerfully reconfigure the relationship of black female slave to white
plantation mistress. Courtesy Jenkins Sikkema Editions, New York.
that make manifest the nation’s racial neuroses. Walker returns to the
overt racial logics of Gone with the Wind, positioning mistress and slave in
bold relief, but she flips the script of Mitchell’s novel, delineating a hyper-
visible blackness that is intricately wed to whiteness, foregrounding the
interrelatedness of black and white in the plantation (and the contempo-
rary) imaginary, refusing a lenticular logic. Her tableaux work as emo-
tional processors, deploying irony to burn through southern sentiment,
making a nostalgia for plantation life difficult to sustain. But Walker’s irony
doesn’t coolly distance the viewer from the work; rather, the viewer is
drawn in and implicated in the tableaux, pushed down a path that Rivi-
ere feared to tread. Here miscegenation, rape, desire, pleasure, brutality,
and tenderness don’t haunt the margins: they are front and center, wash-
ing over and engaging the spectator, encouraging a working through of
traumatic histories.
Walker’s tableaux are not simply about the past. In her speculations
about her position as the ‘‘new Negro’’ of the white art establishment,
Walker pointedly connects her situation both to white control over black
bodies during slavery and to previous generations of black artists who
worked for white patrons. Her recent piece, Cut, is a life-size self-portrait
of the artist as a young antebellum black woman leaping joyfully into the
air. The graceful movement and playful abandon of the figure are harshly
checked by the blood spraying from the woman’s wrists, freshly sliced open
by the straight razor she deftly wields. The artist, both in this piece and in
interviews, comments on her attempts to control her work and her image,
noting that she ‘‘made up’’ racist situations in her work because ‘‘in order
to have a real connection with my history, I had to be somebody’s slave.
But I was in control: That’s the difference.’’ 57 As her work circulates among
wealthy white collectors, she struggles with these issues of control, re-
playing antebellum struggles over who would define the meaning of black
women’s lives and work, but trying to replay them with a difference.
If Walker deploys irony to recast the plantation past for contemporary
consumption, Octavia Butler’s speculative fiction Kindred (1979) strikes a
different emotional register in confronting the same antebellum terrain.
The novel literalizes the concept of traveling back in time as its African
American heroine, Dana, is mysteriously transported from her life as a Los
Angeles writer in 1976 to antebellum Maryland, shifted back into a com-
plex intersection of race, place, and history. Over the course of the novel,
Dana repeatedly returns to the past, called back in time whenever her
white forebear, Rufus Weylin, is endangered, hurled forward when her
own life is threatened. The work speaks back to other currents in popular
culture, sketching a vivid counterhistory and new genealogies of south-
ern diasporic blackness. Kindred quite literally takes on Gone with the Wind,
as Dana, desperate to arm herself with the knowledge of history during a
brief return to the present, first picks up and then rejects Mitchell’s epic
because given her recent visit to the plantation South, ‘‘its version of happy
darkies in tender loving bondage was more than [she] could stand’’ (116).
During her first return to 1976, she also notes that ‘‘somehow, tomorrow
would be better’’ (19), subtly calling to mind Scarlett O’Hara’s frequent
refrain. Butler’s fiction also engages other artifacts of popular and liter-
ary culture, from antebellum slave narratives to Roots, imaginatively re-
constructing black slave agency, southern kinship, and plantation geogra-
phies.58 The novel and its protagonist actively pursue both mainstream and
alternative histories, comprising a rich compendium of antebellum truths
and fictions.
As Dana (and occasionally her white husband, Kevin) shuttle back and
forth across the centuries, the stakes of the contemporary fascination with
televisual and touristic histories are painstakingly revealed. As Dana tries
to explain her disappearance to her husband when she first returns to the
present, she can’t quite ‘‘fix’’ her experience, noting, ‘‘It’s becoming like
something I saw on television’’ (17). Yet as the novel progresses, this flicker-
ing history takes on a brutal veracity, displacing, via its material realities,
the comforts of the twentieth century. On witnessing a horrifying beat-
ing, the first of many she will observe or endure, Dana confides, ‘‘I had
seen people beaten on television and in the movies. . . . But I hadn’t lain
nearby and smelled their sweat or heard them pleading and praying’’ (36).
As she navigates the past, trying desperately to stay alive, tv’s histories
will not suffice. Moving beyond the screen, Butler propels her heroine into
strategic tours of the past, journeys described as both ‘‘trips’’ and ‘‘visits.’’
When Kevin laments their temporal destination, noting that ‘‘there are so
many fascinating times we could have gone back to visit’’ (77), Dana in-
stead underscores the racial stakes of his imagined mobility. Dana’s trips
immerse her in the past, drawing her ‘‘all the way into eighteen nine-
teen’’ and its plantation households (101). The reader, too, enters into this
immersive experience, propelled along by the narrative, touring the Old
South, but in a manner quite distinct from the tours I took along River
Road. Rather, Kindred stages an understanding of slavery that, not unlike
Walker’s tableaux, positions the reader amid its horrors and complexities,
here unveiling the black woman’s line of sight, locking us in to her unique

point of view. Dana is our tour guide, powerfully placing us in the scene,
into a past that becomes ‘‘undeniably real’’ (20).
Butler’s sojourn in southern history allows her to reconfigure the plan-
tation household, suggesting the limits to the magnolia-white tours of Oak
Alley. The slaves do not haunt the margins of this plantation past: they
form its very center. Here the slave cabins are intact, and the ghosts of Oak
Alley come to voice, calling into question portraits of a genteel South. In
Kindred’s Maryland, the antiques and furnishings that accessorize today’s
plantation mise-en-scène are exposed as key ciphers in brutal economies
of power when the slave Sarah explains to Dana that ‘‘the fancy things that
you see in that house now’’ were purchased through the sale of ‘‘my babies’’
(95). Sarah’s rage and anguish reposition the material objects of plantation
life, uncovering the bodies and labor they conceal.
The novel also provides a new and insightful portrait of the geogra-
phies of slavery, sketching both the regional differences that categorized
slave practices and the varied zones of the plantation itself, zones affording
different possibilities for autonomy or resistance. If Kindred maps the spa-
tiality of the plantation economy, it also delineates the ways in which slaves
and freed blacks negotiated those spaces, drawing a complex portrait of
the big house, the fields, neighboring towns, and the region. As such, Kin-
dred allows us to think about the ‘‘boundedness of power, the meaning of
lines, and what it meant to cross a line.’’ 59 In illustrating Kevin’s, Dana’s,
and different slaves’ relative mobility and access to spaces, the novel the-
matizes the ways in which the sites of the plantation materially controlled
the movements and freedoms of black and white bodies. These spaces also
staged danger-crossed zones of intimate contact between slaves and mas-
ters, particularly within the confines of the big house, while also affording
small spaces of limited autonomy to black men and women within the
meager walls of the slave cabins.
For instance, in the slave quarters or detached kitchen of the Weylin
estate, Dana finds brief moments of kinship with fellow slaves, carving out
spheres for fleeting hopes and possibilities. She also comes to know the
rage, anguish, wit, and dignity of the slaves as they come together in these
partially segregated places that allowed a momentary respite from the
masquerades of servility performed for the household’s whites. However,
the sanctity of these sites of solidarity is repeatedly violated, as whites in-
vade the spaces, enforcing their will. These spatial configurations revealed
a complex and intricate politics, structuring varied practices of resistance
and accommodation. Indeed, while Kindred insists that for slaves, the Old
South was, finally, a ‘‘true’’ ‘‘horror story’’ (75), the novel also reminds
us that slaves actively resisted these horrors via a diverse array of strate-
gies and flexible literacies. The novel’s slaves and freed blacks are skilled
navigators, reading a complex social geography, no longer simply a back-
drop for white desires. Others quite literally read and write, inscribing
themselves, as Dana’s ancestor Hagar had, into family Bibles and thus into
history. In fact, the skills of the slaves far surpass Dana’s more ‘‘contem-
porary’’ learning, illustrating their specialized knowledges, tenacity, and
will to survive. The slaves of Butler’s speculative fiction emerge as deeply
moral, if conflicted, beings, possessed of an interiority missing in the por-
traits of Gone with the Wind, its sequel, and many popular and academic
histories.
The Weylin plantation is also an interracial world, a world in which
black and white are as deeply imbricated as they were among the O’Haras.
However, in this world, the plantation mistress is no longer the center-
piece of the plantation economy, displaced as she is by a variety of figures of
black femininity. Butler brilliantly pivots our view of the plantation home,
unfixing its focus on the (white) lady of the house, and instead centering
on Dana, Sarah, and Alice. The mistress, Margaret Weylin, remains part
of the picture, but she is confined to a supporting role. From this position,
she still exerts a great deal of power across the household, ‘‘complaining
because she couldn’t find anything to complain about’’ (81), orchestrat-
ing black bodies as she ‘‘managed’’ her home, doing very little while rush-
ing everywhere. As in Walker’s tableaux, the mistress’s movements are
enabled by black labor. The novel also traces the deforming pressures of
slavery on this white woman, noting her well-honed practice of ‘‘not notic-
ing’’ the light-skinned slave children around the estate who resembled
her husband, a ‘‘not seeing’’ whose repression was released in her often
brutal, erratic, and demeaning treatment of the slave women and their
progeny. This insistence on the forced miscegenations of the Old South
stands in stark contrast to the refusals of Gone with the Wind (and its sequel)
to acknowledge this southern reality. Alice, Dana, and Sarah actively re-
sist Margaret’s will to power, revealing the happy, grinning mammy for
the white construct that she is. Further, in detailing the complex choices
that a woman like Sarah faced, Butler asks us to rethink our view of the
mammy as simply accommodating white desires.60
Not only does Kindred delineate the intricate contours of black female
subjectivity, but it also underscores white refusal to recognize the unique-
ness of black identity. Rufus, by the novel’s end, has merged Dana, his

sometime savior, and Alice, his forced lover, into one woman in ‘‘his crazy
head’’ (229), refusing to respect their differences, unable to distinguish
clearly between them in the intensity of his desires. After Alice kills herself
in a final refusal of his control, he turns to Dana as a ‘‘natural’’ substitute for
his sexual advances. The relationship between Dana and Rufus is a multi-
dimensional one, in many ways the central pairing of the novel, allowing
Butler to navigate the intricate dimensions of interracial contact in the
antebellum South. The novel dynamically explores issues of control, first
presenting Rufus as a child who ‘‘conjures’’ up Dana as a kind of guard-
ian angel, captive to his whims. Although Rufus is not at first aware of his
ability to produce Dana’s appearances, Dana recognizes that she is cap-
tive to a process that she cannot control, forced to play a supporting (and
life-enabling) role to a young white master, caught up in his life much as
Mammy was caught in Scarlett’s. Trapped in the antebellum South, she is
positioned as Rufus’s protector; as his father observes to Dana, ‘‘You can
feel pain—and you can die. Remember that and do your job. Take care of
your master’’ (206).
If Dana is called back in time via unconscious white desire, she is none-
theless a complex figure, resistant to, yet also implicated in, the machina-
tions of antebellum life. Her body, and the bodies of other slaves, function
as nodal points—sites of both oppression and desire—and the relations
between black and white are neither neat nor easy to assess. She struggles
with the control that others exercise over her, recognizing the spiraling
dance of interdependency in which she and Rufus are engaged, noting, ‘‘I
don’t know whether I need him or not’’ (247). If the character is unsure,
the novel is not: Dana and Rufus are bound together, united by ‘‘some
matching strangeness’’ in their very beings (29). Rufus wants Dana around,
and she finds that she wants to give him comfort, particularly as a young
boy. She takes him on as a kind of project, hoping to befriend him, sculpt-
ing him into a kinder, gentler plantation master, reworking the tropes of
Uncle Remus. As Rufus grows into adulthood, revealing how hard it is to
remake a man, the pair are still caught up in a protracted and mutual tango
of disgust and desire, need and hatred, attraction and repulsion. Dana is
again and again surprised by her capacity to care for her tormentor (203,
224), but she also fights against him, at one point slicing her wrists in order
to escape to the future.
If Walker’s installations paraded the psychosexual dimensions of Old
South society in black and white, Kindred also enters this terrain, but via
a fierce and empathetic intimacy. Perhaps shockingly, Butler’s novel por-
trays the emotional (and physical) disfigurations wrought by slavery, pro-
viding an access route to both black and white pain, noting that ‘‘slavery of
any kind fostered strange relationships’’ (230). While clearly delineating
the lines of power in the plantation household, the novel does not sidestep
the messier terrains of affection or intimacy, illustrating both Rufus’s love
for black women (Alice and Dana) and his love’s destructive consequences.
Dana does finally sever her ties to Rufus, killing him and freeing her-
self from the 1800s, losing her arm in the process. But she does not free
herself from the past; rather, Rufus and antebellum Maryland stay with
her, haunting her like a phantom limb. The relationship of Dana and Rufus
is mirrored in the relationship of Dana and her husband Kevin, another
interracial pairing limned by the novel. In tracking the different effects
of the past on each of the twentieth-century characters, the novel mines
the differences between black and white while also insisting on shared
ground. Although Kevin’s white skin clearly affords him privileges dur-
ing their journeys to the past, he is trapped there for much longer than
Dana, a time that both tempts him (he notes, much to his wife’s horror,
that he might be able to get used to the era) and finally marks and changes
him (Dana later learns of his work in the North on behalf of the Under-
ground Railroad). Thus Kindred explores the making of both white and
black identity, of resistance and accommodation, of hope and the loss of
hope. If Kevin could be transformed progressively by his sojourn in the
South, Rufus is finally trapped in the world the planters built, unable to
escape becoming his father’s son, despite Dana’s tutoring. Butler asks us to
think about how family and culture reproduce hatred and power, sculpt-
ing Rufus as a ‘‘man of his time’’ and dulling the sensibilities of slaves. But
the novel also figures other trajectories, paths to different futures forged
from connection, courage, and risk, both physical and emotional. These
paths crisscross white and black, field hand and house slave, South and
North, rich and poor. They are not stable lines of flight, but they are worth
exploring.
The novel also links past and present, refusing the comforts of distance.
Structurally, past and present collide in the narrative, melded via the con-
ceit of time travel. Metaphorically, the novel also suggests how far we have
to go, subtly connecting then and now, calling into question the meaning
of freedom in the bicentennial year of 1976. Dana begins to have trouble
discerning past from present, particularly when back in Los Angeles. The
‘‘comfortable’’ distances between Maryland and L.A. blur, making it hard
‘‘to smooth things out’’ and to distance the reality of slavery, perceptually

linking then and now from the characters’ points of view. Other elements
of 1976 also call history to mind. When Dana first meets Kevin, she is
employed by a blue-collar temp agency that her coworkers have dubbed
the ‘‘slave market,’’ a place where laborers are barely visible to employers,
existing on the margins of the American economy, ‘‘nonpeople rented for
a few hours’’ (53). Other productive linkages are forged, tracing similari-
ties between Nazi Germany, contemporary South Africa, and America’s
past and present. The novel plumbs the racism in Kevin’s family, examin-
ing his sister’s switch from childhood friendships with African Americans
to her marriage to an overtly racist husband. Here the ascension of Cauca-
sian adults into zones of white privilege and power is underscored. Dana’s
grandparents also reject Kevin, hurt that she has married a white man.
Yet both Kevin and Dana move elsewhere, taking their pasts into different
futures, and this movement matters.
It is also crucial that the characters retain their histories even as they
transform them, recognizing that both customs and homeplace speak to
and through them in important ways. Dana is startled by similarities be-
tween Alice’s slave funeral and the L.A. funerals of her childhood, sur-
prised at the links existing across temporal and geographic distances. She
is even more surprised by her powerful attraction to the Weylin planta-
tion, the ease with which she is lured into thinking of this ‘‘alien, dangerous
place’’ as her home (190). Writing in the 1970s, Butler was exploring the
complex meanings for African Americans of a southern homeplace at pre-
cisely the moment they were beginning to return to the region for the
first time since the great migration. Much like Dana, this generation of
returning blacks wrestled with what it meant to be drawn to a south-
ern home when that home was also the site of such trauma and tragedy,
a sense of southern place quite different from that marketed in the River
Road plantation tours or Ripley’s nostalgic portraits of Charleston.61 Kin-
dred deploys a radically integrative strategy, refusing to separate black and
white or past and present, never assigning the horrors of slavery to distant
times. Slavery is carried into the present, in the marked, scarred bodies of
both Dana and Kevin, but its traumas are also processed, worked through,
dealt with, faced full-on. It is precisely this processing that underwrites
the novel’s capacity to imagine empathy and meaningful racial union.
In reimagining the plantation past, both Kara Walker and Octavia Butler
trouble the strategies of visibility that often accompany revisionary histo-
ries. Both artists do not seek simply to ‘‘add in’’ black bodies, recognizing
instead the complex stakes of racial visibility, refusing the easy comforts of
the lenticular. As Butler underscores, being black and visible in the ante-
bellum South was to be at risk, subject to the ever-present brutalities of
the plantation household. Escaping this South meant escaping the hyper-
visibility of the auction block, moving into freedom through invisibility,
stealth, and cunning, traveling underground. Walker confronts the con-
trolling hypervisibility of blackness in today’s mediascape, an economy of
visibility that, in the words of Stephen Michael Best, allows white audi-
ences a ‘‘surreptitious, vicarious occupation’’ of black bodies.62 Here black-
ness is on parade—largely via televised sports and entertainment—but in
a highly circumscribed fashion fueled by the visual logics of late capital-
ism. Blackness is singled out, endlessly recirculated for white consump-
tion, a stream of representation that works to counter claims of systemic
racism (‘‘See, Michael Jordan’s at the top of the game: how can America be
racist?’’) while locating blackness in contained realms largely apart from
whiteness, replaying the fixity of the postcard’s logic. Walker confronts
this hypervisibility of blackness by linking in-your-face black bodies both
to history and to whiteness, refusing a visual logic of rigid separation. In-
deed, she helps us to realize the degree to which the contemporary hyper-
visibility of black bodies—a privileging of an oversaturated blackness—is
but another manifestation of a lenticular logic, a refusal to see connection
or relation while fixating on particular modes of racial imagery. Lenticular
logics are about fixity and immobility; they preclude movement and anni-
hilate connection. In their own ways, Butler and Walker refuse this game
of separation, pursuing other paths and imaging a new regional episteme.63
Both artists orchestrate a collision between past and present, confront-
ing slavery via different emotional registers but effecting similar ends. In
the environments they build, the relationship between identity and differ-
ence is reconfigured. Identity is neither ‘‘authentic’’ nor ‘‘originary,’’ but
grounded in history and malleable in its contact with experience and dif-
ference. In their acknowledgment of the messiness of interracial existence
and the emotional costs of carefully policed boundaries, they chart a com-
plex relationship to the other, a relationship whose intricacy cannot be
fully acknowledged in Gone with the Wind ’s overt fixing of black and white
or in today’s touristic drive to isolate the southern lady in all her whiteness
and imagined glory. Each woman also addresses a national nostalgia for
the South as a region populated with familiar figures, reframing what our
visits to this terrain might mean. They do not embrace the region, nor do
they totally abandon it. There is an ambivalence in each artist, but there

is never cynicism or complete despair. Both Walker and Butler tread on
touchy ground, exploring southern stage sets of miscegenation and the
intense emotional struggles enacted there, layering white on black, and
black on white. In their worlds, it is impossible to tour the plantation with-
out encountering the brutal realities of slavery, ridiculous to embrace a
belle cut free from this past. Their history is alive and gripping, but it is
certainly not genteel. They show us how to tell a different South.
2.
‘ ‘ B OT H K I N D S O F A R M S ’ ’
The Civil War in the Present

g
The room darkens—the
battle of Chickamauga is little more
than a distant flash of light. Moments
later, the tiny city of Chattanooga is
illuminated, and our story begins. . . .
Our hearts were pounding at each
turn, and the show is well
worth the money.
—From an Internet review
of the Battles for Chattanooga
Museum
g TO U R I N G T H E C I V I L WA R
Catherine Clinton’s chapter on the plantation mistress is entitled ‘‘Before
Fort Sumter,’’ and in both title and content, it brings together its account
of the ladies of the Old South with a narrative turn toward the Civil War.
Such a linkage is familiar from contemporary popular culture, where the
cost of the war is almost always figured as the loss of the grandeur of the
plantation past. In the move toward the Civil War, the plantation mistress
is replaced by the soldier, and Clinton notes that ‘‘stories of brother against
brother have long been told’’ (Tara Revisited, 49). Clinton goes on to argue
that ‘‘the romance of war, in all its hypothetical splendor, vanished with the
first flow of blood’’ (49), but a wealth of contemporary imagery suggests
that the Civil War still inspires a very romantic discourse, one inextricably
tied to visions of the plantation era via a linkage of the southern gentle-
man to the Confederate soldier. If narratives of southern femininity often
fix the meaning of the region within a narrow register, tales of southern
manhood can also lead to stasis, particularly when endlessly routed back
to wartime.
The images of Dixie’s tourist industry provide evidence of the con-
tinuing draw not only of the plantation home but also of the Civil War.
The Mississippi Division of Tourism Development brochure (described in
my introduction) that detailed the ‘‘aura of elegance’’ of the Old South
also laments ‘‘the shadows of the bitter Civil War that ended a legend-
ary era in American history.’’ Civil War tourism, like plantation tourism,
has grown in popularity in the past decade and includes sites such as the
Battles for Chattanooga Museum, formerly known as Confederama, on
Lookout Mountain, Tennessee. The museum’s ‘‘three-dimensional, 480-
square-foot reproduction of historic terrain—the world’s largest historic
battlefield display of any kind’’ will help ‘‘history come alive, recreated for
your enjoyment.’’ 1 As a 1980s pamphlet ensures, ‘‘an intricate, electronic
automation system activates more than 3 miles of electrical wiring and
650 flashing lights to make vital history real and exciting for the whole
family.’’ A vast electronic display (recently equipped with digital sound)
maps a mise-en-scène of warfare, immersing the spectator in a space of
history.
History gets made (and remade) in diverse (although not always in such
‘‘exciting’’) ways, and as this brochure for Confederama and the preced-
ing chapter suggests, the history of the Civil War is no exception. This
tourist attraction, just down Market Street from the Chattanooga Choo
Choo, neatly packages the Battle of Chattanooga (that ‘‘sealed the fate of
the Confederacy’’) into a McDonald’s-sized building, complete with an
‘‘attractive souvenir and gift shop.’’ The brochure explains that its battle-
field display of more than five thousand miniature soldiers ‘‘reproduces’’
history ‘‘as guns flash in battle and cannon puff real smoke.’’ It also men-
tions that the models were made ‘‘especially for Confederama in South
Africa,’’ perhaps revealing more about current capitalist networks than
the museum’s proprietors may have wished.2
Confederama was built in 1957, a year after neighboring Georgia added
its own take on Confederate battle iconography to its state flag. The blink-
ing, electrified battlefield re-creations were extremely popular during the
1960s, reflecting national interest in the one-hundredth anniversary of the
Civil War, as well as that war’s capacity to function as a cover story for na-
tional encounters with race and racial politics. A focus on the Civil War as
First opened in 1957, Confederama recently underwent a name change and image
makeover. The new ‘‘Battles for Chattanooga Museum’’ moniker reflects the increasing
awareness in the tourist industry of the need to downplay Confederate symbols in the
marketing of Civil War attractions.
‘‘exciting,’’ U.S.-defining history allows an elision of slavery and its legacies

as a national issue, shifting our collective understanding of nineteenth-
century trauma away from the horrors of slavery and the postwar emer-
gence of other racial terrors toward a deracinated fascination with the
brutalities, intricacies, and nobility of warfare. This return to battlefield
terrains during the struggles of the Civil Rights era recodes our national
history as an ‘‘honorable’’ clash between brothers rather than as a continu-
ing institutionalization of racial injustice.
In the context of the 1990s, Confederama’s name change is also telling.
‘‘Both Kinds of Arms’’ 97

The shift to ‘‘The Battles for Chattanooga’’ moniker deflects the obvious
‘‘southern preference’’ of the museum’s origin, reflecting the tourist in-
dustry’s keen awareness that Confederate symbols can negatively impact
potential revenues. The museum’s new Web site details both northern and
southern generals and victories, structuring the Civil War as about the na-
tion as a whole while simultaneously locating the battles for Chattanooga
as ‘‘the beginning of the end for the South.’’ From the terrain of the South
and a precise locale in Tennessee emerges a new symbolic nation, fused
together through narratives of loss and reunion, the region functioning as
the pivot on which a revived sense of nation can be spun. Via the logics of
global capitalism, an ‘‘authentic’’ localness anchors the meaning of place
at a time of nation-blurring globalization while also working to reconsti-
tute the symbolic boundaries of the nation itself, tightly wedding national
identity to the ‘‘war between the states.’’ The Confederate and American
flags frame the top of each page on the museum’s Web site, positioning the
Confederacy as an integral element of the nation and of national history, an
understanding of the meaning of the nineteenth century that makes other
narratives hard to access.3 Nostalgia and melancholy emerge as powerful
emotional registers, delimiting the affective contours of masculinity for
the region and the country.
This tour of southern Civil War history does not have to end at Chat-
tanooga. Just about every city, town, or open field can contribute to
a tourist’s knowledge, including Stone Mountain, Georgia’s version of
a Confederate Mt. Rushmore, which monumentally immortalizes the
South’s finest sons. If kitschy attractions don’t suit a tourist’s style, he or
she can always roam official battlefield parks for more ‘‘serious’’ history.
(Even the first Civil War tourist site is open for business—the battlefield
at Manassas, where Washingtonians picnicked while watching the combat
from the sidelines. Within two days, real estate speculators had snapped
up the land so that tours could continue.) A 1991 newspaper insert for the
Virginia Department of Economic Development reminded potential tour-
ists that ‘‘more of the Civil War’s major battles were fought in Virginia
than in any other state’’ and detailed a long list of the state’s Civil War at-
tractions. These are described as ‘‘mammoth’’ sites of history and include
the ‘‘Hall of Valor’’ and the ‘‘paths of glory,’’ as well as such enticing infor-
mation as the final resting place of Little Sorrel and Traveller—the ‘‘war
horses’’ of Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee. The insert is a four-page
color brochure from a Sunday magazine section, and the first and last page
are devoted to descriptions of these sites. Inside the brochure, we learn a
Part of a Virginia Department of Economic Development tourism campaign, this
Sunday-paper insert explored Virginia’s role in the Civil War, ‘‘our nation’s greatest
test.’’ Such ads participate in a narrative of national union that focuses on the war as a
tragic site of mourning (and also of tourist fun).
little more concretely how ‘‘to do’’ the past: it reads ‘‘CHECK INTO THE
PAST At Holiday Inn, Your Civil War . . . Headquarters.’’ It seems there
is a Holiday Inn ‘‘near almost every major Civil War site.’’
Tourist attractions may not seem the best resource when investigat-
ing ‘‘official’’ history, but as the brief survey of sites here and in chapter 1
illustrates, they do hint at ways in which history lives on in the present
via popular reconstructions. Tourist zones are political combat zones, ter-
rains of struggle over the contemporary meanings of history. (Of course,
they are economic combat zones as well, as the alliance between the Vir-
ginia Department of Economic Development and the Holiday Inn chain
makes clear. The South receives more than one-third of all American tour-
ists, more than any other region.)4 Looking at precisely what is included in
(and excluded from) these ‘‘combat zones’’ is telling, particularly when it
comes to Civil War tourism, currently a big business. The Virginia Parks
ad opens with the headline ‘‘The Civil War: Our Nation’s Greatest Test,’’
suggesting that our sense of nation and national identity somehow is (or
should be) tightly bound to this four-year period of history. This senti-

ment is echoed in Clinton’s Tara Revisited when she writes that ‘‘the nation
was transfigured in the cloud of smoke over Charleston Bay’’ during the
Battle of Fort Sumter (49).
The descriptions of both this ad and the one for Confederama imply
that history is something that is concerned with the ‘‘mammoth’’ and the
‘‘mighty’’ and, for the most part, with men. These and other Civil War
attractions pay scant attention to women, leading to what historian Gayle
Graham Yates characterizes as the ‘‘gender-specific’’ nature of Civil War
knowledge.5 Yet just because femininity is not overtly represented at these
sites does not mean that it is not woven into our understanding of this his-
tory. On the contrary, femininity is, in many ways, a structuring absence
that buoys up this history. Occasionally this relationship is explicitly re-
vealed in tourist discourse, as in an ad for Vicksburg that reads, ‘‘We’ve
held two kinds of arms. Civil War generals and ladies fair: the Old South
lives in Vicksburg.’’ This caption unfolds alongside a photograph of a rifle
and a pair of ladies’ gloves, as both image and text create an equal exchange
between weapons and women, suggesting one takes the other’s place in
wartime.
While it may not seem all that surprising that representations of
womanhood do not figure overtly in these sites of Civil War tourism, an-
other absence is more telling. This absence echoes the absences of Scarlett,
Savannah, and the lenticular logic of the 3-D postcard, and, of course, is
the absence of race. A thirty-two-page, full-color brochure from the Mis-
sissippi Division of Tourism Development first displaces slavery as a cause
for the war and then only mentions race in the context of loyal ‘‘former
slaves who fought for the Confederacy.’’ 6 If tourism is a political combat
zone, it is currently staking claims on the discursive battlefield of Dixie’s
war history that reroute narratives of race and gender in the service of
masculine tales of conflict and resolution. That this containment of gender
and race in contemporary representations of the Civil War occurs dur-
ing a period of the widespread cultural romanticization of the Old South
(not to mention Florida’s disenfranchisement of African Americans dur-
ing the 2000 presidential election) is even more troubling. We might ask
what cultural work these late-twentieth-century representations of the
Civil War perform, investigating both the nature of their desire for union
as well as the emotional registers they strike, seeking not a single truth
about the war but rather an understanding of what is at stake in differ-
ent ways of remembering and mobilizing the past. Why do the southern
gentleman and his counterpart, the rebel soldier, rival the southern lady in

sheer staying power in the national imaginary? What is at stake in endlessly
revisioning the Civil War as the originary site of all things both southern
and American? How does our melancholic fixation on this war block other
modes of memory and feeling, locking us into precise and often limited
models of thinking history? Might this period of history be mobilized dif-
ferently, with less nostalgia? From Confederama’s vast array of electric
lights to the electronic spaces of television and the Internet, contempo-
rary visions of the Civil War activate specific ways of remembering the
past and narrate complex connections between feeling southern and feel-
ing American, fixing emotion in precise ways while also touring familiar
(and not so familiar) terrain.
g R E M E M B E R I N G H I S TO RY
[War] itself is not just a memory, but a memory industry, with enormous political
value.—Alice Yaeger Kaplan, ‘‘Theweleit and Spiegelman: Of Men and Mice’’
All of the tourist sites I have mentioned share an overarching concern

with the ‘‘authenticity’’ of history: each structures its historic account as a
series of tangible locations, displays, or artifacts that truthfully and accu-
rately represent History (albeit in air-conditioned comfort).7 History’s
‘‘realness’’ here depends on spectacular display and immersive experience,
on structuring an encounter with ‘‘excellent relics’’ and ‘‘exceptional de-
tails.’’ 8 There is an overwhelming emphasis on authenticity and accuracy as
the keys to some ‘‘real’’ History rather than an understanding that our only
contemporary access to history (as the actual past) is through the stories
we tell about it. Both tourist attractions and the vast Civil War publishing
industry (more books—over fifty thousand—have been written about it
than any other subject in U.S. history) incessantly debate the finer points
of military history, seeking out the authentic past, rarely if ever asking
what the stakes of doing so are for today or for the future. In the case
of military histories, such an endeavor seldom focuses on womanhood,
but this tendency nonetheless complements the additive logic deployed by
Catherine Clinton in Tara Revisited. Each is concerned with discerning the
‘‘real’’ facts of history, and neither takes on larger issues around the stakes
of historical interpretation. Part of the appeal of these historical modes is
their seeming ability to ‘‘access,’’ parcel, and partition the past, especially
a past untroubled by the racial or gendered realities of the present. They
also suggest a popular desire for an ‘‘evolutionary’’ historical narrative, a

The vast Civil War publish-
ing industry capitalizes on
the souvenir approach to
history, locating the mean-
ing of the conflict in ‘‘1,800
rare . . . artifacts and battle
maps.’’ This ad ran in the
October 1992 issue of Blue
and Gray, a magazine ‘‘for
those who still hear
the guns.’’
sense that history incessantly moves us forward toward a better nation and
a more complete union. Finally, they seek to reassert the authenticity of
the local as the precise terrain of history.
An intriguing portion of the Civil War publishing network consists of
numerous popular magazines such as Blue and Gray, The Civil War Times
Illustrated, and Reenactor’s Journal, which, along with several others, have a
substantial national circulation. Most of the magazines are slick and color-
ful, combining articles about specific battles, heroes, or military strategies
with a barrage of advertisements for Civil War memorabilia, books, and
artwork. The overall focus of the advertisements and articles is on securing
the facts, on authenticity, accurateness, and detail. Ads offer up ‘‘authentic
reproductions’’ of rifles, and letters quibble over the actual type of buttons
worn by certain regiments. The articles engage in countless explorations
of topics such as ‘‘Appomattox: What Really Happened?’’ and ‘‘The De-
ception of Braxton Bragg,’’ each of which, in the words of the editor of
Blue and Gray, are ‘‘very concerned about fairness and accuracy.’’ Just what
cause fairness and accuracy might serve in the pursuit of Civil War military
history goes largely unexamined, but the same editor does at one point
assure us that ‘‘the only thing the Veterans of the Lost Cause ever really

wanted . . . was the fairest history of the South.’’ 9 One could assert, given
such an explanation, that fair histories can serve many masters.
This particular ‘‘fair’’ history displaces the cultural and economic effects
of the war, locating its impact as only a military one. The excessive (if not
obsessive) focus on detail and authenticity in these periodicals (or at the
tourist sites they frequently advertise) forestalls any framing of the war via
larger social issues, ensuring a relentless return to precise minutiae. An
examination of how cultures produce historical meanings (often at work
in the service of national identities) via certain ongoing recontextualiza-
tions of materials gets covered over by a careful arrangement of objects
and facts. A fascination with the past and the longing for detail structure
a historic sleight of hand, allowing authenticity to stand in for critique. In
this way, popular representations of history can, while seeming to focus
on the facts of the past, reinforce strategies of domination in the present.
Such a process allows a lenticular or monocular logic of race to become
naturalized, erasing its origins as an economy of visibility tied to a particu-
lar cultural moment. Perhaps these histories have such a popular purchase
precisely because they allow the messiness of history to be excised, pro-
ducing a map of legible progress and noble causes. If the plantation homes
of chapter 1 tour a Grand Old South untroubled by the realities of slavery,
allowing the South to function as the source of a certain American ‘‘gen-
tility,’’ late-twentieth-century Civil War histories present the war as the
vehicle by which that gentility gets transferred to the nation, imbuing it
with both tragedy and romance. Each elicits a kind of pride in American
uniqueness and nobility, a sentiment that would be hard to sustain if con-
fronted with the nation’s history of race relations, but perfectly suited to
the terrain of the souvenir.
In On Longing, Susan Stewart notes that ‘‘the historical reconstruction
often promise[s] to bring history to life, . . . to immediacy, and thereby to
erase . . . history, to lose us within . . . presentness, . . . a transcendence
which erases the productive possibilities of understanding through time.
Its locus is thereby the nostalgic’’ (60). This souvenir mentality seeks to
return to an imagined past and is thus concerned primarily with authen-
ticity, the endless details of buttons and dates (even though the souvenir
itself can rarely be ‘‘authentic’’). This need to authenticate a prelapsarian
past subsumes all else at the expense of a larger understanding of history
and causality. In Stewart’s terms, ‘‘the souvenir speaks from a language
of longing, . . . spiraling in a continually inward movement rather than
outward toward the future’’ (135). By examining the costs of such a nos-

talgic approach to remembering history and, later, by considering texts
that try to break the grip of a souvenir mentality about the Civil War, we
can begin to discern ways in which historical memory can productively
serve the future by integrating race and gender within its field of vision. In
tracing these various accounts, I am less interested in ‘‘correcting history’’
than in explaining how, in Flannery O’Connor’s terms, ‘‘our history lives
in our talk’’ (and in our tourist sites, comic books, and documentaries).
The memory of the Civil War can be shifted away from an endless fascina-
tion with, and recirculation of, war memorabilia and stoic heroes (or, in
the language of chapter 1, away from the industrious plantation mistress
busy hiding the silver) toward an investigation of the ways in which his-
torical events continue to produce meaning today. This type of historical
memory is rhizomatic, not rigorous, concerned less with granite than with
greenery.10 If Stewart interprets the nostalgic as tied to a static sense of
temporality and history, nostalgia also entails a stasis of place, wherein the
impossibility of a remembering that illuminates the present proceeds via a
fixing of the landscapes and battlefields of the past. Moving the South and
its meanings into new realms will require new modes of thinking about
the region and its histories, as well as a troubling of certain sacred figures
and places. Such a mobile sense of place can also free us from the fixed
terrains of the lenticular and the clichéd emotions of southernness.
The present-day meaning of historical events or specific places is always
under negotiation, a complex and contested fracas over symbols and mean-
ings. Michel Foucault marks the importance of intervening in this struggle
as he notes, ‘‘There’s a battle for and around history going on at this very
moment. . . . The intention is to re-programme . . . to propose and im-
pose on people a framework in which to interpret the present.’’ 11 His com-
ments occur in an interview conducted for Cahiers du Cinema in which he
considers the ways by which media reshape popular memory, thus widely
reformulating popular understandings of history. His context is France in
the mid-1970s, a time when Giscard d’Estaing was proposing ‘‘a more just
and humane society’’ and rewriting popular conceptions of French history.
The repopularization in the United States of an image of the Civil War as
a noble national battle represents a similar process, one that suggests that
contemporary political domination involves historical definition. Thus it
is important to explore how the past lives on (and is produced) in the
present via the machinations of everyday life. One must not ask simply
what the truth of the Civil War was, but instead explore in what forms and
symbols these truths live on and to what purpose. While it is not impos-

sible to imagine a ‘‘progressive’’ reappropriation of the patriotic sentiment
usually deployed in war narratives, this endeavor is a difficult one. None-
theless we can move the terms and terrains of the South and its histories,
figuring new ways of feeling southern.
g I ’ L L TA K E M Y S TA N D I N D I X I E - N E T :
N E O - C O N F E D E R AT E S I N C Y B E R S PAC E
The campaign of cultural genocide against Mississippi and the entire South has
increased at a disturbing and rapid pace since the inauguration of Governor Ronnie
Musgrove. In this so-called ‘‘multi-cultural’’ society, it has become increasingly
obvious that there exists one culture that must die while all others are allowed and
encouraged to flourish. Much energy is being expended to complete the eradication
of every vestige of Southern culture.—www.freemississippi.org
Southern terrains need not be bound by the geographic divisions of the

Mason-Dixon line. The South also takes shape on our tv, cinema, and com-
puter screens, electronically mediated, and emanating from various points
south, north, east, and west. I do not recall exactly how I first stumbled on
one of the many outposts of a secessionist Dixie in cyberspace. I think that
in a fit of narcissism, I typed ‘‘tara’’ into a Web search engine and started
surfing sites. I visited the Tara museum in Atlanta and several other Atlanta
pages and then, with one stray click of the mouse, found myself on the
doorstep of the Confederate Embassy in Washington, D.C. Having spent
a recent hot, muggy summer in D.C. without ever encountering such an
edifice, I was surprised to learn that it also existed in physical space as a
real building in the nation’s capital. Later I began to ponder what purpose
a Confederate embassy might serve. Would I go there for a visa to travel
to a conference in Mississippi? Perhaps I could visit it to plea on behalf
of loved ones left behind in Louisiana (most of my family is still there)?
At any rate, I spent many hours during the next few days following the
neo-Confederate trail through cyberspace and then put these sites out of
my mind.
Or so I thought. Throughout the past few years, I found myself drifting
back to this virtual South, increasingly interested in how these sites envi-
sioned southern identity and its relationship to the legacies of the Civil War
and the ‘‘Old South.’’ The sites also seemed to challenge new media theory
of the late 1990s, scholarship that posed the virtual realm as a playground
for identity, underwriting both disembodiment and placelessness. These

theories often maintained, in the words of Sandy Stone, that cyberspace
functions as a kind of public theater, ‘‘a base . . . for . . . [the] cyborg,’’ 12
suggesting that in their play, these cyborgs are rewriting the standard of
the bounded, embodied individual (43). But the neo-Confederates busy
guarding the portals of the Confederate Embassy in cyberspace seem rela-
tively unconcerned with the prosthetic nature of cyber-communication;
rather, they deploy the electronic realms of the Internet to reassert a par-
ticular sense of place and identity at the very moment that global capitalism
appears as a homogenizing force across the South. For these cyber-rebels,
reconstructing Dixie and its citizens is not about play at all; rather, it is
a serious battle over the demands of place, race, and identity.13 Cyber-
communities like those of the neo-Confederates invoke specific registers
of place, yet these places evade precise discussions about race or racism,
naturalizing whiteness via the creation of new regional identities that re-
figure white southern masculinity at the close of the mechanical age by
borrowing from the language of the Civil Rights struggle.
Although I have thus far been referring to these neo-Confederates
as if they were a monolithic and self-named entity, the terms ‘‘neo-
Confederate’’ and ‘‘neo-rebel’’ are not always used on these Web pages,
though I suspect they are titles many in the groups would embrace. My use
of these terms refers to the creators and inhabitants of a fairly broad cluster
of both individual- and group-authored Web sites, sites primarily con-
cerned with ‘‘preserving southern heritage,’’ a heritage intimately bound
up with the outcome of the Civil War. They often refer to themselves as
‘‘southern nationalists’’ or as ‘‘southrons,’’ imagining a newly secession-
ist South. For the most part, these pages are designed and frequented
by white men of a wide range of ages and classes, though the ages seem
to cluster in the eighteen-to-thirty-year-old and the forty-five-to-sixty-
year-old groups, and many are middle- or upper-middle class. Most are
native-born southerners as well, though a small percentage no longer re-
side within the physical borders of Dixie, and a good number also partici-
pate in Southern ‘‘heritage’’ groups off-line. These groups have received a
substantial amount of press coverage in the past few years, largely because
Peter Applebome’s Dixie Rising and Tony Horwitz’s Confederates in the Attic
have brought news of the neo-Confederate movement to a wide-ranging
audience.
No single group or individual Web site entails every aspect or member
of what I call the cyber-Confederacy, but most of the pages reference a
long list of links to other Confederate Web sites, and several umbrella sites

serve to introduce and catalog the variety and number of Confederate Web
pages that exist (I have visited well into the hundreds). Three major sites,
which between them cover pretty much all of the cyber-Confederacy, are
Dixie-Net, the Confederate Network, and the Heritage Preservation As-
sociation. Each of these sites contains information (or links to informa-
tion) about Confederate history and the Civil War, reenactments, south-
ern merchants, and what many of the sites refer to as ‘‘heritage violations,’’
a term that most often references attempts to ban or remove symbols of the
Confederacy, particularly in state flags. Many of the sites advocate south-
ern separatism or nationalism, sometimes via secession, in the process
reworking the meanings and legacies (and imagined outcome) of the war.
Each of these warehouse sites also includes some type of mission state-
ment, often in the form of a bulleted manifesto stating the groups’ aims.
For instance, Dixie-Net, the official Web site maintained by the South-
ern League (which is spearheaded by Alabama history professor Michael
Hill and other professors and is in some ways comparable to the con-
servative National Association of Scholars) asserts that the league’s pur-
pose is to ‘‘advance the social, economic, cultural and political indepen-
dence of the Southern people by all honourable and peaceful means’’
(www.dixienet.org).14 A fourth warehouse site, Dixieland Ring, addresses
similar themes but stages a more inclusive appeal, defining southernness a
bit more broadly. But this site does labor to reconfigure the much-heralded
networked nature of cyberspace, for it structures its links in a circle, cre-
ating a kind of closed mobility. The page itself proclaims, somewhat para-
doxically, that ideally, ‘‘the [user] keeps moving forward, [and] eventually
he will end up back where he started.’’ Of course, individual visitors to the
site are free to abandon the ring structure, but the physical construction of
the pages encourages an orderly progression through a list of pro-southern
sites that works against the frequently touted anarchy of the Internet.
During a quick tour of these sites, it soon becomes apparent that they
trade heavily in what might be deemed the signifiers of the Confederacy,
from their often animated southern flags to their structuring of a sonic
southernness via countless (and varied) renditions of ‘‘Dixie’’ and other
Confederate battle songs. Battle itself is frequently figured as a primary
frame of reference and as an originary moment, and the facts of the ‘‘war
between the states’’ (never the Civil War; in fact, several sites ban the use
of the term) constitute a large part of the historical information the sites
detail. The war itself becomes the ground on which claims to heritage are
waged, though here heritage clearly functions as a universal and natural-

ized category that only some can lay claim to, and which all ‘‘real’’ (read
‘‘white’’) southerners would die to defend. The South’s complex racial his-
tory and its relationship to the Civil War disappear as the war is rewritten
in univocal terms.
Furthermore, these sites construct a phantasmagoric South via several
varieties of mapping, a willful refiguring of place and history that echoes
the networked electronic maps of Confederama. For instance, many sites
revision U.S. geography, presenting maps of the eleven states of the Con-
federacy floating detached and separate from the rest of the United States,
recasting the outcome of the war. The Dixie-Net site actually maps and
literalizes the drama of secession via an animated image in which the south-
ern region breaks free from a map of the Union and hovers inviolate (and
in rebel gray) at the top of a page. This page also narrates the story of ‘‘the
South as its Own Nation,’’ underscoring the vast demographic and eco-
nomic resources of the region through a series of graphs and charts that
detail the viability of the South as a separate nation. The visitor to this page
learns that ‘‘in economic power, a Southern nation composed of the eleven
States would have the fourth largest gross domestic product . . . after the
remainder of the United States, Japan, and Germany,’’ a precise example of
the narration of nation as imagined community. The economic growth of
the Sun Belt South created a new space-time of southernness, one equally
cherished by the southern boosters seeking global investments in the re-
gion and by the neo-Confederates who simultaneously worry about the
homogenization of the South. While the maps of Dixie-Net both limn and
love familiar old geographies, they also reveal the contours of new eco-
nomic realities. The neo-Con’s perception that Dixie is under attack seems
odd given the South’s new economic and political clout, a disjuncture that
reveals the complexity of representing the South during a time of growth.
Old and new images collide, and a struggle to control the meaning of the
South ensues.
These cyber-outposts highlight, as one site reminds us, that much like
Web pages, the South, to this day, is still undergoing ‘‘reconstruction.’’
They also visualize a fantasy of a new Confederacy and a virtual secession
at precisely the moment that black Americans are moving to the South in
greater numbers than they are leaving it for the first time since the Civil
War. The carefully constructed graphs and charts of this imagined south-
ern nation do not offer the visitor any demographic information on the
racial makeup of the South. One can only imagine that the African Ameri-
can families recently relocated from Detroit or Chicago would feel none

too comfortable taking up citizenship in such a southern nation. That the
neo-Con’s imagined community glosses over the heterogeneity and diver-
sity of the actual South almost goes without saying, but it is important to
highlight the elisions of these covert strategies, modes of representation
that again whitewash southernness.
Other mappings are less literal, calling on imagery of the Old South
to transform the ‘‘unrooted’’ realms of cyberspace into particular cyber-
places that correlate to real and imagined landscapes of gentility. These
cognitive mappings structure an imagined place of history and heritage
by referencing the ways of the Old South. One such site is the Confed-
erate Embassy that started me on this journey. Its pages present a virtual
photo album of white southern fantasy, replete with images of modern-day
dancing belles, smiling rebel gentlemen, and a luxuriant, entirely white
plantation home. These hoopskirted images of the past, in concert with
old black-and-white images of the southern soldier, smack of Lost Cause
sentiments, working to ‘‘enshrine the memory of the Civil War.’’ Today’s
neo-Confederates are clearly linked to this historic Lost Cause ideology,
both in their defense of the memorials and statues of Confederate soldiers
erected during that earlier period and in their figurations of southern grace
and manners, suggesting that origins and foundations are not always lost
in cyberspace.
This rebirth of the Lost Cause more than one hundred years after its
origins interests me primarily for the differences it displays from the origi-
nal. Neo-Confederate revampings of Lost Cause imagery depend heavily
on their reconfiguration of two important visual registers as they rework
iconic signs of both femininity and race: the southern lady and overt images
of blackness. Although crucial to the figurations of the Lost Cause at the
turn of the last century, these icons have largely disappeared in the fan-
tasmatic South the neo-Confederates have built for the new millennium,
replaced as they are with a near obsession with the contours of white south-
ern masculinity. Several personal Web pages, often created by younger
white men and linked to larger clearinghouse sites like Dixie-Net, have
names like ‘‘The Virginian Gentleman’’ and commit a great deal of space
to delineating the southern gentleman’s finer qualities: he strives to forgo
the use of power and ‘‘feels humbled himself when he cannot help hum-
bling others.’’ He is the descendant of the crusader and the champion of
justice, reconfiguring plantation mythologies along a particular vector of
masculinity that strives to distance itself from ‘‘cracker’’ and ‘‘redneck’’
southern imagery. This is a highly mannered whiteness, a whiteness that

draws from popular rhetorics about the Old South and the Civil War to
constitute a new southern middle class. But in these reconstructions, the
southern gentleman, though modeled on Lost Cause portraits of Robert E.
Lee and Jefferson Davis, stands largely alone, unencumbered by the lofty
version of femininity that once accompanied him.
Gone, too, is any overt imaging of blackness or explicit expression of
racism. If Lost Cause ideologies figured blacks either as loyal ex-slaves who
benefited from plantation life or as a dangerous, ‘‘eating cancer,’’ the neo-
Confederates focus almost exclusively on whiteness, albeit a whiteness
that is naturalized and taken for granted.15 A concern with white mascu-
linity and its preservation replaces representations of blackness, and al-
most all of the sites decry any racism, hate mongering, or Klan or neo-Nazi
activity. (Many of the Web pages feature an ‘‘anti-Klan’’ logo, an x’ed-out
image of a Klansman’s hood.) Often the pages (some seemingly genuine,
others less so) express dismay over the continued perceptions that protect-
ing southern heritage means you must be racist. Hence these sites abandon
the overt racism of the Lost Cause era for the more palatable covert racism
characteristic of the post–Civil Rights era. While this turn from explicit
racism can simply be an act of bad faith, understanding how covert racism
works in many of these sites entails recognizing that practitioners of this
brand of racism (quite fervently) often do not believe themselves to be
racist. Simply labeling them and their cyber-places ‘‘racist’’ does little to
help us understand how they understand either whiteness or blackness.
These sites deploy a doubled and particular mode of address, an address
expressly structured toward a public. At one level, they hail fellow white
rebels, enunciating a clear address to a ‘‘you’’ who resembles the creators
of the sites. For instance, one page opens with the promise that ‘‘preserv-
ing our heritage is preserving your heritage.’’ Membership pages delin-
eate quite specifically what the ‘‘you’’ visiting the site must believe in (or
at least agree to) in order to join the organizations. Yet the sites are not
just for consumption by like-minded individuals. Unlike, say, Confederate
conventions or reenactments, these sites also stage a carefully mediated
public address designed both to dissociate their actions from overtly racist
causes and to educate the public on issues ‘‘of southern civil rights.’’ If
‘‘Confederama’’ became ‘‘The Battles for Chattanooga Museum’’ in order
to attract a larger public, Dixie-Net and its ilk also recognize the value in
new types of southern branding. Their new public address carefully and
selectively appropriates the discursive practices of both civil rights groups
and a wide range of nationalist struggles. Thus page after page insists on

the need to reclaim history in order to end the oppression of the south-
ern people and offers practical tips on how to ‘‘buy Dixie’’ or to boycott
corporations that violate southern heritage. The Heritage Preservation
Association home page labels the group ‘‘the most successful Civil Rights
Organization for Southern Heritage,’’ noting their efforts at ‘‘guarding our
future by preserving our past’’ and inviting the viewer to ‘‘help us tip the
scales of Justice for Dixie.’’ These organizations both define the borders of
the South, mapping its terrain, and defend their sense of self and region
beyond these constructed borders.
Sites also speak of ‘‘the cultural genocide of the Confederacy’’ and of
campaigns of ethnic cleansing against Southerners. Several groups include
links to the Homelands Page, a clearinghouse for nationalist movements
worldwide. (If you visit this page from the Confederate States of America
network, you are in for one of the Net’s surreal juxtapositions: it is possible
to view the Chiapas home page from beneath a border extolling the bene-
fits of Confederate secession, while ‘‘Dixie’’ blares through your speakers.)
Frequent comparisons are also made between the southern independence
movement and struggles in Scotland, Northern Italy, Croatia, and Que-
bec. Although we may rightfully worry about comparisons between in-
dependence for white southerners and the Chiapas revolutionaries, this
call for a virtual Dixie does signal an attempt at reconstituting a public
sphere where the finer points of citizenship and its requirements can be in-
terrogated, debated, and lived. Although neo-Confederate organizations
have existed throughout the twentieth century, these Internet communi-
ties signal a new level of awareness about public perception and battles
over public spaces and a heightened awareness of the functions of pub-
licity. These sites understand that successful publicity now often requires
an evasion of questions of race and racial representation, at least in terms
of blackness. (Whiteness, of course, is naturalized, not recognized as a
racial category.)
These men are fashioning a ‘‘technologically mediated publicness’’ that
sustains a desire for origin and homeplace. In other words, they can be
seen as actively constructing what Nancy Fraser has called a ‘‘subaltern
counterpublic,’’ designed to mediate and reconfigure the boundaries be-
tween the private and public. Like the creators of other counterpublics,
these men coin distinct languages and invest old signs (such as the flag)
with fresh meanings as they construct new access routes to the public.
Fraser primarily discusses the subaltern counterpublic in terms of groups
that challenge dominant ideology (her example is feminism). What does it

mean that white, male, mostly middle-class men—the group we usually
see as central and important players in the public sphere—feel the need
to battle for alternative publics? After all, both democratic and republican
white southerners—from Ted Turner to Newt Gingrich to Bill Clinton
to the brothers Bush—have emerged as key players on the national scene,
and the neo-Confederates’ own statistics indicate the South’s economic
growth and stability during the past few decades. Yet despite their im-
proved economic position and the prominence of many white males from
their region, these men certainly view themselves as marginalized because
of their southernness, an identity they clearly ground in the South’s losing
the Civil War. They actively construct spaces in which this origin can be
discussed, celebrated, and protected from attacks, real or imagined.16 The
sites continually insist that in an era of ‘‘political correctness,’’ white south-
erners remain the only group that can still be stereotyped and vilified.
This virtual battle is being fought to defend a specific southern heri-
tage, a heritage that is undeniably white. Although ‘‘whiteness’’ itself is
rarely mentioned in these Web pages, Celtic, Anglo-, and European ances-
tries often are. Thus the Southern League proclaims that it will ‘‘affirm
the legacy of our precious Anglo-celtic heritage.’’ In White, cultural critic
Richard Dyer notes that the turn to situating whiteness as ethnicity (Celtic,
Polish, etc.) ‘‘tends to lead away from a consideration of whiteness itself’’
(5). Put differently, an exploration of white southernness couched in the
terms of ethnic identity is less likely to produce an understanding of the
privileges whiteness confers and often functions as yet another form of
covert racism. This is not to say that we shouldn’t attempt to understand
ethnicity’s relation to whiteness but to say that fetishizing ethnicity as a
cover for whiteness is not enough. Neither Scarlett’s tour through Ireland
nor the neo-Confederates’ propensity to wear tartan is situated within
the everyday black and white politics of Dixie, and both obscure a ‘‘pos-
sessive investment in whiteness.’’ 17 Contemporary theories of race often
posit whiteness as devoid of content, as, in the words of Toni Morrison,
‘‘mute, meaningless, unfathomable’’ (Playing in the Dark, 59). It is perhaps
useful to think of these neo-Confederate appropriations of nationalist or
civil rights struggles as an attempt precisely to give whiteness both voice
and content. Without a discourse or images of blackness to delineate the
contours of whiteness, a contrast familiar from Gone with the Wind or from
Klan rhetoric in the 1920s, these men struggle to find new ways of securing
the meaning of white southern identity.
Emotional defenses of the southern flag or other Confederate symbols

are closely tied to this attempt to carve out an embodied meaning for
whiteness. One site included a variety of letters protesting Ole Miss’s deci-
sion to ban Confederate symbols from the school’s publications and sports
events. Rich in sarcasm, one of the writers suggests renaming the football
team (formerly the Rebels) ‘‘The Guilt’’ and changing the school colors to
‘‘blush red.’’ While we might be tempted to dismiss these letters as racist
refusals to see the pain caused to many by these symbols, this evocation
of guilt is a response shared by many of my white students when we study
theories of whiteness or of race more generally. Many claim anger at being
made to feel guilty about what they describe as a past during which they
were not even alive, a response provoked as much, I think, by our theo-
ries of whiteness as by their naïveté. One of the limits of these theories is
their tendency to slip between readings of whiteness as a dominant and
dominating ideology and the various ways white people are positioned in
relation to this spectrum of privilege and power. If the Left is not willing
to offer up a possible reading of a progressive or oppositional whiteness,
an identity that moves beyond liberal guilt or reactionary anger, conser-
vative groups like the neo-Confederates will be happy to assign white-
ness another content. They offer lessons in transforming guilt over the
South’s racial past into anger, an anger that refuses to see history in black
and white. The FreeMississippi.Org Web site has as its motto ‘‘Are you
mad enough yet?’’ While never mentioning race, the opening page clearly
claims Mississippi for its white citizens, as this section’s epigraph and the
following quote make clear:
As Mississippians, we say: ‘‘Enough is enough!’’ We proclaim before
Almighty God and before all nations of the earth, that we are a separate
and distinct people, with an honourable heritage and culture worthy of
protection and preservation. We pledge to defend and perpetuate that
noble heritage and be of service to our people in the spirit of our noble
ancestors. We vow to preserve Southern language, speech, manners,
music, literature, tradition, thought, custom and faith: all things that
are woven into the fabric of our ridiculed and despised symbols.
Such a vision of what a Mississippian might be can hardly acknowledge the
shared racial traditions that underwrite the distinctiveness of the South’s
language, music, cuisine, and literature. Neither does it suggest that Mis-
sissippi has the highest ratio of African American citizens of any U.S. state.
To acknowledge the biracial nature of many regional traditions would re-
quire a recognition that symbols like the Confederate flag do not represent

a southern heritage that black southerners want to embrace. A southern
heritage that does not reflect the histories and desires of black southerners
is finally no southern heritage at all, since the South cannot be under-
stood apart from the history of cross-racial intimacy that has so shaped the
region, even as that intimacy has been both brutally enforced and resisted.
The neo-Confederate Web pages replay a logic of separatism that re-
lentlessly focuses on white male southern identity, staging a new visibility
for whiteness as an injured, wronged, violated whiteness and also under-
scoring the degree to which we lack compelling narratives or theorizations
of successful union (between North and South and between races). Their
plea for ‘‘outside’’ forces to ‘‘leave the South and its heritage alone’’ under-
writes a racial separatism even while proponents of this rhetoric may not,
as individuals, support or advocate such a position. Nonetheless this call to
be ‘‘left alone,’’ like the Confederate flag itself, has a long racial history that
cannot easily be discarded. In the case of states’ rights or the new southern
face of the Republican Party, being ‘‘left alone’’ is a shorthand for disinvest-
ments in public infrastructures, for weak labor laws, and for abandoning
affirmative action and pro-choice legislation, all economic and ideologi-
cal choices with profound ramifications for the possibility of productive
cross-racial alliances in the South and beyond. This inability to think be-
yond separatism also permeates more ‘‘liberal’’ accounts of today’s South,
from books like Dixie Rising and Confederates in the Attic to Ken Burns’s epic
The Civil War. Although the creators of these works hope for a South differ-
ent from the South envisioned by former Georgia senator Newt Gingrich
or the Southern League, the stories they provide of the region and its his-
tories do little to challenge the vision of the neo-Confederates or to move
us toward NuSouths.18
Although it is important to be critical of the neo-Cons and their narrow
definition of southern heritage as conservative, white, and mostly male,
their cyber-South does express a real desire for some type of social or
community life that is less bound by a distant and seemingly unrespon-
sive government and more fully engaged in the local and the regional.
Although their response may be to call for ‘‘states’ rights’’ and a decrease
in federal power, I wonder how the sense of dissatisfaction with public
life that they express might be differently mobilized. How could we nar-
rate other versions of southern history and place that are not bleached to
a blinding whiteness? Richard Dyer writes of the need to make whiteness
strange in order to reveal its limits and its constructedness. One way to
achieve this in relation to southern culture would be to continue to tell the

stories of those ‘‘eccentric’’ and brave southerners, white and black, who
have struggled to build a different South less steeped in the sentiments
of the Lost Cause, stories emerging from works that approach the region
differently. Such stories could appeal to many southerners who perceive
their region to be marginalized without replaying the covert racial politics
that neo-Confederate sites so often deploy. They could also point the way
beyond the binary poles of covert and overt racial logics. If overt racial rep-
resentation brings together black and white to privilege whiteness, and if
covert strategies repress difference to the same end, what seems necessary
is an overt representation of racial difference and its interconnections that
simultaneously explores the interrelation of this difference without privi-
leging either term while also remaining accountable to the material conse-
quences of inequality throughout southern history.19 By holding black and
white within a single southern frame—a frame that acknowledges past
injury and disparity—we might begin to discern a future less mired in an
intractable and endless separatism.
g D O C U M E N T I N G H I S TO RY : R AC E , G E N D E R , A N D
N O S TA L G I C N AT I O N A L I S M I N T H E C I V I L W A R
Received war stories may lull our critical faculties to sleep.

—Jean Elshtain, Women and War
In the fall of 1989, The Civil War aired on pbs as a five-night, eleven-hour
journey through the historic event that W. J. Cash claims forever forged
the identity of the South. The series was hailed by many as the ‘‘revolu-
tionary’’ historic breakthrough of its young ‘‘genius’’ director, Ken Burns,
and in its liberal humanist tone and attention to both blacks and whites, it
might seem to break us free from a covert racial representation, bringing
black and white together across the series. The documentary was certainly
masterfully edited, woven together tapestry-like from photographic stills,
etchings, diaries, letters, the voices of authority, and other sources. Al-
though twice as many viewers watched the tv movie on Leona Helmsley,
The Queen of Mean, which aired simultaneously, The Civil War pulled in a
record pbs audience of roughly 14 million each night. Newsweek proclaimed
that this ‘‘video miracle . . . drenches us in a rain of chilling facts’’ (Waters,
68–69), and the Washington Post praised the work for being ‘‘unremittingly
authentic’’ (Broder, D7) and for offering ‘‘genuine eloquence from genuine
[albeit long dead] people’’ (Johnson, A2). That most of the media saw the

Ken Burns’s The Civil War deploys photograph after photograph to reinforce the series’s
claim to authenticity. Here southern soldier Sam Watkins and northern soldier Elisha
Hunt Rhodes are framed as ‘‘spear-carriers,’’ foot soldiers in Burns’s melancholic tale
of national loss and triumphant union.
series as ‘‘the best of tv and of journalism’’ (Quindlen, A23), as some kind of

superhistory, is perhaps best represented by the words of then-neh head
Lynne Cheney. She said, ‘‘That film was a triumph of narrative history. . . .
History was presented as something that touched deep emotions’’ (Bacon,
A12).20
On the surface, The Civil War takes a more serious and respectful ap-
proach to historic events than the romantic tv miniseries North vs. South,
and it certainly adds (albeit in very limited ways) to an important revision-
ist project vis-à-vis the position of slavery and slaves in the period before
and during the war, shifting us into a more ‘‘all-American’’ terrain than
the Dixie-centric Web sites of the neo-Confederates. The series’ intent is
clearly to move beyond the military histories that have categorized much
of the work on this period, suggesting the war’s human costs, yet in many
ways, it retains the (largely male) fascination with war memorabilia al-
ready evident in the five thousand miniature soldiers continually waging
electronic combat at Confederama.21
Shortly after the series’ release, journalist Drummond Ayres Jr. wrote
that rather than turning from war, ‘‘suddenly the nation seems to be re-
discovering the Civil War. . . . According to the National Park Service,
tourism is up about 20 percent’’ at battleground sites and attractions (22).

One could speculate that the sale of T-shirts, rebel flags, and other war
memorabilia was up, as well. The Civil War tourist campaigns I have dis-
cussed all sprang up after the pbs broadcast in an effort to capitalize on a
renewed interest in the Civil War and the Old South, helping the South to
secure its status as the most ‘‘toured’’ region of the country. These tourist
sites and the documentary actually share a similar approach to history. All
are so excessively concerned with the accumulation of accurate detail that
larger issues easily get lost in a parade of military trivia. One could think
of Burns’s Civil War as a televisual museum or, more bluntly, as a tv tourist
trap (with the requisite gift shop, as a variety of product tie-ins were mar-
keted along with the series). Although there are obvious differences be-
tween Civil War tourist sites, this documentary, and the outposts of the
neo-Confederates (particularly in the different possibilities for spectato-
rial reaction each underwrites), all are marked by the sense of longing or
nostalgia that haunts the souvenir, linked by certain structures of feeling
that circulate within a very narrow economy of meaning.
Much of the feeling of the series derives from its use of images and voices
to ‘‘reconstruct’’ the past. Each of the nine episodes is characterized by hun-
dreds of photographic still images edited side by side with etchings, paint-
ings, and recently shot footage of empty landscapes. The sheer number of
images serves to reinforce the series’ claim to authenticity, as a particular
and insistent use of photographs comes to lend credibility to the project.
Battles ‘‘come alive’’ not through the dioramas of Confederama but by a
skillful practice of dissolving between newly shot footage of empty battle-
field sites, period photographs, and paintings of historic combat. Burns
populates the empty spaces of history with a seemingly endless parade
of faces, smoke, and fallen soldiers, but the effect is to freeze these loca-
tions in the service of nostalgia. More specifically, the visual deployment
of actual places or landscapes overdetermines their possible valences of
meaning vis-à-vis a narrative of loss and despair. The possibility that spe-
cific places meant different things to different individuals vanishes beneath
a sense of dismay over bombed-out buildings and torched plantations. The
view of the South (the terrain of most of the war, and the space most often
imaged in the series) that The Civil War shapes is of a past South, a lost
South, a feeling that is reinforced by the visual strategy of only represent-
ing the present via empty landscape shots. Any alternative possibility of
tracing how the sepia-toned South of the series can be understood today is
overridden by a sense that the meaning of the South (and thus of the nation)
is fixed in this particular past. Burns’s construction of the South freezes

the region into a familiar and monolithic place, even while the images of
people with which he populates the narrative are often more diverse.22
In fact, it is perhaps the formal structure of the series that finally de-
rails its attempt to add diverse voices and images to popular histories of
the Civil War. The weight of historical accuracy in the series derives from
the multitude of photographs that unfold hour after hour, photographs
that are deployed as markers of authenticity, securing a link between the
photographs and the ‘‘real.’’ They seem somehow to capture the truth of
history, but the very silence of the photograph underscores the legitimacy
and meaning of the narrative that overwrites them, structuring an over-
whelming sense of loss and melancholia. As film theorist Aine O’Brien
points out, such a use of historical photography ‘‘cements the narrative
that might otherwise splinter. . . . photography bolsters the myth of the
linear development of an emerging national consciousness.’’ 23 Although
photography can certainly serve other ends, the documentary’s stream of
images, rather than finally signaling plurality, blurs together along a linear
drive that works to secure the series’ tragic overtones, reconstituting the
nation in a romance of national reunion. The constant parade of images
is reframed by the narration of the series, despite its more progressive or
revisionist moments, within an overall attitude of longing for a lost place
and a lost people. Thus though the series presents a diverse array of faces
and voices, the narrative force of The Civil War simultaneously reinscribes a
brand of hero worship familiar from military histories, fueling a nostalgic
nationalism and illustrating the limits of a representational strategy aimed
at simply ‘‘adding in’’ diversity. If Octavia Butler’s Kindred highlights the
risks of black visibility for the slave, Burns’s documentary inadvertently
reminds us that visibility is not enough, underscoring the limits of an addi-
tive lenticular logic. Seeing faces doesn’t ensure that we will really ‘‘see’’
history; we also need to see connections.
Although the series purports to be a history of Everyman, its chief focus
is on military history and on the men that made that history happen. Again
and again, the only resort to an interpretative frame for the war is a re-
sort to the cause-and-effect logic of battle as the various episodes detail
the mistakes and glorious triumphs of military strategy. Robert E. Lee
is undoubtedly the hero of the series, from its opening moments, when
he is figured as opposed to slavery and secession, to its closing salute to
his mythic, marbleized image. His military skill is continually eulogized
as commentators such as Shelby Foote note Lee’s ‘‘eerie ability to read
his opponent’s mind.’’ Episode 6 offers a six-minute portrait of Lee that

sketches him as a larger-than-life hero who had ‘‘the unqualified love of his
men’’ and ‘‘was a warm, outgoing man’’ (despite the 250 slaves on his plan-
tation). Comments from Lee’s contemporaries (‘‘his heart [was] as tender
as ideal womanhood’’) slide effortlessly into the voices of today (he was ‘‘a
military genius’’), creating a narrative of the man that easily facilitates a
nostalgic longing for the purity and graciousness of southern gentlemen of
days gone by, echoing the neo-Confederates’ take on southern masculinity.
The ways in which this understanding of manhood shaped both southern
and northern responses to the war as it unfolded (and as we continue to
unfold it today) cannot be accessed within the framework of hero worship
that shapes The Civil War.
Whereas the majority of reviews of the series laud it as history come
alive (like at Confederama), the reviews that are critical of The Civil War
generally take issue with its representation of race. In an insightful piece
in the journal Transition, attorney Bill Farrell notes that the series’ glorifi-
cation of Robert E. Lee and of Klansman General Nathan B. Forrest plays
into an erasure of the historical reality of racism, allowing Lee to become,
in Burns’s words, ‘‘our favorite general.’’ Farrell also points out several his-
torical details omitted from the series, but in this he is playing on Burns’s
terrain in a battle for authenticity. Instead, the strength of Farrell’s critique
comes when he analyzes Burns’s narrative strategies, briefly highlighting
how the series depends on a metaphor of the nation as family in order to
succeed. The series, from beginning to end (paralleling the Virginia tourist
board’s claim that the war was our nation’s ‘‘greatest test’’), focuses its nar-
rative energy on the eventual reunion of North and South. This reunion is
figured as occurring within the family, but Farrell rightly insists that such
a narrative frame necessarily cannot ‘‘acknowledge . . . that this tearful,
joyous, and spiritual family reunion could only occur as it did because the
North abandoned black Americans in the South.’’ 24 The series celebrates
a regained familial nationalism—North and South together again—that
is already familiar from the closing scenes of that other epic of the Civil
War, The Birth of a Nation.
Of course, The Birth of a Nation ends with a joyous reunion between
North and South, as the wounds of war are overcome via a marriage be-
tween northerners and southerners, a bond deployed equally in the service
of nationalism and of racism. Richard Dyer has recently tracked the de-
gree to which that film, at different moments, figures both the South and
the North as the emotional center of its narrative, and he also traces the
film’s strategic construction of the whiteness of the South. The Civil War

more firmly locates the South as its emotional and geographic center, with
its northerners generally venturing into southern terrain. This figuration
depends not only on the focus on southern places noted earlier but also on
a narrative trajectory that imagines the South as a prodigal son, needing
to be recouped into the national (and white) family.25
Throughout the series, race (as blackness or whiteness)—though al-
most always represented—is never integrated as a term of analysis, a move
that follows the integrationist or additive mode of the lenticular; rather,
select facts about slavery are often added as local color and never really
connected to larger issues. For instance, episode 6, ‘‘The Valley of the
Shadow of Death,’’ early on includes an excerpt from a letter by an escaped
slave, Spotswood Rice, to his children still in bondage. The rest of the epi-
sode, just shy of eighty minutes, focuses almost entirely on the military
history of 1864, including long, loving portraits of Lee and Grant. The
last moments of the piece return to Rice (shifting the postcard’s vision
back to the field of blackness), this time writing his former master to plea
for the release of his daughter. In no way does this token representation
of ‘‘slave experience’’ contribute to an understanding of the dynamics of
race in the era, functioning as it does to introduce the glories of two fa-
mous white generals. Facts (about race or anything else) in the series are
presented as neutral evidence and are rarely the subject of critical com-
mentary. These moments also function as ‘‘emotional texture,’’ adding poi-
gnancy to the episode’s focus on military history, deploying blackness as
an emotive frame for white military heroics. While one gets the sense that
Burns knows that race is central to his portrait of American life, the nos-
talgic tone of the documentary can never really account for race, instead
allowing its quick takes on black life in the era to stand in for the hard
work of thinking through and analyzing racial connection and conflict.
These glimpses of blackness simply underwrite white melancholy as the
‘‘proper’’ response to the tragedy of war.
Again and again, two voices and faces serve as stand-ins for an attempt at
understanding the dynamics of race and racism. From the past, we hear the
words of Frederick Douglass, and in the present, we hear historian Barbara
Fields. Although their voices are the most analytical of the series, with
Fields once suggesting that this should not be a history ‘‘about weapons
and soldiers,’’ their comments are not contextualized in any way. In fact,
Fields’s observations are so heavily edited that her attempts to move be-
yond military history are continually interrupted by images of battle. The

Civil War becomes exactly what Fields warns against: a detailed military
history that exudes the monumental.
The Nation’s Lewis Cole also criticizes the series for avoiding a real
confrontation with race and laments that ‘‘the overdependence on a few
visual and aural icons—the sour-sounding fiddle that became a cliché
overnight—was . . . a symptom of lack of intellectual and emotional imagi-
nation. Is melancholy the only emotion the producers could associate with
this revolution?’’ (696). Cole also comments on the nation’s fascination
with the war, which dissociates it from causes and effects, seeing it as symp-
tomatic of ‘‘our national lobotomy.’’ In contrast to Cole, David Broder
claims that by graphically showing the horrors and losses of battle—‘‘the
terrible carnage’’—the series is a ‘‘visual indictment of war.’’ Other re-
viewers echo such sentiments. The Civil War does provide information such
as the whereabouts of Mississippi’s state budget during the war—one-fifth
was spent on artificial limbs—and offers several lingering close-ups of sev-
ered arms and legs. We see ‘‘the fatal wounds—the shattered bones, the
opened guts, the blasted faces’’ (Broder, D7). Although Broder continually
reads these images as ‘‘unromanticized scenes of battle’’ (D7), his prose
often lingers lovingly on the macabre details, as does the series’ camera.
Voice-overs intone about the ‘‘soft pink petals [of nearby trees] raining
down on the living and the dead’’ and describe in endless detail the screams
of wounded men, especially those caught in brush fires. Writing on photo-
graphs of death in wartime, film theorist Lynn Kirby questions whether
the corpse’s ‘‘presence is necessary to the critical understanding of official
war history and death’’ and goes on to argue that perhaps imaging the dead
body of wartime is less important than an overall narrative strategy that
can help to explain why these bodies matter (76). Although The Civil War is
littered with corpses, its narrative frame tends to treat death as a necessary
evil, the crucible within which white national masculinity is forged.
The text displays the same fascination with blood and guts that Klaus
Theweleit ascribes to the Freikorps soldiers of Weimar Germany. But
Theweleit also assigns that fascination to all of us. Although Theweleit
focuses his research on Germany between the world wars, his remarks in-
clude a much broader discussion of men and war and of the homosocial.
Rather than simply cataloging images of violence, Theweleit calls on us to
ask the question ‘‘how does human desire . . . lend itself to the production
of death?’’ 26 That is a question The Civil War, with its obsessive attention
to detail, cannot begin to answer. The drama of the series is reserved for

battles and military narratives. As the men trade in their everyday lives for
lives in combat (or, in the language of tourism, trade in their ladies’ arms
for other, more deadly, arms), war and violence are eroticized. One Civil
War soldier echoes Theweleit as he notes that the battles were splendid, ‘‘a
perfect whirlwind of men,’’ while others describe the spectacle of battle
with a fascinated delight. Through its use of diaries and letters, The Civil
War reveals the soldiers’ fascination with the ecstasy of violence, but more
crucially, it also reveals (if carefully read) the director’s (and our culture’s)
continuing thrill with gore.
At another level, the series can easily be seen as representing the homo-
social aspects of war that Theweleit traces. Again and again, the voice-over
narration celebrates the ‘‘manliness of the men’’ and ‘‘the mystic bond’’ that
joined soldiers to their leaders, with one soldier writing that ‘‘the causes
of war were wide apart [for each side], but the manhood was the same.’’
One of the final moments of the documentary reinforces this reading as
it looks at the fiftieth-anniversary reunion at Gettysburg. Over images of
bearded old men hobbling about the battlefield, a voice waxes emotionally
on about how the old soldiers ‘‘flung themselves upon their former ene-
mies not in mortal combat but embracing them in both love and affection.’’
The reunion was ‘‘a transcendental experience.’’ Here brother embraces
brother, and the (white) national family is restored via a recuperation of
region, of the South as errant but beloved son.
Given this continued emphasis on masculinity, it should come as no sur-
prise that the series rarely focuses directly on women. It does use excerpts
from the diaries of plantation mistress Mary Boykin Chestnut in almost
every episode and twice gives five-minute mini-lessons on women (espe-
cially as volunteers and nurses), but as with its tokenized, integrationist
treatment of race, the series never successfully incorporates gender differ-
ence as a central term of analysis.27 While even the ‘‘facts’’ about women
that the series includes are questionable, the real problem lies in the way
in which femininity comes to shore up masculinity and, in turn, gets ar-
ticulated with an intense patriotic nationalism.28 Burns repeatedly quotes
Civil War wives pleading with their husbands to fight bravely without con-
sidering what such statements might tell us about the discourses of war in
the past or in the present. Political scientist Jean Bethke Elshtain notes in
her Women and War that ‘‘women have played many parts in the narratives
of war and politics’’ (x) and suggests that ‘‘war seduces us because we con-
tinue to locate ourselves inside its prototypical emblems and identities’’

(3).29 In the case of The Civil War, these prototypical images are those of the
loyal and patriotic ‘‘others’’ of male warriors, those white female support-
ers who wound bandages, nursed the sick, and kept the home fires burning.
Although it rarely makes this distinction, the ‘‘southern women’’ of the
documentary are almost always white southern women, a rhetorical move
that further displaces race (as both whiteness and blackness) as a category
of meaning across the episodes. Because women are positioned primarily
as the defenders of patria, their relationship vis-à-vis slavery need not be
considered. Thus the series’ discourse can never break free of its ‘‘tall tale
of civic virtue’’ to examine how our popular imagings of gender and race
support a certain patriotic nostalgia for wartime (Elshtain, 93).
The Civil War can be read as a prime example of how a certain sense
of a region and a war get romanticized on a national level, for the series
portrays its version of the war as, in Shelby Foote’s terms, ‘‘defining our
country.’’ In many ways, the documentary turns the Civil War into a site for
jingoism and nostalgic nationalism, figured through a tidy version of the
national family that erases complexities of race and gender. The version of
loyal femininity constructed by the series selectively positions women in
the service of certain myths of nation. Here the nation’s power is conflated
with a love of country that does not allow an unpacking of the contra-
dictions of nationalism but glosses over them in pursuit of a narrative of
nation that focuses on triumph and on glory.
In that respect, the series feels like an uncanny prequel to the soon-
to-unfold coverage of Desert Storm, complete with star generals, illus-
trated maps, expert commentary, and smiling, devoted wives. (U.S. Gen-
eral Norman Schwarzkopf even claimed to have watched Burns’s epic
repeatedly in preparation for the ‘‘conflict.’’) Because of the familial frame
the series constructs, any real analysis of race or gender vanishes in the
pursuit of what really made America: blood, guts, and two kinds of arms.
This frame (and the patriotic sentiment it enables) also prevents an under-
standing of the war that can adequately frame the responsibility white
Americans bear for the fate of blacks after the war.
One moment of the series, frequently cited as its most powerful, illus-
trates how the documentary enacts a slippage between images of families
and a sense of the national family. At the close of episode 1, in a segment
titled ‘‘Honorable Manhood,’’ the voice-over narration recites the last let-
ter home of a soldier soon to die in battle. He assures his wife that his ‘‘love
for [her] is deathless . . . and yet my love of country comes over me like a

strong wind.’’ At the level of narration, the comforts and joys of family are
mirrored in the glories and honor bestowed by citizenry; the image track
replicates this slide as it frames six miniature photographs of unidentified
families with scenes of battle. The nostalgia for the war, or more accurately
for some lost moment preceding the war, occurs precisely at the site (or
sight) of the family. The Civil War’s version of the nation as family—with
the South recuperated as prodigal son—does perhaps suggest a utopian
desire for connection and community in social relationships, but this par-
ticular family finally comes at too high a price, underscoring the necessity
of figuring families and homes differently, an important consideration of
subsequent chapters.
The Civil War is, no doubt, a moving narrative. It is evocative, poignant,
sentimental, linking history and cognition to the engine of emotion, and
its ability to strike such emotional registers certainly played a crucial role
in the documentary’s success. But if the series accesses emotion, it also
plays emotion. It is important to ask how it moves us and to where. The
Civil War connects masculinity to emotion, allowing the male viewer a
sanctioned outlet for sentimentality and feeling, and akin to reenacting, it
functions as a kind of historical extreme sport, underwriting an intensity
of masculine self-expression and bonding within a safe and ‘‘legitimate’’
terrain. As one Amazon.com reviewer writes, ‘‘I was moved to tears at
times. . . . You will be moved too even if you think you’ve seen it all.’’
Others describe the viewing experience as ‘‘a thrilling trip through the
battles of the Civil War,’’ noting that ‘‘especially dear to my heart [is] a
sense of emotion and pathos that makes it a deeply moving, most personal
experience. Watch this documentary and you will not only understand the
Civil War—you will also feel it deep inside your being.’’ The series’ focus
on select letters and diaries from the war period helps guide this emotional
movement, portraying nineteenth-century ‘‘manhood’’ as simultaneously
literate and deeply feeling, reclaiming that era’s sentimentality as also mas-
culine.30 These men come to represent honor, conviction, loyalty. For the
contemporary (white) viewer, there is a public display of affect (and affec-
tion) that also functions as political rhetoric, providing detailed instruc-
tions about how this war should make us feel and constructing a particular
version of what we (as white Americans) are supposed to get emotional
about. In the terms of The Civil War, this source of national feeling is clearly
not joy or jubilation at the end of slavery; rather, we get worked up via
a precise strain of nostalgia and melancholy inextricably mired in loss, a
loss that is, but should not be, separated from the end of slavery.

Popular culture provides emotional ‘‘paradigm scenarios,’’ inculcating
particular ways of feeling, emotive modes that have political and social
consequences.31 While recognizing the affective efficacy of The Civil War,
we also need to explore its construction of nostalgia and recognize the
limits to the emotional containment that the work models. In the series, a
general nostalgia for an earlier time, for an imagined past lost via the Civil
War (a sentiment also packaging the plantation tourism of chapter 1), gets
narrowed into a kind of white male melancholia. In its elegiac odes to the
‘‘honorable manhood’’ of the war era, the documentary fixates on loss, and
what emerges as the thing lost is a sense of a stable, honorable white mas-
culinity. Across the episodes, such an image of white masculinity floats free
from blackness, inadvertently suggesting that what troubles white mascu-
linity at the end of the twentieth century is an inability to come to terms
with the historical costs of a national history of racial violence. Whiteness
must be frozen in ‘‘honorable’’ combat at the period of the war, dissociated
from the histories of slavery and Jim Crow that precede and follow it, as
well as from the troubled history of white responses to movements for
civil rights within our own time. The Civil War is nostalgic for a time un-
troubled by racial difference. Of course, such a moment has never existed
in the United States.
Renato Rosaldo insists on the cultural specificity of nostalgia, detailing
the mechanisms of an imperialist nostalgia that longs for the very thing it
helped to destroy, instead focusing on and enshrining ‘‘an elegance of man-
ners governing relations of dominance and subordination.’’ 32 To a degree,
white northern fascination with the Old South and the Civil War might be
read along these lines, but it’s even more telling to think about how nostal-
gia for the war functions for the entire (white) nation as a kind of imaginary
union, a familial wholeness that must disavow white guilt over racial in-
justice. This longing for an era of civility and the romance of reunion is not
the same familial union staged in the closing images of The Birth of a Nation.
Most obviously, race performs a very different role in The Civil War than in
the earlier epic, sketched as it is in less overtly oppositional terms. Instead
the series’ desire for union—as noble, as civil, as honorable—functions as
a cover story for white racial guilt. Glossing Freud, Caren Kaplan notes
that melancholia usually masks anger: when this anger cannot be expressed
‘‘openly without guilt, the melancholic subject remains in a state of acute
loss,’’ and this understanding of melancholia helps explain its function in
The Civil War.33 The documentary’s drive to authenticity, coupled with its
narrative of union, stages a seeming access to the ‘‘real’’ of history that

does not require an acknowledgment of U.S. racial histories, but the im-
pact of this sleight of hand reemerges in the series’ emotional registers.
Ironically, Burns’s attention to detail, his obsessive history, actually makes
other kinds of remembering difficult, if not impossible. We can’t have a
true harmony or union without understanding the stakes, costs, and possi-
bilities of racial union as they have played out throughout our history. The
Civil War achieves its union only through forgetting history’s larger stakes.
Its melancholia impedes a more productive kind of historical memory. If
framed as a central part of the terms of postwar national union, the na-
tion’s racial past might be mourned, acknowledged, worked through, and
eventually atoned for. Rather than facilitating such a processing of mourn-
ing (over the brutality of slavery and reconstruction, over loved ones lost
in the war), the series forgoes the action of mourning in favor of the stasis
of melancholia.
Here The Civil War also differs from the modes of historical memory
modeled in the Web sites of the neo-Confederacy. While both the docu-
mentary and the virtual Confederacy strike a nostalgic tone, the former
converts nostalgia to melancholia, while the later embraces anger as an
escape route from guilt. One fixates on a limited reunion, the other on an
imaginary secession. Nonetheless, in both cases, an inability to address the
guilty legacies of institutionally privileged whiteness impedes a possibility
for racial alliance (even when that union is clearly longed for in a work
such as The Civil War or in Burns’s newer documentaries on baseball and
jazz).34 Together they also illustrate two modes of a lenticular logic, the
separatist and the additive: the neo-Confederates, like the sequel Scarlett,
evade race, while the documentary represents both whiteness and black-
ness but severs the connections between the two. While it is important to
understand that each deploys different racial modes (and different modes
of racism), it is equally crucial that we recognize how neither strategy
points the way toward progressive modes of feeling southern. Unable to
come to terms with a suppressed guilt, they look resolutely backward into
an imagined and distant past, back to dear ole’ Dixie.
Faced with such a narrow understanding of Civil War history, is there
hope for a different mobilization of patriotic sentiment? In their introduc-
tion to Nationalisms and Sexualities, editors Andrew Parker, Mary Russo,
Doris Sommer, and Patricia Yaeger remind us that the media helps ‘‘to
instill through representational practices an erotic investment in the na-
tional romance. But these same methods can be deployed as well for other
kinds of civic education, counter-narratives that reveal the dangers im-

plicit in such castings of national identity’’ (12). Such other modes of educa-
tion can emerge from a variety of fronts, moving us away from the smoke
and soldiers of Confederama and The Civil War.
g D I X I E A N D T H E E V E RY DAY : S H E R M A N ’ S M A R C H
A N D S O U T H E R N H I S TO RY
The best weapon against myth is perhaps to mythify it in its turn, and to produce an
artificial myth.—Roland Barthes, Mythologies
Like Ken Burns’s The Civil War and other tourist discourses, Ross
McElwee’s feature documentary Sherman’s March: A Meditation on the Pos-
sibility of Romantic Love in the South in an Era of Nuclear Weapons Proliferation
(1986) is a film ostensibly about that fateful moment in Southern history,
the war between the states. It also aired (eventually and repeatedly) on
pbs, but it takes a decidedly different tack in remembering southern his-
tory. Some might doubt that McElwee’s ‘‘epic’’ (it is 155 minutes long) is
history at all, but it is useful to read the work as a provocatively personal
and historical endeavor, an approach to remembering historical events and
specific places as something other than souvenirs. The film wittily insists
that the importance of the past lies in its mobilization in the present, often
through the filters of the personal and the everyday. In this context, the
origins of the film’s making are particularly interesting.
As the opening moments of his film relate, independent filmmaker
McElwee had received a substantial grant to make a documentary about
the lingering effects on Southern consciousness of Sherman’s march to the
sea, particularly as the march affected civilian populations—the women
and children who were Sherman’s main targets. The film begins much as
one might expect the originally conceived project would have: with an as-
sured masculine voice-over narration intoning authoritatively about Sher-
man’s strategy. The images are black-and-white still photographs of a map
(very much resembling those in The Civil War) depicting the route of the
march, a few select ruins, and a stern portrait of Sherman himself. As the
voice goes on to state that ‘‘traces of the scars he left on the South can still
be found today,’’ the screen goes black, and a second voice, which we soon
learn is McElwee’s, interrupts, asking, ‘‘Do you want to do that over?’’ Our
narrator, slipping out of the realm of assumed objectivity, responds, ‘‘Yeah,
why don’t I try it again.’’ Gone is the objective, all-knowing pbs voice of
history. McElwee’s considerably less ‘‘professional’’ voice takes over, ex-

plaining (in a near whine) that before the project really got under way,
he was dumped by his girlfriend. In sheer (comically melodramatic) de-
spondency, he decides to head on home (he is a southerner) and see what
happens. These happenings constitute the next 150 minutes of the film.
From this opening scene, McElwee challenges the traditional and ‘‘seri-
ous’’ form of cinematic history, the objective voice-over documentary of
high-school history classes, pbs, and much of The Civil War series. He rejects
this omniscient historical voice for a voice that is profusely interwoven
with the personal. As the story moves along, we are as much involved
with McElwee’s personal dramas as with his less-than-careful tracing of
Sherman’s march. He offers a version of remembering the past that is not
overly concerned with the official or the authentic but instead attempts to
perform, in bell hooks’s words, an act ‘‘of remembering that serves to illu-
minate . . . the present.’’ 35 But the film does not simply reject traditional
documentary in favor of autobiographical meanderings. It also calls a host
of other cinematic traditions into question, reworking familiar represen-
tational strategies in the service of a different history. As an independent
work, it consciously veers away from the tradition of cinema verité, par-
ticularly as it is practiced by the Boston school. In its opening scene, the
film self-referentially highlights its ties to this form: the voice of the first
narrator is none other than that of Richard Leacock, one of the found-
ing American fathers of cinema verité and one of McElwee’s film school
instructors.36
Two scenes midway through the film powerfully underscore that
McElwee is after neither a traditional pbs history nor a memento mori
of southern tragedy. After an hour and a half of failed romantic exploits,
he once again remembers Sherman and explores some of the ruins of the
war. An almost masterful voice-over (the words are serious, but McElwee’s
voice sounds far from masterful) explains Sherman’s path of destruction
as the camera tracks along the charred remains of Shelton Church. He
provides dates (November 1864) and gory details (the coffins exploded
when the church was burned), but just as the scene seems to be taking on
some level of historical ‘‘seriousness,’’ McElwee switches gears and says,
‘‘It seems I’m filming my life in order to have a life to film. . . . I’m be-
ginning to lose touch with where I really am in all of this.’’ He weaves
together historical and personal discourse in a manner that articulates past
and present, refusing to focus on the burned-out images of southern his-
tory. He suggests that what southernness means should no longer be found

solely in the ruins of the war; rather, these ruins become a metaphoric
space to address the dilemmas of the present.
Immediately following this scene (separated by a brief black screen),
a stationary, probably unmanned, camera reveals McElwee on a vine-
covered riverbank with the skyline of Columbia, South Carolina, looming
on the opposite shore. A nervous, self-conscious McElwee, trying to look
serious (he wears a suit and tie), fidgets with his hair and begins narrating:
‘‘On February 16, 1865, here on the banks of the Congaree River. . . .’’ Mov-
ing slowly back, he informs us that ‘‘80 percent of Columbia was burned
to the ground.’’ But the statement does not quite achieve its possible grim
impact, for just as McElwee finishes speaking, he tumbles over the edge of
the sloping bank, vanishing from view into the vines that creep along the
river’s edge. We hear him sliding down the slope, bumping along, and then
the sound track from the next scene briefly overlaps the image of the empty
riverbank. It is a local band singing the Motown hit ‘‘R-E-S-P-E-C-T.’’ The
vines on the riverbank are kudzu, a worrisome creeping vine peculiar to
the South. Originally imported in an attempt to prevent soil erosion, the
rhizomatic tuber quickly spread out of control, covering trees, buildings,
and anything else in its path. Throughout the film, as McElwee explores
various Civil War ruins and battlefields, the camera lingers on images of
kudzu-covered pillars and porches. The vine-twisted spaces of the river-
banks and the ruins overwhelm and subsume the authentic and official
history of the souvenir, and details no longer work in the service of nos-
talgia. Kudzu roams through the South much like McElwee’s camera, and
the historical memory they inspire is not the staid history of old maps
and still photos; it is alive and personal, subterraneous and contemporary.
The film resists essentializing the battlefields (familiar from tourism) into
a fixed site of regional identity; rather, the film enacts a mobility of land-
scapes that resists the too easy privileging of place that is central to many
regional and national myths.37
McElwee deals with the problem of historical memory not through dis-
tance or transcendence but via the everyday—flatly, rhizomatically. For
McElwee, the everyday is enigmatic, introducing a degree of stupidity
and comedy into the history presented by Burns or by tourism. We are
no longer constrained by the ‘‘mammoth’’ or the ‘‘authentic,’’ those twin
hallmarks of tourist history. By incorporating elements of the everyday,
including missed cues, rusted-out cars, and mosquitoes, the film allows
one to deal with a region that has accumulated a multiplicity of frozen,

staid images of the past without resorting to nostalgia. By refracting pieces
of past and present together through the lens of the personal, McElwee
articulates a different version of the South, a version that is critical of
moonlight and magnolias. Even when McElwee visits a Confederama-like
diorama in Georgia, his tour is active and performative, knocking roughly
against the lure of the souvenir and suggesting that what we take away as
tourists is not always predetermined by the site.38
From the opening moments when he tells about being dumped by his
girlfriend, McElwee’s experimental style of documentary merges with the
autobiographical. The film takes us rambling through McElwee’s roman-
tic misadventures as he intermittently provides ‘‘the facts’’ about Sher-
man’s own misdeeds in the South. This tendency to personalize larger
issues is not new to southern ways of speaking—writers from Faulkner
to O’Connor have discussed this peculiarly regional, intensely personal
way of talking. In analyzing the history of the area, southern historian
W. J. Cash maintains that the South is ‘‘a theater of the play of the purely
personal, the purely romantic.’’ 39 By strategically linking aspects of the
personal with the more impersonal ‘‘facts’’ of history, McElwee resists the
nostalgic and conservative impetus behind much southern tale-telling and
thus presents quite a different view of the Civil War.
Consistently throughout the film, McElwee smoothly interrupts his
historical narrations to introduce the present in a productive mixing.
When describing the Battle of Peachtree Creek, he shifts from a descrip-
tion of the six thousand soldiers who died in a few hours ‘‘fighting over a
piece of land not much bigger than a baseball field’’ to self-absorbed worry-
ing about his current romantic interest, who he has recruited to star in his
film. He is afraid he is losing her to Los Angeles, for she is about to leave
to make a ‘‘hack Hollywood epic.’’ The intrusion of the personal (and of
the threat of Hollywood history) into the historical facts allows McElwee
to craft a version of history and battle that does not succumb to the mel-
ancholic fascination with memorabilia to which The Civil War falls prey.
One might argue that Ken Burns also deploys the personal in his history,
as he incorporates a wide range of diaries, letters, and individual voices
into his accounts of the war. However, McElwee’s use of the personal does
not subordinate the personal to a larger narrative frame of national re-
union. In Sherman’s March, the personal propels (rather than supports) the
narrative to call this national tale into question.
Shifting between observer and participant, voyeur and filmic object,
McElwee further disrupts the boundaries between public and private his-

tories. He describes himself as ‘‘an exiled Southerner . . . who returns to
the South again,’’ 40 and he functions much like the indigenous ethnogra-
pher of contemporary anthropological work who, as an insider studying
his own culture, ‘‘offers new angles of vision and depths of understand-
ing.’’ 41 McElwee perhaps knows that ‘‘cultures do not hold still for their
portraits’’ (10), and thus he moves, as an insider, at the pace of the South—
slowly and languorously—filming all the while. The indigenous ethnogra-
pher ‘‘pervades and situates the analysis, and objective, distancing rhetoric
is denounced’’ (12), yielding to ‘‘autobiography and ironic self-portrait’’
(14). McElwee is particularly ironic when addressing the myths and meta-
narratives of the South (such as chivalry, honor, and family—his relation-
ship to each of these is troubled and distant), and this ironic distancing
mediates between simply affirming the myths on one hand or sliding into
nihilistic rejection on the other. His funambulistic positioning between
inside and outside allows him to challenge the great origin stories of the
South without falling prey to the dual pitfalls of condemnation or cele-
bration. Importantly, McElwee doesn’t romanticize his southern heritage,
allowing him to explore the South and its tales without essentializing his
identity as a southerner. He does, after all, flee the South once more as the
film ends.42
Because of his doubled placement both inside and outside of southern
culture, McElwee is subtly able to critique a variety of notions of south-
ernness as he switches his positions in the film. One of the myths of the
South that he calls into question is the image of southern manhood. While
ever present in Dixie’s iconography, the construction of white southern
masculinity has received scant attention in academic histories, leading to a
‘‘cryogenically preserved’’ white southern manhood ‘‘cloaked either in an
antebellum suit fashioned from honor or topped off by a coonskin cap.’’ 43
The social construction of tropes of southern manhood, as well as their
variability, requires elaboration, and McElwee’s performance points the
way. Throughout the film, McElwee positions himself in or against a num-
ber of roles, each a masquerade of maleness as it is constituted in south-
ern myth and all of which he is ill-equipped to play. The most obvious
of these roles is reflected in his fascination with, and shadowing of, Burt
Reynolds. Early in the film, McElwee spends a fair amount of time with
an aspiring actress, Pat, who idolizes Burt Reynolds and is certain the star
would love her if she could just meet him. Through the remainder of the
film, McElwee compares himself to Reynolds and describes the actor as
his nemesis. At one point, McElwee encounters a Burt Reynolds look-

alike outside a hotel and spends some time with him, hoping to divert the
real Burt. As various men and women swoon over Reynolds, he is imaged
as a paragon of southern masculinity, a lively mix of the playboy and the
good old boy. Near the end of the film, McElwee hears that Burt is in town
and sets off once again to find him to, as McElwee puts it, ‘‘get his views
on masculinity and romance in the South.’’ Surrounded by all the appa-
ratuses of Hollywood, Burt is in a foul mood, and his masculinity seems
constructed and artificial, showing little of the charm his characters strive
for either in his Bandit days or in his more paternal role on the cbs sitcom
Evening Shade.
Many other masquerades of masculinity abound in Sherman’s March,
beginning with the McElwee family picnic early in the film. The entire
extended ‘‘clan’’ is together for an annual reunion, and several good old
boys are dressed up in tartan kilts, ‘‘competing in various feats of strength
and virility.’’ Shot from a low angle, running about with huge poles, the
men appear large and slightly foolish, not quite at ease in their trappings
of ethnicity. Looking scraggly and wimpy, McElwee once again seems
out of place. McElwee also visits a survivalist outpost, here coming close
to the camps of the neo-Confederacy inhabiting a parallel mediascape.
Their extreme isolationist stance feels frozen in relation to McElwee’s
constant mobility and regional searching, revealing the neo-Confederates’
tendency to hermetically seal off the meaning of southern heritage, iso-
lating it from the vibrancy and motion of other southern moments. The
southern survivalist mentality weights down the meaning of southern
identity, reducing the possibilities of identity and tradition to a carefully
bunkered repetition. Other roles are more appealing to McElwee, and
he momentarily tries several on for size. While visiting at home, Ross
gets involved with his sister’s friend Claudia, and together with Claudia’s
daughter, they go to a masquerade ball. McElwee chooses to go as a Con-
federate general, and our first view of him in costume is sitting in his
parents’ living room, eating dinner from a tv tray. He looks as foolish as
the men in kilts did, and when he returns later that evening, tipsy and
talking to his camera, we know that once again another version of mascu-
linity has slipped through his fingers. He is no more successful at playing a
modern-day Rhett Butler, the smooth-talking womanizer, for his primary
accoutrement, a borrowed convertible, keeps breaking down, making it
difficult to carouse. His closest (though still far-fetched) alliance seems to
be with Sherman himself, a strange choice of role model for a southern
fellow.

Ross McElwee, with camera in hand, poses as a Confederate general, one of several
failed masquerades of masculinity explored in the film Sherman’s March. Photo courtesy
of Ross McElwee.
McElwee’s portrait of Sherman throughout the film provides an inter-

esting point of comparison to the representation of generals in The Civil
War. Burns paints a portrait of Civil War generals—and particularly of
Robert E. Lee—as the heroic centerpieces to Civil War history, as the
site and origin of ‘‘honorable manhood.’’ It was their ‘‘daring and luck and
genius’’ that propelled the event, and by extension the nation’s history, for-
ward. McElwee’s version of Sherman, while providing many of the same
details, comes across as considerably less heroic, if only because his nar-
rative of Sherman is continually interrupted by the everyday details of
the narrator’s life. Confronted with the melancholic monuments of white
southern manhood, Sherman’s March deploys an ironic humor to shake us
free from nostalgia, suggesting other affective possibilities for southern
identity. Still, there is a certain hint of melancholia and of the mythical in
the film’s closing focus on a statue of Sherman, an affective register that
McElwee’s humor does not quite negate. Here is an emotional residue that
we need to explore more fully.
While McElwee gleefully deconstructs white southern masculinity
through playful autobiography, white femininity also emerges as a cen-
tral element in the documentary. Throughout Sherman’s March, McElwee

seems to be seeking the perfect heroine for his film romance, a sort of non-
Scarlett for his anti-Rhett. Although he pursues several women, they all
decline his offers, despite the help he receives from various ‘‘marriage bro-
kers.’’ As the film moves along, we watch as Ross embarks on one romantic
endeavor after another, meeting several intriguing women along the way.
Some reviewers of the film likened the portrayals of these women to paro-
dies, rather cruel and insensitive mockings by the man behind the camera,
who focuses on ‘‘women who are bizarre, a little wacky, maybe objects
of patronizing humor.’’ 44 McElwee disagrees, claiming that the women
are ‘‘funny, but not pathetic.’’ ‘‘Having decided to film women who are
independent in the South means they’re going to have to be somewhat
eccentric.’’ Southern femininity can be a very eccentric thing.
McElwee’s defense aside, one can also argue that the film structurally
and formally treats its women in interesting ways, while engaging a num-
ber of women’s issues. Apart from McElwee himself, the major presences
in Sherman’s March are all women, and these women are allowed a great
deal of room to perform. As film critic Ellen Draper points out, ‘‘the great
achievement’’ of McElwee’s film ‘‘is his articulation of his wonder at the
mystery of the women he encounters. Not unlike the great Hollywood
melodramas of the 30’s and 40’s, [he] appreciates these women as per-
formers, creating fantastic communities in a world of violence.’’ 45 The
film reveals the performative nature of southern femininity, denaturaliz-
ing certain stock images while investigating the complexity of southern
womanhood.
From Jackie’s teaching and nuclear protests, to Joyce’s empowered
singing in a strip mall parking lot, to Charlene’s emphatic attempts at
marrying Ross off, the women shine through as resilient and tough, even
at their most flirtatious. None of the men in the film (including McElwee)
seem as capable of surviving as these women, despite the often disabling
illusions they weave about themselves in order to get by. In a telling
moment in one of the film’s ‘‘historic voice-overs,’’ McElwee notes that
when Sherman attacked Atlanta, ‘‘women literally held the city together.’’
By tracing Sherman’s march—a military action waged primarily against
women—McElwee is already offering a rare vision of women in wartime.
He does not stop there. He goes on to allow these modern-day women,
most still partially confined by the hoopskirts of myth, to talk about their
fears and fantasies. Through their talk and Ross’s antics, the spectator
glimpses some of the high stakes of southern femininity, even if these stakes
are not overtly recognized by the women or by McElwee himself. Equally

important to the film’s depiction of women is the camera’s treatment of
women’s spaces, whether at home or at work. The women are frequently
shown going about their business as they good-naturedly fend off Ross’s
prying. We see women cooking, cleaning, mothering, primping, exercis-
ing, and lounging, but we also see them working: as teachers, singers,
lawyers, linguists, actresses, and activists. This is not simply a collection
of ‘‘positive images’’ of southern women. Rather, it is an investigation into
the terms and stakes of southern femininity.
Although none of the women’s portraits was apparently ‘‘staged,’’ each
comes across as a performance at some level. Perhaps the real import of
the film is the degree to which it manages to reveal the artifice of southern
femininity. Early in the film, McElwee’s future date for the masquerade ball
talks about aging and says, ‘‘I’m going to have total reconstruction. Just like
the South.’’ Again and again, we see these women engage in a wide range of
performances and undergo various reconstructions as they struggle with
the specter of the belle. McElwee’s sister, in one of the film’s funniest and
most memorable scenes, humorously describes the twin surgeries she has
just undergone—an eye-bag removal and a fanny tuck. Speaking in the
language of colloquial ‘‘wisdom,’’ she lets Ross in on a secret of femininity:
If you can hold a tube of Crest in your sagging buttocks, you should head for
the anesthesia. We also see Claudia get makeup tips from her young daugh-
ter and learn that she would never leave the house ‘‘unmade.’’ We hear
Pat ramble on about her fantasy role: as a female prophet who never ages
and who has young Tarzan lovers. Teenagers at an exclusive girls’ boarding
school, which McElwee calls ‘‘the very cradle of southern womanhood,’’
study their school pictures, casually telling each other not to worry, the
photographer will airbrush away the imperfections. Finally, Charlene puts
it all in perspective. Commenting on romance and women, she tells Ross
that it does not matter if he believes in true love; it’s all a game. ‘‘You’ve
got to kid her and kid yourself until you believe it.’’ The belle is revealed—
to the perceptive viewer—as both a plastic construction and a painfully
real presence. Small wonder that these southern women are a little bit
eccentric.
By presenting these endlessly reconstructed women in their every-
day environments as they go about their daily routines, Sherman’s March
subtly points out the gaps between these women’s lived experiences and
the official regional mythologies of southern womanhood. The lives of
these women are not the mythic, romantic lives of beauty and veneration
equated with the southern belle. Even as they sometimes strive to enact

the myth, these women (and, more importantly, we as spectators) know
that it is a labor-intensive and stress-producing performance. Sherman’s
March structures a space from which we can move beyond a simple venera-
tion of white southern womanhood (which Jacqueline Dowd Hall, Angela
Davis, and Ida B. Wells have all linked to racial violence) without devalu-
ing or mocking the women. Rather, the film insistently nags at the ideals of
southern femininity, tracing the gap between regional myths of femininity
and southern women’s everyday lives. The film further suggests that our
notions of femininity (and the social and psychic mechanisms they entail)
must be filtered through discourses such as those of place, regionalism,
and nationalism. Southern femininity is not valorized by the film as much
as it is examined, making it hard to view DeeDee, Pat, Charlene, or Jackie
as the southern ladies of myth.
In Nationalisms and Sexualities, feminist theorist Mary Layoun points out
that narratives of nationalism involve both a grammar (or order) and a
rhetoric that expresses that grammar. ‘‘It is from the differences or gaps be-
tween [these two] that a certain flexibility or fluidity may be discerned.’’ 46
Sherman’s March begins to open up just such a gap in its construction of
southern womanhood. Understanding femininity as it is played out in
Dixie can teach us a great deal about both the dynamics of racism and
the seeming failure of the women’s movement in the Deep South and also
hint at potentially productive relationships between femininity and femi-
nism, an important element of subsequent chapters. The insights into the
machinations of southern femininity and romance that the film provides
can serve as a starting point for a more complex analysis, insights that
begin to crack open the stasis of identity in iconic southern mythologies.
Charlene’s revelation that romance is just an elaborate game points to
another interesting critique of southern mythology. As testified to by W. J.
Cash and others, romance has always been an integral part of the histo-
ries and mythologies of the South. In many ways, the South is the embodi-
ment of romance, its very site, but Sherman’s March does not easily accept
this equation. Even the film’s subtitle calls the connection into question,
wondering if there is a possibility for romance anymore. Ross’s hunt for
love in the South proves unsuccessful and reveals much about romance
beyond Charlene’s assessments. Frustrated that Karen does not return his
love, Ross remarks that ‘‘love is obsession.’’ Throughout Sherman’s March,
romantic love is figured as comic or apocalyptic; as obsessive and unex-
plainable (in Karen’s case, as she is consistently drawn back to an inappro-
priate beau); as brutal (in Pat’s case, as she laughingly explains away an

abusive lover); as utopian (in DeeDee’s desire to bring the priesthood into
her home); and as sheer (and consciously) constructed fantasy (as Charlene
explains it). At best, it is contradictory, unable to resolve Karen’s femi-
nism with her good-old-boy boyfriend. By placing romance in relation
to the male perspective, Sherman’s March powerfully reveals the degree
to which it, like notions of southern femininity, constricts and disables
women. Contemporary feminist work on romance and popular culture
hints at possible sites of identification and liberation for women in ro-
mance forms.47 Films such as Sherman’s March underscore the necessity of
carefully evaluating the relation of romance to the dominant order in a
specific frame, exploring the impact of region on myths of romance. The
film derails a powerful southern investment in romance, a sentiment in
the South that can easily buoy up old stories and familiar tales, privileg-
ing Scarlett’s heartbreak over Mammy’s enslavement or the homosocial
romance of white veterans over the horrors of Jim Crow, often operating
to reinforce a white, white world.
The film’s title, after positing a historical subject, continues with the
subtitle A Meditation on the Possibility of Romantic Love in the South in an Era
of Nuclear Weapons Proliferation, collapsing, as the film itself does, romance,
war, and history. Women hold this triangulation together, as McElwee
continually compares his failure with women to the threat of nuclear holo-
caust, a move that makes the relationship between women and war much
more explicit than The Civil War does; hence McElwee’s portraits of love
and family are not mythical images from the pages of a national familial
scrapbook. War and sexuality are overtly and comically linked in other
ways as well, as one of Claudia’s friends remarks, ‘‘I really get turned on
by the Civil War.’’ The film also links women with antinuclear activism
in the real world outside of Ross’s nightmares. His old girlfriend Jackie
is passionately involved in antinuclear efforts, and the film follows her at
rallies, in protests, and on a trip to a monument for survivors of nuclear
holocaust. We learn that most nuclear waste is dumped in the South, and
that South Carolina’s largest crop (next to peaches) is plutonium.48
Finally, McElwee attends the unveiling of a monument honoring the
Confederate dead in Sumter, South Carolina, and talks with an elderly
woman. In her brief appearance, she remarks, ‘‘There’s nothing glamorous
about war. It’s death and destruction,’’ a comment on death that echoes
none of The Civil War’s macabre fascination. The women’s voices (which
are largely univocal for Burns) begin to sever romantic male fantasies link-
ing both masculinity and femininity (and southern identity) to war. Still,

McElwee’s tone often plays into an old southern ploy of honoring strong
women (albeit wacky ones) and, even while presenting a variety of south-
ern women, still seems somehow to ‘‘fix’’ them as almost essential south-
ern types, particularly if we as spectators do not read them against the
grain. Perhaps one of the risks of the expatriate returning home (even as
indigenous ethnographer) is a certain ease with which the relationship be-
tween individual subjectivities and social contexts gets frozen within a
static South, a stasis McElwee tries to trouble. His film provocatively ex-
plores the constructions of white southern identity, recognizing tradition
without embalming or enshrining it. He does important work here, dis-
connecting and denaturalizing an all too easy linkage between ‘‘southern-
ness’’ and ‘‘whiteness.’’ While focusing on whiteness, the film also fleetingly
represents blackness.
McElwee takes a different tack than Burns when addressing blackness in
his documentary. He largely drops it as a category and only briefly images
racial difference. In one of three scenes that include African Americans,
McElwee is waiting on Pat and her friend Lee as they prepare for an audi-
tion with an agent. Both women flutter about the apartment, applying
mascara and trying on outfits, while McElwee films and narrates the event.
As the women prepare to leave, a black maid, Magnolia, briefly (though
not apparently happily) enters the frame to say ‘‘bye’’ and ‘‘good luck.’’ In
some ways, her role in the film is akin to that of Mammy in Gone with the
Wind: through her unseen and unnoted labor, she facilitates the perfor-
mance of white femininity, keeping house so that Pat is free to pursue Burt
Reynolds and a film career. The strategic irony that begins to call white
southern womanhood into question throughout the film does not quite
extend to black femininity, missing an opportunity to think through the
complex play of womanhood across racial lines.
Sherman’s March figures southernness primarily as whiteness, reenacting
the lenticular logic of Scarlett and Savannah and generally erasing African
Americans from the frame, but the film’s images also provide a ground
via which the spectator can question this very logic. By applying a criti-
cal pressure to the film’s few images of blackness, it is possible to read
beyond the seeming whiteness of McElwee’s text. Magnolia’s face in the
mirror underscores (for me, at least) the lie of the equation ‘‘southernness
= whiteness.’’ Both her visage and the quiet tones of the black mechanic
who discusses death with Ross haunt Sherman’s March, revealing the degree
to which blackness works in the text to prop up white femininity and to

allow male emotion, for the conversation about cancer between Ross and
the mechanic is one of the few moments of noncomical emotional affect in
the documentary. Yet somehow this fleeting connection achieves an inter-
racial intimacy missing from The Civil War; the terrain of the personal and
the everyday offers a glimpse of other modes of union, a union that breaks
the grip of the lenticular. One wishes that McElwee had taken this current
further.
Toni Morrison has noted that an author’s ‘‘response to American Afri-
canism often provides a subtext that either sabotages the surface text’s ex-
pressed intentions or escapes them through a language that mystifies what
it cannot bring itself to articulate but still attempts to hold together.’’ 49
The ‘‘Africanist’’ presence in Sherman’s March cracks open the film’s seeming
whiteness, signaling the role blackness plays in maintaining certain images
of southern hospitality. Although the text does not overtly call this role
into question, it hints at other possibilities for meaningful black visibility,
possibilities that the following chapters will pursue. In contrast to Sher-
man’s March, The Civil War makes much of its inclusion of race as a visible
presence, but that text must always hold blackness and whiteness apart
in order to underwrite and reentrench a narrative of national (white) re-
covery. Although neither documentary thoroughly analyzes blackness in
relation to whiteness, Sherman’s March does limn a space from which to
critique whiteness via the shadowy figures it places in juxtaposition to its
white characters. McElwee moves us forward by moving away from a mel-
ancholic take on southern history, coupling nostalgia with strategic irony
to break melancholy’s backward pull. Whereas Burns’s nostalgia is gener-
alized and free-floating, authorizing and underwriting melancholy, there
is a specificity to McElwee’s nostalgic moments, locating this affect and
linking it to the present. A focus on the everyday and the now diffuses
nostalgia’s abstraction effect, no longer reading the past as frozen in its
difference, largely lost and to be mourned.
Although McElwee goes further than Burns in deromanticizing Dixie,
there is finally a tiny, muted echo of the longing for lost times evident in
The Civil War, an echo that McElwee’s incursion into irony and the everyday
does not quite displace. McElwee’s attitude toward historical events is far
from monumental, but a certain sense of melancholia still tinges the edges
of his work, perhaps because he can never really unpack the romance of
the South without fully integrating race into his analysis. This underlying
melancholy leads me to ask why ‘‘we,’’ as a nation, remain so fascinated

with the details of this war. There is an overriding sense in much of Civil
War popular culture and, to different degrees, in both documentaries that,
as a nation, we had to sacrifice something to survive our country’s ‘‘great-
est test.’’ These mediations of the Civil War reveal how easily different
representational strategies can serve to connect the ruins of war with the
ruins of a lost culture by collapsing images of battle onto images of plan-
tation life and hoopskirts. To maintain this fantasy about the Old South
and our nation’s history, gender and especially race must be suppressed as
integral terms of analysis.
It may seem that to praise Sherman’s March while critiquing The Civil War
is to chastise the middlebrow histories of pbs for not being more ironic or
‘‘experimental,’’ rejecting the widely popular in favor of the idiosyncratic.
Actually, this variation on the high/low binary is not that interesting, as
neither work exists outside of culture; identities (of individuals and re-
gions) are forged in the crucible of culture, where such distinctions rarely
hold. While I clearly prefer Sherman’s March (also occasional pbs fare), there
is much to be learned from both works: in recognizing the latent desire
for union and honorable manhood fermenting in The Civil War, we can
begin to imagine how to mobilize these emotional registers differently.
We can also begin to think critically about the extent to which many nar-
ratives of nation depend on images of blackness for their emotional tex-
turing. Further, as we saw in chapter 1, academic histories are not immune
to the representational tactics of Burns’s work; rather, ‘‘popular,’’ ‘‘high-
brow,’’ and ‘‘academic’’ works all engage in skirmishes over the definitions
of the South, linking ‘‘high’’ and ‘‘low’’ across a continuum of meaning. In
many ways, they are in symbolic dialogue and offer us different but re-
lated models for thinking through southernness. My purpose here is not
to fault these various representations of the Civil War for failing to match
some (imagined) utopian image but instead to explore the meanings of
their limits, latencies, and contradictions. Still, the differences between
their varied strategies matter. There are less hidebound southerners, deni-
zens (and expatriates) of Dixie who are not as captivated by certain Old
Souths, frustrated as they are by the narrow emotional registers evoked
by certain tired old tales. Moreover, the insights gleaned from McElwee’s
ramblings are not solely applicable within the groves of academe or the
funky independent cinema circuit, nor are they his alone.

g D I X I E R E D U X : C A P TA I N C O N F E D E R AC Y TO T H E R E S C U E
He thinks that if there are an infinite number of universes, they must be infinitely
mixed with good and bad. . . . He doesn’t know what he wants to do. . . . He should
be happy. His future waits.—Captain Confederacy, no. 1
A region can be a site of stultifying authenticity, an easy answer to the pres-

sures of globalization, but it can also function in other registers, becoming
a contested terrain mobilized for alternative histories. Under various pres-
sures, the region shifts, glimmers, and changes, a site of possibility both
emergent and sometimes foreclosed. There is a push and pull to its con-
tours, a give and take to its meanings. Speculative fictions can ask us to
reimagine familiar ground, reconfiguring our plantation past à la Octavia
Butler or rethinking white southern investment in the Civil War as ori-
gin story, moving us to the present. In tackling the terrain of our nation’s
‘‘greatest test,’’ Captain Confederacy does just that. It’s also a comic book,
published from 1986 to 1988, and from 1991 to 1992.50 Writer Will Shetterly
and artist Vince Stone shake free our cultural fixation on a particular mo-
ment in national history by rewriting that history: here the South won the
war and left the Union. Now fast-forward to the future, to a time roughly
our own, when North America has fractured into a number of rival nation-
states, including the Confederate States of America, Free Louisiana, the
U.S.A., the Republic of Texas, and California, among others. Beginning
with the premise of the Civil War and imagining that ‘the South succeeded
in seceding,’’ Shetterly plots a southern history in which roaring cannons
and military minutiae recede from view, replaced by the everyday of a
parallel present.
Captain Confederacy sketches a future South vaguely resembling an apart-
heid South Africa or a Jim Crow South, a world mapped by an overt spa-
tial geography of racism. Slavery has ended, but racial oppression thrives.
There are ‘‘colored quarters’’ of town and fiercely enforced ‘‘colored cur-
fews,’’ as well as a white government at once paternalistic and overtly
racist. Small white children dress up like Captain Confederacy, the na-
tional (super) hero, and loving laments to an older South still dance across
the tv screen. Margaret Mitchell’s novel Glorious Tomorrows is still a best-
seller (and one black woman dreams of rewriting it from a slave’s point of
view). Captain Confederacy is also on television, protecting ‘‘truth, jus-
tice, and the Confederate way,’’ reinforced by the luscious Miss Dixie and
fighting the likes of Blacksnake, a ‘‘colored’’ villain who doesn’t realize,

in the words of the good Captain, that ‘‘violence only hinders his people’s
cause.’’ Captain Confederacy helps him see the light, at least in the opening
pages of the first issue. The comic’s first installment begins as a tv news-
cast, presenting the heroics of the Captain. However, under each panel,
a running commentary unfolds, talking back to the image, troubling this
new South. We soon learn that ‘‘our hero’’ is just a regular guy, a two-bit
actor named Jeremy Gray; the Dixie Duo and their black counterparts
are all part of Project Hero, a cbi propaganda machine designed to keep
folks in their proper places, supporting the Confederate government and
maintaining racial oppression. In exploring the lives of Jeremy and Roxie
(Miss Dixie) and Aaron and Kate (who play whatever stereotypical black
character the plot demands), the series repeatedly foregrounds the role
of the media in constructing possible Souths, subtly commenting on the
electronic transmission of Dixie. As Jeremy and the others watch them-
selves on tv or in the pages of Newsweek, the comic highlights the South’s
mutability and constructedness, the potential slipperiness of the region,
via a foregrounding of acts of mediation, underscoring that the South gets
made in the stories we tell about it.
Jeremy, Aaron, and Kate are casual friends, but Jeremy’s white girl-
friend Roxie is more overtly racist. Jeremy and Aaron both begin the series
fairly apolitical, but Kate is quickly framed as more radical, tied to an active
Underground Railroad, a narrative strategy that acknowledges a history
of black resistance to oppression throughout ‘‘other’’ southern histories.
When she is ambushed and presumably killed by cbi agents (after being
ratted out by Roxie), Aaron finally fights back; he’s shot by Roxie as he tries
to unmask Project Hero on the air, and the network spins his death as just
another act of heroism on the part of Captain Confederacy. The first issue
ends with Jeremy wracked by guilt and anguish, imaging possible futures
but paralyzed by an anger born of feelings of helplessness and guilt, locked
somewhere between the emotive registers of the neo-Confederates and
The Civil War. Over the next several issues, Kate reemerges, still part of an
organized multiracial, multinational resistance, now bent on recruiting
Jeremy to their cause and using his iconic status as the Captain to unveil
the government’s hypocrisy. Jeremy initially resists, protesting, ‘‘I’m just
an actor,’’ and ‘‘You can’t change a country overnight.’’ He wants to be left
alone, to get on with his life. But he slowly comes around, falls for Kate,
and helps save the world. As the second series begins, Kate has been in-
stalled as the new (quite pregnant) Captain Confederacy, and Jeremy is
her sidekick, Kid Dixie.

Captain Confederacy reimagines southern history, modeling new
modes of feeling southern and reworking old icons. Image courtesy
of Will Shetterly.
Although the comic books unfold in broad strokes (but much less re-
ductively than the previous paragraph suggests—the story’s pace is lively
and engaging), the series models the emotional trajectory of a white south-
erner’s move toward a future of accountability for racial pasts and presents.
Jeremy begins an average guy, just getting along in the South, not really
thinking about the impact of his role as Captain Confederacy on the world
around him. Later, as he is faced with his culpability in Aaron’s death,
Jeremy’s character arc outlines a route out of grief and helplessness as
he rejects the comforting narcissism of self-pity and the disavowals of
displaced anger. Emotions are mobile, changeable, productive; there are
many ways of feeling southern. As series 1 draws to a close, Jeremy is quite
literally reborn into racial consciousness, returning phoenixlike from the
brink of death to follow Kate’s lead in challenging the government. While
this affective mobility suggests the differences between the masculinity of
Captain Confederacy and that called forth by both the neo-Confederates
and The Civil War, the comic nonetheless explores similar themes, deeply
concerned with figuring an honorable manhood. But this is a new white
masculinity for new times. Jeremy’s actions in the present (and for the
future) restore his honor, severing honor from the iconic status of the long-
dead hero, pursuing acts of courage among ordinary men focused on the
now. The Civil War also attempts a history of Everyman, but there honor
is time-locked, frozen in the sepia-toned and segregated past of military
monuments, unable to imagine other futures or active presents. Captain
Confederacy is not anti-South; from within its frames emerges a fondness
for the region and many of its rhythms, but there is also a recognition of the
complexities of place and the responsibilities born of historical memory.
Neither is southernness naturalized as whiteness.
The comic reconceives black femininity, figuring Kate (and black
womanhood) as integral to southern histories of resistance, a source of
vibrant activism against oppression. While Kate’s character might be read
as the ‘‘strong underpinning’’ for Jeremy’s emotional transformation, once
again figuring black identity as the support system for white feeling à la
Mammy and Scarlett, the series undermines such an easy turn by pointedly
foregrounding the symbolic labor Kate’s character performs. In issue 5,
‘‘Dreamscapes,’’ we learn that as a side effect of the Project Hero super
serum, Kate has begun to inhabit the other characters’ dreams. As their
dreams unfold panel after panel, Kate inhabits the background, some-
times saving the day, sometimes restoring order, sometimes soothing hurt
feelings; across twenty pages, Kate is called up to play her role in other

characters’ scenarios, drawn into their worlds much as Dana was pulled
backward through time by Rufus in Butler’s Kindred. While inside a dream
of Jeremy’s, she notes, ‘‘Usually I’m ignored or incorporated into the
dreamer’s fantasy. No one seems to remember me when they wake up,’’
symbolically referencing the shadowy existence of black figures in the
dominant imaginary and reflecting on the roles they play there.
Unlike Scarlett or The Civil War, whose representations of blackness re-
main shadowy, providing emotional texture for white characters and view-
ers, Captain Confederacy both explores the role of blackness within white
dreamscapes and also begins to imagine how white southerners might ac-
knowledge and begin to repay their debts to blackness. Kate comes to
exert a sense of agency from within these shadow states, slowing moving
Jeremy along to greater consciousness. The psychic effects of the super
serum also affect white femininity, giving Miss Dixie the power to read the
minds of those around her. Her access to black thoughts almost drives her
crazy as she comes to experience the effects of racism from the oppressed’s
point of view; initially she reacts in anger, attacking a black servant, but
she slowly comes around as she also recognizes shared qualities of hope,
fear, and possibility. Her transformation and Jeremy’s are perhaps too easy,
lacking some of the complexity of Kevin’s coming to consciousness in Kin-
dred, but they nonetheless hint at a model of change for white subjectivity
that is altogether missing in a tale such as The Civil War. Chapter 4 will
again access this current, tracking several southern memoirs that explore
the difficult task of remaking white southern identity.
From the retooled Stars and Bars of Captain Confederacy’s costume
to the mapping of urban and rural southern places, the series takes up
the symbols of the South and imaginatively reconstructs them, shaking
loose the stock figures, geographies, and temporalities of southernness. If
Octavia Butler and Kara Walker alter the meaning of the southern lady,
Shetterly reconfigures the southern gentlemen, unfixing his location in an
idealized Civil War past, instead deploying him for a different understand-
ing of our present. In the lively letters column that ends each issue, Shet-
terly writes, ‘‘I often wonder whether the ‘colorful symbols’ of the South
have been enhanced by the romance of defeat. . . . I have the ambivalent
feelings of most Southern liberals toward the icons of the war.’’ If Shetterly
seems unsure, the comics themselves process this ambivalence, taking up
southern symbols to open up spaces for cross-racial alliance and antiracist
identities. Captain Confederacy is clearly utopian (after all, Miss Dixie comes
around to the cause pretty quickly), but its utopianism speaks to a desire

A Madison County tourism
campaign illustrates the
mobility of the southern
belle’s image, linking Old
and New Souths.
for union that is much more fully realized than the latent expressions of
The Civil War and similar texts. Unlike a film such as Mississippi Burning,
where revisionist history fantasizes white heroics where none existed, Cap-
tain Confederacy rewrites the past to create a parallel universe where white
southerners can help to change the world through the hard work of listen-
ing, learning, and changing. Jeremy Gray doesn’t lead us into a bright new
future, saving the day; rather, he follows Kate and her comrades, decen-
tering the whiteness at the heart of many tales of southernness. Together
they are neo-Confederates of a very different order than those hostilely
guarding Dixie-Net and the Confederate Embassy.
The final page of the comic’s closing issue features Kate, in her hero’s
garb, speaking at a news conference, reminding viewers that ‘‘no one
knows what a national champion should be,’’ implying that ‘‘average’’ folks
can change the world. Their utopian vision has not yet been achieved, and
they continue to battle racism, but they are hopeful and optimistic. In the
last frame, Kate and Jeremy stand together, awaiting a baby and working
toward a different South. Like Kindred’s Dana, who returns to the South
at the novel’s close in order to imagine different futures, this pair of ‘‘ordi-

nary’’ heroes offers us new symbols for a new South. Compared to another
recent set of southern images, we begin to see the value of rethinking
Dixie’s imagery. An advertisement from Alabama’s development bureau
offers up a sunlit photograph of a stately plantation home. On the grand
front steps stands a hoopskirted southern belle arm in arm with her 1990s
beau, a helmeted, uniformed, moon-booted astronaut. The caption reads,
‘‘Huntsville, Alabama: Where the Old South Delights in the Space Age,’’
revealing both the mobility of the figure of the belle and the curious ease
with which this mobility can be put to work in the service of the dominant
order, the twin lessons of the previous two chapters. It also suggests that
southern symbols underwrite very particular takes on the region, linking
history and the present in precise ways. We would do well to remember
the same and to be careful with whom we link arms.

3.
S T E E L M AG N O L I A S ,
F ATA L F L O W E R S , A N D
D E S I G N I N G WO M E N
On the Limits of a Politics

of Femininity in the
Sun Belt South
g
Everybody must learn
this lesson somewhere: that
it costs something to be
what you are.
—Shirley Abbott,
Womenfolks
On the back cover of her 1991 best-seller A Southern Belle Primer, journal-
ist Maryln Schwartz promises the reader insights into ‘‘the mystique of
the Southern Belle,’’ as well as guidelines for ‘‘survival in a society that has
not gone with the wind.’’ Not surprisingly, given its title, the slim volume
focuses on the contemporary southern belle, tracing her lineage and pre-
dicting her future while offering a variety of etiquette tips for survival in
a southern world. For instance, the book admonishes the would-be belle
to select her silver pattern with care, never to use dark meat in chicken
salad, and to wear white shoes only between Easter and Labor Day. While
clearly tongue-in-cheek and not a serious conduct manual, the Primer does
serve to illustrate the importance of etiquette and tradition to the mod-
ern southern belle (who is still exclusively white). One Alabama belle in-
sists that the most crucial elements for ‘‘being southern’’ are ‘‘breeding
and manners’’ (15), and a member of the St. Cecilia Society of Charleston,
South Carolina, maintains that ‘‘in Charleston, tradition is everything’’
(69). (This same St. Cecilia Society was Scarlett’s great obsession in the
Gone with the Wind sequel.) Other southerners have commented on the
South’s rule-bound society as well, occasionally with more cynicism than
Schwartz’s book evinces. Novelist Dorothy Allison probes the hypocrisy
of the South’s class-bound traditions in her novel Bastard Out of Carolina
and elsewhere describes a southern ‘‘childhood of forced politeness,’’ and
feminist Mab Segrest writes, ‘‘Southerners raise their indirection to an art
and call it manners. Manners are one thing that still, to this day, separate
Southerners from Yankees.’’ 1 For Segrest, this is not necessarily something
to celebrate, for southern manners often mask southern inequities.
Tradition and manners are repeatedly framed as the glue that binds
the South together, distinguishing it from other regions. This is a famil-
iar mantra, one linked to the ‘‘famous’’ southern hospitality capitalized on
by many of the tourist attractions highlighted earlier in the book. Con-
temporary fascinations with the ‘‘grandeur’’ of the Old South depend on a
certain sense of decorum, and this genteel mise-en-scène of southernness
is constructed via a carefully manipulated stage set of moonlight, magno-
lias, and manners. White southerners frequently stress the importance of
keeping up appearances; for example, in her Womenfolks: Growing Up Down
South, popular writer Shirley Abbott describes the ‘‘natural theatricality’’
inherent in southern hospitality. It requires ‘‘a talent for taking on a special
role in a comedy of manners that will apparently run forever, no matter
how transparent its characters and aims’’ (106). This maintenance of an
aura of tranquillity despite a certain degree of transparency suggests that
southern hospitality is a performance, a masquerade, an agreed-on social
fiction, albeit a powerful one with material effects.
In an intriguing article analyzing the popular coffee table book Lee
Bailey’s Southern Food and Plantation Houses, feminist theorist Patricia Yaeger
highlights the degree to which celebrations of the traditions of southern
hospitality often ‘‘repeat the worst parameters of white southern sover-
eignty; they mandate a social system that is almost invisible because of
the ways ‘good taste’ functions. . . . [They] move us back into a dreamy
acceptance of a terrifying social habitus.’’ 2 Yaeger’s work echoes that of
French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who has analyzed the various ways
in which taste functions to uphold social distinctions, acting as ‘‘a sort
of social orientation, a ‘sense of one’s place,’ guiding the occupants of a
given place in a social space towards the social positions adjusted to their

properties.’’ 3 Taste in the South has everything to do with manners, with
knowing ‘‘one’s place,’’ propping up an entire social system and naturaliz-
ing its strictures, locking in the lenticular. Bourdieu further suggests that
such social schemes are ‘‘turned into muscular patterns and bodily automa-
tisms,’’ structuring a particular ‘‘way of bearing one’s body, presenting it
to others, moving it, making space for it’’ (474). When it matter-of-factly
reminds young ladies never to smoke while walking, A Southern Belle Primer
sketches the bodily comportment of the belle, outlining a way of being in
one’s body that works to facilitate southern grace and hospitality. Properly
packaged, mannerisms perfected, the belle traverses particular regional
spaces with ease (and, of course, grace); other spaces remain off-limits,
beyond the proper domains of the refined southern woman.
The Primer picks up on a long tradition of southern rhetoric vis-à-vis the
belle and the lady. During the 1940s, novelist and journalist Lillian Smith
frequently commented on the ‘‘layers of taboos and proprieties and deco-
rums’’ that structured southern society, social prescriptions that are cru-
cial to the maintenance of southern femininity and racial segregation.4 As
Gone with the Wind takes pains to illustrate, the southern lady (as the grown-
up belle) functions as the pivot around which this mythical mise-en-scène
of southernness unfolds: she is integral to its successful performance, and
her performance creates the reality. Ellen O’Hara structured and ordered
the space in which the graciousness of Tara materialized, a role inherited
by Scarlett in the novel’s sequel, and this focus on the lady erased the vari-
ous labors that enabled her gentility. Her role was reinforced in popular
regional paeans to southern women, including one by southern statesman
Thomas Nelson Page, who wrote in 1897 that the southern lady ‘‘was in-
deed a surprising creature—often delicate in frame . . . but her force and
character pervaded and directed everything, as unseen yet as unmistak-
able as the power of gravity.’’ 5 Of course, this masculine encomium to
true southern womanhood served as a cover and a justification for various
manifestations of the Lost Cause mentality, including the Klan, helping to
shore up a wounded southern masculinity postwar; but it was also taken
quite seriously by women in Page’s day and afterward. One example is
found in the words of Laura Orr, the historian of North Carolina’s dar
society. In 1912 she maintained that ‘‘southern housewives worked hard to
keep their great households, and at the same time exercised their gracious
hospitality, while the New England women feared witches and discussed
sermons as their only intellectual diversion.’’ 6 Graciousness was continu-
ally reinscribed as strictly a southern quality, used by many white men and
Steel Magnolias, Fatal Flowers, and Designing Women 151

women to different ends, but by both in the service of an emerging Jim
Crow South.
This is not to say that these popular constructions of the belle and the
lady were completely embodied or enacted by southern women, past or
present. Rather, in their glorified forms, the belle and the lady can be seen
as asymptotes, as limit figures against which many southern women evalu-
ated their own lives. Whether or not women embraced these ideals, their
popularity had material effects in women’s lives, be they black or white,
rich or poor. The belle and the lady are more ideology than reality (even if
most white southerners will still claim to know a lady or two), but they are
ideologies with reality effects. Even women who overtly resist the lady’s
lure do so within the symbol’s realm of influence. Constructions of femi-
ninity impacted (and continue to impact) women’s lives throughout the
country, not only in the South, but the regional fixation on, and deploy-
ment of, a particular feminine ideal reaches a different level in the South,
tightly bound as it is to the maintenance of specific racial orders. Both the
iconic image of the southern lady (certainly a more enduring symbol of
womanhood than those associated with other regions) and the emphasis
on a highly mannered performance of gender distinguish Dixie’s take on
femininity. The performative nature of the lady signals a difference both
in kind and of degree, limning a very different history of race, gender, and
place than that of other regions. Even if this difference in regional femi-
ninity were only one of degree, that difference has been fetishized, fixated
on, and marketed for so long that it has taken hold, creeping into white
southern consciousness like kudzu.
This ‘‘steel magnolia’’ description of the southern lady lives on today,
in sources ranging from the 1989 feature film of the same title to A South-
ern Belle Primer. In the latter, much attention is paid to the importance
of maintaining an illusion of the fragility of southern femininity. For in-
stance, Schwartz relates in great detail the story of one southern lady who
entertained guests with aplomb despite the raging winds of an engulf-
ing hurricane. Her grateful guests allegedly replied that this lady’s ‘‘hos-
pitality was stronger than [Hurricane] Hugo,’’ and Schwartz goes on to
insist that ‘‘a favorite saying in the South is a true belle is a bulldozer—
she’s just disguised as a powder puff’’ (x). Other feisty southern women
are later described as ‘‘ladies in the true Southern belle fashion: they look
like cream puffs and get things done like Sherman tanks’’ (25–26). An air
of graciousness and a demeanor of submissive delicacy (which both mask
inner strength) thus define white southern femininity in popular discourse.

The belle or lady raises flirtation and softness to an art form, deploying a
performance of heightened femininity to disguise both determination and
potency. This performance is an agreed-on social fiction, allowing a simul-
taneous privileging of both delicacy and strength. Here southern femi-
ninity glosses the body and adorns it, smoothing its surface by substituting
manners and ritual for overt sexuality.
Lillian Smith commented on this substitution, noting that white south-
ern women’s place on the ‘‘pedestal’’ led them to focus on their homes,
which she described as ‘‘gracious and good to live in. . . . Places you re-
member—if you live on that side of town—[as full] of quiet ease and
comfort and taste. In these homes, food and flowers were cherished. . . .
Sex was pushed out through the back door. . . . Segregation was pushed
out of sight also’’ (141). After divorcing femininity from sexuality, white
southern women’s focus fixated on home and family, or, if unmarried, on
romance, that quest for domesticity. Susan Brownmiller has commented
that ‘‘femininity is, in essence, a romantic sentiment’’ (2), and this is per-
haps true of U.S. femininity in general. Still, the terms of this equation are
even more rigidly fixed in popular discourse about the South, where the
slippage between femininity and hospitality reinforces an understanding
of the region as the primary national site of romance, an argument al-
ready familiar from the previous chapter.7 This location of romance within
a southern mise-en-scène depends on specific triangulations of gender,
race, and place, meanings that shift across the twentieth century while
also circulating familiar images of the belle and the lady.
For instance, in the March 22, 1953, magazine section of the New Orleans
Times-Picayune, an article entitled ‘‘There’ll Always Be a Southern Belle’’
describes the belle as ‘‘the most formidable mantrap in the world,’’ per-
haps because she is so thoroughly ensconced in tulle netting. A scant three
columns of copy are encircled by several large photos, all focusing on the
fun of flirtation (‘‘a Dixie art’’) or on the trying on of wedding dresses.
The text ensures the reader that ‘‘the Southern girl dresses for men . . .
and plays for men [but] never too well.’’ The secret to her allure? ‘‘Melt-
ing accents, fluttering lids, sweet-talk,’’ all wrapped up in ribbons and a
‘‘devastating’’ southern charm. Additionally, ‘‘for the Southern belle, all
life leads to the wedding day,’’ after which ‘‘she sets right about having
daughters, and there the planning [of romance] begins again.’’ This is not
an attitude confined to the South of the 1950s. Four decades later, Missis-
sippi magazine still centers an annual issue on ‘‘weddings of the year.’’ In
the January–February 1990 issue, the editor extols the joys of wedding

planning and insists that ‘‘grand weddings are not a thing of the past in the
Magnolia State’’ (7), and the feature article begins with the assurance that
‘‘there are few things in which we Mississippians take more pleasure than
weddings’’ (41). Likewise, A Southern Belle Primer includes an entire chapter
on Southern weddings, insisting that ‘‘Southern belles go all-out for their
weddings’’ (71) and ‘‘that there is no detail overlooked in planning a South-
ern belle’s’’ big day (78). Several subsections describe the various rules of
etiquette governing Dixie weddings, a move that works not only to frame
romance as key to the southern belle’s life but also to lock the meaning
of southernness within a very narrow register. Although weddings are no
doubt ‘‘big days’’ throughout the United States, they are constantly and in-
sistently inscribed as precise markers of place in popular discourse about
the South.
These blissful images of weddings, belles, and romance link idealized
notions of southern femininity across a span of forty years, but there are
important differences as well. In the 1950s newspaper spread, five large
photographs frame a brief essay on the wonders that make up the southern
belle. In turn, the text surrounds a lone small photograph: a picture of the
‘‘heroine’’ of the piece, the young belle Jane, in the kitchen of her home,
watching as an African American woman in uniform works at the counter,
ostensibly preparing the evening’s meal. The caption reads ‘‘family cook
gives Jane some pointers.’’ Occupying the foreground of the snapshot and
filling the right half of the image, the woman towers over Jane, under-
scoring the girl’s petiteness and whiteness, positioning the two in sharp
contrast. The nameless woman is not mentioned again, but her visibility
in the center of the layout suggests that, much as in Gone with the Wind,
the black woman still functions as an anchor, imagined to labor happily
in the service of white femininity, training the belle for her future as a
wife. The ‘‘family cook’’ smiles in the photo, focused on her task, and Jane
laughs cheerfully in the background.
In the context of the 1950s, this quaint story works double time. At one
level, it erases the specificity of blackness and black agency at precisely the
moment when the Civil Rights movement begins to challenge the racial
logics of Jim Crow, containing black femininity within the white house-
hold and refusing even to name black subjectivity. Ironically, the layout
images an integrated household just as white southerners are lining up to
fight for segregation in broader public life, suggesting that white south-
erners were not opposed to racial contact as long as it unfolded strictly on
their terms. Also forgotten is the emotional and physical labor expended

The January–February 1990 issue of Mississippi magazine refigures the southern belle as
southern bride, noting that southern ‘‘celebrations of marriage are classic.’’ The July–
August 1988 issue frames the southern belle as perennial pageant queen, noting that
‘‘the southern feminine mystique cuts through all corners of our culture. In the world
of beauty and talent pageants, it seems to be magnified.’’
by black domestics as they toiled in the white home.8 At a second level,

the feature article (it’s the cover story for that issue) also confines white
femininity, reinscribing women within the domestic sphere as part of the
larger cultural backlash against women’s wartime freedoms. The essay be-
gins with a near acknowledgment of this fact. A brief preface notes that
‘‘before deciding to publish’’ the story, the editors called the author at
home, for they ‘‘were concerned as to whether a few members of the fair
sex . . . might be offended by his remarks.’’ The author, photographer Bern
Keating, ‘‘roars’’ his objections, insisting that he loves southern girls ‘‘one
and all’’—hell, he married one! Faced with such enthusiasm, the editors
simply agree, adding that’s why we have ‘‘three on our cover.’’ The possi-
bility that white southern women might not embrace this particular ver-
sion of the giggling belle and domesticated wife is momentarily introduced
but quickly smoothed over, dismissed in its silliness. White women are
returned to their place on the pedestal, circumscribing women’s mobility
while picturing a model of integration divorced from equality or freedom.
White female desires are trivialized; black ones can’t even be named. Once

again, black and white women are locked back into old household dynam-
ics, replaying familiar southern tales of dominance, the belle achieving
ideal femininity via the labor of black ‘‘help.’’
When Mississippi magazine images the wonderful world of wedding bliss
nearly forty years later, perky southern femininity serves other, though
not entirely different, ends. The black supporting cast has vanished, as
the state is figured as overwhelmingly white. More than two dozen happy
couples smile back from the volume’s glossy pages; two are African Ameri-
can. In a companion section featuring the ‘‘Mississippi Baby Album’’ (pre-
sumably the payoff for all that busy coupling), every baby is white.9 Other
issues from the same period focus on beauty pageants (with the tag line
‘‘Can Other States Compete?’’) and ‘‘Designing Mississippians.’’ The pag-
eant issue labors to distance the ‘‘good old boy (gob)’’ image of the state,
noting that there ‘‘seemed to be more mbas and bmws and fewer gobs
and double-wides.’’ There’s an upscaling going on, an effort to distance the
ugly images of the state that took hold in the national consciousness during
the Civil Rights movement, replacing rednecks with young professionals.
The southern lady is still highly visible, winning recognition via the pag-
eant circuit and assorted garden tours. The 1980s-based return to these
images of manicured white femininity speak to the backlash against the
gains of both the women’s and the Civil Rights movements, positioning
women within traditionally feminine pursuits while erasing from visibility
the high number of African Americans living in Mississippi. Following the
logic of the Reagan-Bush era through to a regional conclusion, the south-
ern lady returns to a focus on domesticity and beauty, enshrined in an
oddly white world where she reigns without challengers.
Her reemergence also reflects larger regional anxieties about the per-
ceived homogenization of the South via the pressures of global capital-
ism. Sources like Mississippi magazine and the Primer reinforce an insularity
to all things southern, defending and policing the borders of the region
even while responding to national pressures. Such texts are replete with
statements like ‘‘It’s the same all over the South’’ (Schwartz, Primer, 4),
pronouncements that continually assert regional difference while simul-
taneously imposing a sameness and homogeneity within the region itself.
This discourse limits the possibilities for productive border crossings or for
rethinking differences within the South, while also supporting the ‘‘moon-
light and magnolia’’ version of southernness. As the economic and material
conditions of (parts of ) the South improved during the neoliberal 1980s,
cheered on by a relentless southern boosterism, the discursive positioning

of the region also shifted. These two realms—material and discursive—
mutually supported each other, creating a kind of feedback loop in the
meanings of southern icons. One variable in this loop is feminism and what
it might mean for the South. For instance, the Primer and its sequel, New
Times in the Old South, seek to discern the contours of the belle of the new
New South, but this belle is a belle with a briefcase, newly out of therapy
and interested in ‘‘women’s issues,’’ including equal pay.
Although both books steer clear of the word ‘‘feminism,’’ they do pro-
cess certain goals of the liberal feminist movement, incorporating them
into an expanded vision of the southern lady. The sequel quotes an eighty-
two-year-old ‘‘Miss Maybelle’’ who ‘‘thinks ladies should be, first and fore-
most, ladies, and that the issue of women’s rights should be approached
with ladylike manners and respect’’ (46). If Gone with the Wind sought
to reconcile Scarlett and the New Woman, various Sun Belt versions of
the late-twentieth-century lady also explore how southern manners and
women’s rights might be woven together, proposing various strategies of
performance and outlining different possibilities.
Throughout the Primer’s version of the Sun Belt South, southern gra-
ciousness and southern femininity interlace, supporting each other and
weaving tales of romance and region even while the South is changing. It is
a process in which surfaces and appearances mean everything, for hospi-
tality and femininity in the South share the status of masquerades. If Scar-
lett O’Hara and other belles (real and imaginary) are well aware of their
performances of southern femininity, so too is the recognition of southern
hospitality as a performance fairly common. Although Bourdieu argues
that the ‘‘schemes of the habitus . . . owe their efficacy to the fact that they
function below the level of consciousness’’ (466)—echoing Riviere’s analy-
sis of her southern patient’s unconscious performance of femininity—
popular writing on the South again and again suggests that, at least on
some levels, this operation is not entirely unconscious. Lillian Smith calls
the process a ‘‘conspiracy of blindness . . . entered into voluntarily but later
made obligatory by custom’’ (Killers of the Dream, 211). Thus this mise-en-
scène of southern graciousness is in some ways both conscious and compul-
sory. Masquerades of southern hospitality and femininity, always linked,
are learned daily and overtly, not needing the psychoanalyst or sociolo-
gist to reveal them. Yet a warning repeatedly echoed in white southern
women’s writing reminds us that we are all eventually liable to believe our
fantasies if we perform them long enough. Sun Belt documents of femi-
ninity are important registers of the complexity of playing the belle or

lady, and they also suggest the liabilities inherent in appropriating such
southern theatrics for feminism.
If previous chapters were concerned primarily with the pre–Civil
Rights South, both as ‘‘it was’’ (pace Gone with the Wind ) and particularly
as it functions in the recent present via historical memory, this chapter
turns its attention more fully to the Sun Belt South. What happens to those
symbolic nodes we’ve been mapping—the belle, the plantation—when
they’re not so firmly moored to representations of the nineteenth-century
South? The southern lady doesn’t only thrive among the plantation tours
of the River Road, locked in fantasy versions of the 1800s. Her meanings
aren’t so tightly circumscribed; competing versions of what she should
mean take shape in a regional milieu responding to the Civil Rights and
women’s movements, as well as to the pressures of global capitalism. These
Sun Belt ladies are less obviously tied to the past and seemingly to race (for
Mammy is locked away as a collectible, largely separated from the lady),
but such a reading is possible only if the meaning of race is fixed as ‘‘black-
ness.’’ These 1980s and 1990s ladies are all about whiteness, deeply invested
in discerning its contours, querying what whiteness will mean on the cusp
of the twenty-first century. Indeed, as in the case of the neo-Confederates,
the lady’s whiteness sometimes serves to underscore our national inability,
postintegration, to begin to imagine productive and progressive models
of racial contact and alliance, a recurring problem for the region and the
nation. At stake are possible modes for white femininity and identity in
the South, modes that run the gamut from pageant queen to drag queen,
from steel magnolia to fatal flower, hinting as well at potential relation-
ships between southern femininity and feminism and across racial lines. Is
the southern lady locked in her old masquerades, or can she be mobilized
differently? Must her story always be a romance? Might she be made over
in radical new ways, highlighting fresh modes of feeling southern?
g ‘‘ T H E R E ’ S N O S U C H T H I N G A S N AT U R A L B E A U T Y ’’
I would rather have thirty minutes of wonderful than a lifetime of nothing
special.—Shelby, in Steel Magnolias
Released less than two months before the wedding issue of Mississippi maga-
zine hit the stands, the blockbuster feature Steel Magnolias (along with
other 1989 fare such as Sex, Lies, and Videotape and Driving Miss Daisy) sig-

naled a full-on national fascination with a revamped southern femininity
that owed more to the plantation ladies of yore than to Daisy Duke and her
clan. The film brought together a star-studded ensemble cast, including
Julia Roberts, Shirley MacLaine, Sally Field, Dolly Parton, Olympia Du-
kakis, and Daryl Hannah, all appropriately Dixiefied, and went on to earn
an adjusted gross income of over $100 million. Based on an off-Broadway
play by Louisianian Robert Harling, the movie expanded the play’s all-
female cast to include several two-dimensional male characters, additions
that only served to highlight the film’s focus on the simultaneously wacky,
tough, and touching heroines for which it is named. We accompany the
women through their daily lives, much of which revolve around Truvy’s
home-based beauty parlor; Truvy is played with typical country wisdom
by a typically big-haired Dolly Parton. Steel Magnolias shares many con-
cerns with the Primer: the film opens with the preparations for the young
belle Shelby’s wedding in full swing and also delineates the ‘‘proper’’ be-
haviors for southern women, both troubling and embracing the power of
decorum and the well-mannered belle. The intricacies of southern femi-
ninity and southern manners structure the field on which the movie’s ex-
ploration of the lives, loves, and losses of its central characters unfolds.
Reviews of the film in the popular press were predictably dismissive,
lamenting the one-liner format of the work’s comedic moments as well as
the more melodramatic turns of the narrative. The tear-jerking drive of
the film came in for particular abuse. Hal Hinson wrote in the Washington
Post that ‘‘the movie is an orgiastic celebration of big, sloppy emotions; it’s
the filmic equivalent of ‘Feelings.’ . . . on a degenerated line from Tennes-
see Williams by way of Hallmark.’’ Desson Howe concurred, adding that
‘‘Southernworld is alive and well and running through the known emo-
tions.’’ Not surprisingly, Steel Magnolia’s emotional roller coaster remains
precisely what many fans love about the film, and as we shall see, this
emotive terrain is a particularly southern one, modeling precise ways of
feeling southern. Internet reviews from the International Movie Database
and Amazon.com praise the film’s navigation of both tragedy and humor,
with one viewer from Minneapolis noting that despite countless viewings,
she ‘‘still gets choked up.’’ Another fan describes the film as ‘‘heartbreak-
ing,’’ advising potential viewers to ‘‘just rent it and get some Kleenexes.’’
These commentators also reflect on the movie’s southernness, noting that
‘‘these six witty southern belles show their strength and character time
and again, proving they are true Steel Magnolias’’; ‘‘they never lose their

As this publicity still indicates, the wedding sequence from Steel Magnolias was a popu-
lar image for marketing the movie, although the film’s narrative sometimes worked
to call the wonders of marriage into question. A similar tension characterizes many
‘‘strong-woman’’ portraits of southern femininity.
sense of grace and optimism.’’ Many of the reviews also focus on the im-
portance of both female friendship and family in the film, as well as on its
quest for romance.
Romance plays a key role in the film, a recurring subtext around which
the plot unfolds. Many of the characters’ lives revolve around a search
for romantic highs, including Shelby’s obsession with her wedding and
Truvy’s strategic attempts to seduce her husband into assorted roman-
tic scenarios. Even crotchety old Ouiser snags a man by the film’s end,
redeeming her character’s surface meanness via an ‘‘inner’’ kindness un-
leashed by true love. Early in the film, as the gang is settling into comfy
salon chairs, happily anticipating big ole wedding hair, Truvy prods Shelby
to share all the romantic bits of her courtship with Jackson. Shelby waxes
poetic about the carefully orchestrated setting she has constructed for her
wedding, a girlish fantasy of all things pink, including nine bridesmaids,
yards of rosy-hued silk bunting, and a church decked out in her signa-
ture shades, blush and bashful. While the film opens up a space to mock
Shelby’s blissful vision (and her mother M’Lynn remarks that the church
looks as if it has been doused in Pepto Bismol), the world of bridal fantasy

that the film underwrites looks remarkably like the weddings that grace
the pages of Mississippi magazine. The movie’s bouffant taffeta creations
and lace-drenched environs map neatly over Mississippi’s ‘‘top weddings’’
of 1989.
Writing about women’s films of the 1930s, Maria LaPlace observes that
romance functions ‘‘as a way in which female desire is figured in female fic-
tions.’’ 10 Her discussion of Now, Voyager (1942) tracks the degree to which, in
women’s films, ‘‘the ideal heterosexual relationship is always presented in
terms of perfect understanding, . . . a relation of ‘soulmates.’ ’’ At one level,
Steel Magnolias certainly frames romance as a primary object of women’s
lives, particularly as Truvy, saddled with a pretty unresponsive hunk of
a husband, laments, ‘‘I miss romance so much.’’ Yet at another level, the
film significantly troubles romantic ideals, figuring romance as at best dif-
ficult, at worst deadly. As the opening scenes unfold, we follow the camera
down sleepy southern streets, a stroll that culminates at the delivery of a
towering wedding cake to the Eatenton household. This careful framing
of the cake, an icon of wedding bliss situated in a sweet southern setting,
is almost immediately interrupted by the echoing of gunshots. We quickly
enter into the chaos of wedding planning, a task made even more difficult
by the inept trio of Shelby’s father and brothers, who are busy shooting
pigeons out of trees, trying to de-fowl the reception area. Here the com-
edy undermines the more romantic sentiments of the film, but romance
is also troubled via less humorous techniques.
Continuing its examination of the cluelessness of masculinity, the movie
soon introduces Jackson, Shelby’s handsome but oddly wooden fiancé; he
climbs into her bedroom window to reassure Shelby about their future,
saying, ‘‘I’m going to make you very happy.’’ She quietly responds, ‘‘We’ll
see.’’ More symbolically, Shelby’s lavish beauty-parlor description of her
courtship and wedding is almost immediately followed by her descent into
diabetic shock. As Truvy and the gals prattle on about romantic highs and
lows, Shelby’s face slowly contorts, turns red, and begins to shake, power-
fully interrupting the narration of romance. It is as if the discussion of the
wedding has accessed all of Shelby’s anxieties, propelling her into an al-
most catatonic state. Significantly, diabetes leads to the buildup of excess
sugar in the blood, suggesting that the excessive sweetness that southern
women endlessly perform has infected their very interiority. Via Shelby,
their bodies fight back against the sappiness of romance. Life after the wed-
ding is not any better. Against the recommendations of her doctors and
the wishes of M’Lynn, Shelby quickly gets pregnant, putting her life at risk

because she thinks a baby ‘‘would help things a lot.’’ Clearly, all is not well
in the land of matrimony, and Shelby seeks a baby as a cure for what ails
her marriage. Our only glimpse of Shelby’s life out of her small hometown
occurs on the day she slips into a coma, figuring her new marital home as
the site for trauma and collapse. The film relentlessly draws Shelby back
to her birthplace, away from the lures of romance and back into the circle
of women who provide her true source of sustenance and emotion.
Steel Magnolias lovingly sketches the possibilities for, and powers of,
female friendships, figuring the relationships between its women as the
crux of the film. In her discussion of the maternal melodrama and ‘‘the
theoretical bind of the representation of women in film,’’ Linda Williams
notes that ‘‘the excitement generated when women get together . . . is not
to be underestimated,’’ 11 and certainly Steel Magnolias structures a space
for dispersed identifications and multiple points of view. The ensemble
cast splits identification for the female viewer along multiple vectors, ex-
ploring a community of women across modes of difference, including dif-
ferent ages, classes, and religions. Truvy’s Beauty Spot represents a sort of
liminal space, lodged between the public and the private, part of Truvy’s
home, yet separate from it, creating a kind of safe haven for the women.
In times of stress or chaos, the women congregate there, refortifying and
rejuvenating (teasing comb in hand) to face the outside world. Within this
space, the women endlessly ponder femininity and its stakes. Ladies at
Truvy’s are in a continual state of reconstruction, making over both body
and soul. Lip waxes, mud masks, highlighting foils, dye jobs, and hair spray
figure prominently, and Truvy deems both herself and Annelle ‘‘glamour
technicians.’’ Beauty and the accoutrements of femininity are revealed as
constructions, both powerful social fictions and feminine tools, as Clairee
declares that the only thing that separates humans from animals is their
ability to accessorize. Truvy proclaims that ‘‘there’s no such thing as natural
beauty . . . it takes effort to look like this.’’ As the girls peruse back issues of
Southern Hair, they explore the production of feminine beauty, examining
its possibilities. No doubt this gentle mocking of the labors of femininity,
a mocking that simultaneously revels in the processing of femininity and
its potential to bring women together, remains a major source of the film’s
draw, the terrain of many of its less melodramatic pleasures, fulfilling a
desire for women viewers to see women represented together in shared
spaces, having fun. That pleasure should not be discounted, but we should
also think through how this pleasure is welded to other meanings as the
narrative unfolds.

Christine Gledhill, drawing on a substantial body of scholarship within
film studies that focuses on the melodrama, has described melodrama as a
genre (and a cultural sensibility) in which ‘‘an ideological meets a psycho-
logical need, needs that are not necessarily identical.’’ 12 The larger ideo-
logical forces framing Steel Magnolias knock roughly against its capacity
to address female desire, often reining in its more liberatory drives. For
instance, the film’s focus on the labor of femininity helps to conceal the
degree to which the narrative simultaneously deconstructs femininity and
reinstalls a fairly traditional model of feminine behavior. A two-part model
of femininity emerges. The ‘‘outside,’’ the surface, is revealed as artifice,
a carefully manipulated and produced shell, liable to constant change,
as Annelle’s transformations throughout the film underscore. This outer
shell is malleable, constructed, a socially accepted artifice made over and
wielded by women as a way of moving through the world. This surface play
is encouraged, held up as a source of fun and bonding, even if it represents
labor and the possibility of failure. But the ‘‘inside’’ of femininity remains
unchanged across the narrative, fixed as an essential and internal good-
ness, a goodness variably visible in each of the main characters, but always
‘‘there’’ nonetheless. This idealized core of femininity is selfless, caring,
gentle; it is most clearly realized in M’Lynn, whose ‘‘essential’’ femininity
is established early in the film. Shelby ascends into full femininity as the
narrative unfolds. Early on, Shelby is almost bratty, equipped with all
the smart-mouthed impudence of youth; slowly, tragedy and motherhood
allow her to access her true self, bringing it to the surface. She symboli-
cally sheds her long 1980s hair, ready to move into maturity; at first she
cries at this loss but quickly and stoically accepts it.
Shelby follows in her mother’s footsteps, willing to sacrifice everything
for a traditional family and a mediocre marriage. But Shelby and M’Lynn
are not simply late-twentieth-century reflections of the angel in the house-
hold. Rather, their characterizations subtly draw on the mythologies of the
plantation mistress. The pair map fairly neatly across the mother-daughter
model sketched in Gone with the Wind, emerging as a sort of latter-day Ellen
and Scarlett. M’Lynn manages her own large household with all the effi-
ciency of Ellen O’Hara, making sure things run smoothly and serving the
less fortunate through her work at the mental heath center. While the men
of the film crumble in the face of tragedy, M’Lynn remains a true steel
magnolia, making funeral arrangements and keeping things together. Cer-
tainly, Shelby’s ‘‘rebellious’’ side is more subdued than Scarlett’s, but her
small rebellions (reflected in her insistence on working outside the home)

do finally exact quite a price. She doesn’t simply lose her man; she loses
her life.
The film is set firmly in the ‘‘New South,’’ and there is also a return to an
older model of southern femininity, subtly reworked but still referenced as
a standard. The southern woman is figured as the keeper of family values,
the self-sacrificing core that holds the family in its centripetal orbit, ar-
ticulating the power of sisterhood and female playfulness to conservative
notions of family and femininity. Particularly through the characteriza-
tion of Shelby and M’Lynn, Steel Magnolias enacts a performative sleight of
hand, sneaking the southern woman back up on the pedestal, still caught
within the confines of the big house.
This reconfiguration of the southern woman also speaks to the reali-
ties of race in the Sun Belt South, particularly given the almost unrelent-
ing whiteness of the film. The film is ostensibly set in ‘‘Chickapenn,’’ a
small fictional Louisiana town; Chickapenn stands in for Natchitoches,
the parish seat of Natchitoches parish and also home to screenplay author
Robert Harling. The original play was staged entirely within the confines
of Truvy’s beauty parlor, a space that might reasonably remain entirely
white. However, in transferring the play to the big screen, the narrative
continues to unfold in an oddly white town at precisely the moment that
the black population emerges as the majority demographic of the city of
Natchitoches. Additionally, according to the 1990 census, the parish as a
whole is more than 35 percent African American. What, then, are we to
make of the willful whiteness of the film? The movie is very much about
white desires for a safe—and segregated—space. Truvy’s provides such a
place, creating an emotional haven for the women in the narrative. As I
have suggested, this haven can be read as protofeminist, but it is simul-
taneously about the white South’s reaction to the changing landscapes of
the region after the Civil Rights and women’s movements. Also at play
are national anxieties and agendas around multiculturalism. Home gets
complexly reconstituted in the film, along two registers. First, there is the
home away from home represented by Truvy’s, a retreat from the private
family. Second, there is the familial home, a space figured simultaneously
as the site of trauma and stress and as an idealized goal of femininity.
In the tradition of The Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind, Steel
Magnolias struggles to define the role of the white southern woman within
this domestic realm. If The Birth of the Nation saw the white southern home
as threatened by blackness, and if Gone with the Wind imagined it struc-
tured by an embracing blackness (even while also threatened), Steel Mag-

In the white, white world of Steel Magnolias, the working-class lives of Truvy (Dolly
Parton) and Annelle (Daryl Hannah) provide just the right touch of local color, under-
writing the emotion and southern feeling of the film’s central couple, Shelby and her
mother.
nolias disavows blackness and racial difference, insisting on a largely white

world, fixated on the belle and the lady. Racial difference gets displaced
in the film, as in Scarlett, reemerging as class rather than as ethnic differ-
ence, with class functioning to provide ‘‘texture’’ and local color. Class (and
sometimes age) allows the frisson of difference that imbues the upper-class
white world with ‘‘flavor.’’ Dolly Parton’s Truvy again and again spouts
the down-home country wisdom from which the other women draw sus-
tenance. If Truvy supplies the ‘‘soul’’ of the film, Annelle’s lower-class
life provides the entertainment. M’Lynn and Shelby form the emotional
centerpiece of the film, but the other women (differently classed or aged)
function as sounding boards for white upper-class feelings. Blackness can
not be named within this model of difference.
Thus Steel Magnolias displaces blackness, willfully re-creating a segre-
gated Louisiana from which a new white lady emerges, a move that covers
over the rollback of Civil Rights taking place during the 1980s. We can read
this return to whiteness among multiple vectors. Coupled with the film’s
conservatism about gender, the erasure of race could be just that—a will-
ful erasure, a reflection of the increasing ‘‘gating’’ of white communities
throughout the South and the nation. But it could also express the white

South’s (and the nation’s) inability to conceptualize what racial contact
might even look like. The narrative pursues contact across class and gen-
erational difference, but it cannot even think about contact between races.
There is a hesitancy in films like Steel Magnolias (or the very different Sling-
blade) to address race in an overt manner at all (even as whiteness), perhaps
suggesting a fear of ‘‘getting race wrong.’’ Such a fear, when unaddressed,
finally reproduces erasure and covert racism, forestalling possibility, fix-
ing us in a very white world. If the neo-Confederates of chapter 2 imagine
an all-white world by displacing race via an angry white masculinity, Steel
Magnolias plumbs the emotional registers of white southern femininity to
enact a similar separatism.
Steel Magnolias narrates a certain route through tragedy and recovery
for southern femininity, reestablishing white southern womanhood as the
foundation to stable white identities in the 1980s South and masking re-
cent histories of feminism and the Civil Rights movement, the real un-
spoken source of the white home’s disruptions. Set against the film’s joyful
embrace of sisterhood, there is a conservative valorization of a symbolic
woman (as sacrificing and maternal, as Dixiefied angel on the veranda) that
disavows the changing position of women in the decade, changes wrought
by feminism. These political issues are circuited back into the private
realm, after negotiation within the semiprivate space of Truvy’s. Although
we catch glimpses of Shelby’s doubts about the role she is supposed to
play (her ‘‘We’ll see’’ to Jackson’s ‘‘happily ever after’’), she still steps into
the role, gracious to the tragic end, suggesting the conscious yet com-
pulsory nature of white southern women’s masquerades. For Shelby, the
only way out of these performances is via self-sacrifice and death, her fits
symptomatic of her larger discomforts.
The film’s delineation of southernness does not only derive from its
focus on femininity. Place also figures prominently. The movie paints a
loving portrait of southern small-town life, structuring a regional mise-
en-scène that is expansive and helps to process emotion, welding south-
ern feeling to southern places. The southern setting is tied to emotional
registers at three particular points in the narrative. In the opening scene,
the camera follows Annelle as she moves through the tree-lined streets of
Chickapenn, shaded lanes that recall the oak-draped pathways of planta-
tion tourism. Through the dappled light, we embark on a loving tour of
small-town life. The settings are lush and idyllic, including lovely flowers,
polite mail carriers, and big, beautiful houses with broad green lawns,
underwriting a sense of both nostalgia and stability as markers of south-

ernness. As the narrative unfolds, place reemerges as a central player at
moments of emotional crisis, suggesting that southern places help soothe
troubled emotions. After Shelby’s death, M’Lynn leaves the hospital in
Shreveport to pick up her grandson at his aunt’s house. As she drives
through the countryside, the bayous surround her. The film weds the in-
tense emotion following Shelby’s death to M’Lynn’s journey, the solitude
of the bayou setting both expressing and alleviating her maternal pain. The
southern countryside permits a kind of emotional processing, a process-
ing that can only be achieved through leaving the city. The film’s ending
revisits the tour of southern living familiar from the opening scene, focus-
ing on rolling green landscapes. As an Easter egg hunt unfolds in the park,
Shelby’s now-motherless young son explores the terrain, and Annelle goes
into labor, linking death to birth through tropes of resurrection.
The setting has secured the order with which the film began, placing
the hope for the future in the young boy, Jack Jr., and ennobling Shelby’s
maternal sacrifice. In Steel Magnolias, the pastoral, small-town South is set
up against ‘‘future’’ Souths: ‘‘high-tech’’ Shreveport (where kidney trans-
plants are performed) finally fails the women, and real peace is achieved
outside the city’s realm. Authentic feeling and authentic southernness are
located in very small towns and in the countryside, reclaiming the rural
South from 1970s traditions of hillbilly representation and also the grow-
ing importance of urban areas within the region. Here, contrary to early
theories of melodrama, mise-en-scène does not operate as visual excess,
signaling hysteria or ideological leakage, but instead works as a palliative,
smoothing over the contradictions of the white southern household, re-
turning M’Lynn to the confines of domesticity at precisely the moment
her rage might take her somewhere else. While the lush landscapes may
be excessive (they’re certainly saturated), this excess does not operate as
critique; place restores M’Lynn, but it also restores the order of romance
and of patriarchy, systems other moments of the film threaten to reveal
as detrimental to its women.
Steel Magnolias creates an affective structure that welds emotional reg-
isters to a kind of regionalized epistemology, a southern way of knowing
and doing. The film revolves around core contradictions, contradictions
between women’s ‘‘freedoms,’’ freedoms explored in the woman-centered
space of Truvy’s, and other obligations, obligations to family and patri-
archy. The soothing environs of Chickapenn are meant to resolve these
contradictions in the favor of 1980s conservatism, but this resolution is not
total. Indeed, the flatness of Shelby’s marriage, not to mention the two-

dimensionality of the film’s male characters, begins to suggest the limits
of a subservient masochistic femininity. Weddings may be idealized, but
marriages are often mocked. Shelby’s sacrifice and the southern landscape
work to redeem marriage, but at a very high price. The viewer might
very well know that Shelby never really had her thirty minutes of won-
derful. While the film occasionally breaks open the myths of romance,
highlighting the futility of martyrdom in marriage and the hollow limits
of fluffy blush and bashful southern wedding fantasies, the camera’s return
to southern settings helps to absorb emotion, redeeming fairly conserva-
tive modes of white southern feeling, bleaching out southern geography
and identity.
g ‘‘ S C A R S F RO M A S O U T H E R N G I R L H O O D ’’
& did my mother . . .
sob into her dormitory
pillow bubbling within her
belle’s brainpan with the
lobotomies of marriage
—Rosemary Daniell
In her poem ‘‘Of Jayne Mansfield, Flannery O’Connor, My Mother and

Me,’’ southern writer Rosemary Daniell interrogates the myths of romance
and the southern belle popular during her childhood in the 1950s.13 The
first stanza of the poem describes ‘‘the debs in white cotton panties’’ and
‘‘all the permanent Daughters of the Confederacy’’ who are ‘‘caught in
their corsets of white’’ and goes on to reveal the limits of ‘‘the white satin
wedding.’’ By the poem’s end, marriage has been figured as both an act of
suicide and as a lobotomy, a far cry from Shelby’s blush-and-bashful wed-
ding fantasies, and the poet’s rage at the myth of marriage she was sold
during adolescence is palpable. Her imagery also serves to highlight the
overwhelming whiteness of the myths of southern womanhood, imaging
whiteness as at once diseased and illusory.
Daniell’s critique of the South’s yoking of femininity, romance, and re-
gion continues in her memoir Fatal Flowers: On Sin, Sex, and Suicide in the
Deep South (1980) as she constantly reiterates the ties between her training
in romance and in southern femininity. Early into her story, she confides
that ‘‘in spite of years spent in therapy, feminism [and] journal keeping . . . I
still am too much of a Southern woman to feel as comfortable alone as with

a man beside me’’ (13). Daniell explores the various paths by which roman-
tic myths of the southern belle were ‘‘imprinted’’ on her from an early age
(9), illustrating the intensity with which white southern femininity always
seems to take romance as its ultimate telos. Both her autobiography and
her poetry quickly move to dissociate romance and southern femininity.
For Daniell, romance functions much as it does for feminist theorist Patri-
cia Mellencamp, as ‘‘a fiction that keeps women captive. Romance is a
genre, a theme, and story primarily defined by male desire’’ (Mellencamp,
A Fine Romance, 76), and it ‘‘verges on obsession’’ (101). If Daniell rejects
romance with alacrity, instead intent on exploring other options for south-
ern women, she is unable to dismiss so easily the other machinations of
regional femininity that her narrative details. Rather, white femininity is
the uneasy focus of the entire volume, and Daniell alternately embraces,
repudiates, and redefines the terms of southern womanhood.
Daniell’s appraisal of the role of the belle again illustrates that white
southern femininity is a performance, a socially endorsed and prescribed
masquerade. Tracing several generations of her family’s women, she high-
lights the ways in which the skills of southern femininity, the cultiva-
tion of its ‘‘mystique,’’ were handed down from mother to daughter (Fatal
Flowers, 33). In the text’s acute attention to the details and production of
femininity, a sense of the labor involved in producing ladyhood is fore-
grounded. Passage after passage describes the focus on appearance and
clothing that dominated both her own and her mother’s girlhoods. She
notes that particularly in the South, the ‘‘female body, imperfect, was
made to be covered, and how it was covered mattered’’ (77); the essence
of southern femininity lay in its packaging, in its accoutrements. Women
who learned these lessons—learned ‘‘this art of being aggressive without
seeming to be’’ (110)—could reap the rewards of southern womanhood:
‘‘a doting . . . husband, a comfortable home [and] beautiful children’’ (111).
Daniell further insists that ‘‘this assumption still exists in the South,’’ more
powerfully than in other regions.14 In a section recounting her mother’s
gift to her of foam-rubber falsies, Daniell muses, ‘‘It was the appearance
of having breasts that mattered, just as proper behavior mattered more
than passion,’’ a moment that underscores that ‘‘proper form was even more
important than beauty’’ (112). She came of age in the early 1950s, a time
when the Times-Picayune was extolling the gracious belle. The South she
chronicles was a South intent on organizing and encoding proper ways of
feeling southern, and this process played out in both systems of etiquette
and systems of law, linking the rule of manners to the rule of Jim Crow in

subtle and not so subtle ways. For dominant culture in the 1950s, to feel
southern was to feel space, to feel femininity, to feel family, as intimately
bound up with prohibitions, prohibitions aimed at policing the contours
of class, race, and gender. Although ‘‘race’’ does not seem a key concern
of the memoir, Fatal Flowers does delineate how powerfully social codes
constricted white feminine behavior, marring the perfection of a white
satin world.
The narrative’s focus on feminine forms and behaviors serves to high-
light the tight imbrication of femininity and manners in the South, as
gender and etiquette endlessly reinforce each other within the southern
landscape. Daniell probes this linkage, noting that southerners ‘‘tend to
determine behavior by a fixed set of ethics rather than by feeling or rela-
tionship’’ (45). This fixed ethical order leads to ‘‘a primary tenet of South-
ern feminine behavior . . . that of presenting even—especially—under
duress a controlled and subdued public demeanor’’ (93). Daniell recognizes
and exposes this prescription, questioning its necessity, and accentuating
the ultimate ‘‘sterility and rigidity’’ of the femininity it delineates (82).
Here femininity masks a hollow core, a sterile emptiness, and elsewhere
in the volume, femininity both covers and produces a sickly decay, sketch-
ing a different vision of the two-layered model of southern womanhood
than the one extolled in Steel Magnolias.
In the chapter entitled ‘‘Stains on a Piece of White Satin,’’ Daniell re-
counts her seemingly triumphant teenage years: ‘‘Yet this Southern-fried
Seventeen magazine success story was a thin skin barely covering my true
feelings. It was not my popularity, my sewing, and my election to the
cheering team that were my reality, but the rot that lay just beneath my
giggly surface’’ (125). Similar moments throughout the memoir juxtapose
surface to reality, as when Daniell writes that ‘‘just beneath the surface of
my skin were . . . signs of the pus that must be filling my interior’’ (126).
Later, as an adult, Daniell studies her reflection in a mirror, insisting that
this ‘‘woman with her white, white skin, her long dark hair, was just a
shell. . . . I hated her loveliness, knowing it was just a thin layer covering
putrescence’’ (173). Repeatedly, ‘‘something dark, fetid, [and] unhealthy’’
comes to characterize the depths of southern femininity, a ‘‘rot’’ that stands
in stark counterpoint to the glowing, scrubbed surfaces of southern lady-
hood. The positioning of this surface illusion of loveliness in relation to
a lurking decay suggests a causal link between the two, limning the sick-
ness inherent in white southern womanhood. If Steel Magnolias explores
the surface effects of southern femininity to unmask the strong core of

Dixie’s true womanhood, Fatal Flowers instead pursues the debilitating con-
sequences of manipulating femininity. Here the core of womanhood is dis-
eased, putrid, decomposing, and grotesque. Patricia Yaeger has noted the
‘‘importance of irregular models of the body within an extremely regu-
lated society’’ (Dirt, xiii), and the endless return to the deformed body in
Daniell’s memoir serves to highlight the dark side of southern hospitality.
The text’s obsession with white imagery also suggests that southern order
produced a deformed whiteness, broken and infected beyond repair, re-
vealing the stakes of a carefully constructed whiteness, stakes that Steel
Magnolias and Shelby’s seizures can only hint at. Indeed, throughout her
work, Daniell insists that their ‘‘training in sexual dissembling’’ exacts a
great cost in white southern women’s lives, a cost that extends beyond a
mere belief in romance.15 Often, she figures the final cost of southern femi-
ninity as madness. Although the memoir is relatively unconcerned with
the often deadly effects of southern etiquette on black men and women
during Jim Crow, it does begin to reveal the high price that the image of
the belle exacts in the lives of white southern women.
When charting her own relation to the myths and force of southern
femininity, Daniell frequently characterizes the process as likely to pro-
duce insanity. As she continually holds her perceptions of her rotting self
up against the smooth ideals of southern ladylikeness, she soon begins to
recognize her ‘‘craziness’’ (Fatal Flowers, 127). The seeming inevitability of
being driven ‘‘mad [by] her own contradictions’’ haunts her (50); she under-
stands that these very contradictions led to her mother’s suicide, an act
propelled by her inability to live the ideal of southern femininity. Her
mother ‘‘sought to remain the girl, the belle’’ (35), and she played the role
well throughout her youth. Yet ‘‘her reign [as belle] held within it the very
seeds of her exile, her eventual self-destruction’’ (39), because unequipped
with a proper husband, her mother never successfully completed the trans-
formation from flirtatious belle to tasteful and propertied lady. Her suicide
creeps through Daniell’s text, a constant reminder of the stakes of per-
forming southern femininity, particularly as one ages.16 If Ross McElwee’s
Sherman’s March hints at the gap between regional myths of femininity and
the everyday experience of southern women’s lives, thus nagging at the
ideals of southern femininity, Fatal Flowers pries this gap open into a chasm.
The indelible grammar of southern etiquette is rewritten via Daniell’s rhe-
torical focus on its dysfunctional effects, applying 1970s feminism within
a regional frame.
Yet even while Daniell’s text works at one level to condemn the limita-

tions of southern femininity, she also recognizes that many women deploy
it as a survival strategy, using feminine ‘‘artifice’’ to get by in a fiercely
patriarchal society (244). Although at least partially written against the
constraints of southern femininity, the book, in its excessive and continued
portrayal of southern womanhood, also underscores that breaking free of
southern femininity is a difficult task indeed. She envisions white southern
women as ‘‘netted in one mutual silken bondage’’ (18), a bondage that has
its allure even given its high price. As the autobiography draws to a close,
the narrator examines several women who have chosen to forgo traditional
southern femininity. Even when she finds strength in these women (not an
altogether common occurrence in the memoir), the narration is tinged by
a nostalgia for a simple life of venerated womanhood. The text is finally
unable to celebrate its turn from conventional southern femininity, as the
narrator repeatedly ‘‘experience[s] chagrin and loss at meeting Southern
women who had clung to, and become successful . . . through the old
Southern skills’’ of the lady (202). One senses the narrator’s often unspoken
desire to return to an easier life, one that ‘‘can be as addictive as magnolia
blossoms or Jack Daniel’s’’ (218), for the cost of challenging this ideal ‘‘had
been enormous’’ (291). In this cataloging of various performances of the
lady and the belle, we are still, to a degree, frozen in a landscape of per-
petual southern femininity. Finally, the narrator (as well as her readers)
is left to live with ‘‘the discomfort of her ambivalence,’’ an ambivalence
tinged with melancholy.
Still, this is not the ambivalence of Steel Magnolias. That film works
hard to hide its doubts about southern womanhood, packaging them as it
does within a terrain of landscaped femininity and soothing small-town
life. Fatal Flowers takes ambivalence as its starting point, exploring the
narrator’s love-hate relationship to southern mores throughout its three
hundred pages. It also stages various strategic attempts to bust out of
ambivalence, hinting at a Dixiefied version of Bourdieu’s socioanalysis:
a homegrown attempt to denaturalize the learned bodily comportments
of southern femininity. Daniell reveals the social structures (of taste, of
embodiment) that orient southern femininity along certain trajectories;
she also seeks to challenge these structures. She recounts in great detail
her various sexual escapades, reveling in a ‘‘bad-girl’’ identity defined by
wild sex, drug use, and a penchant for Jack Daniel’s. She tours the seamy
side of the South, trying to break free from the concealing mannerisms of
belledom, but ultimately her rebellious behavior functions only as the flip
side to sanctioned and refined femininity, the exception that underwrites

the rule of the lady. Always uncertain of her own class standing, teetering
on the brink of white trash culture, Daniell both craves upper-class status
and consorts with assorted southerners—particularly drag queens—who
actively mock that world. The memoir’s heroine remains trapped within
the binaries of southern cultures of taste, alternately being bad or good,
but falling easily within a classifiable southern world. She comes closest to
destabilizing those environs when exploring her capacity for rage, a seeth-
ing anger that builds up throughout the memoir, gradually supplanting her
bad-girl behavior. Her anger is closer to the surface and more full-blown
than M’Lynn’s, almost capable of burning through the ambivalence that
dogs the memoir. But this rage battles with guilt, an emotional barrier that
tamps down the anger and recircuits the narrative back into a melancholic
ambivalence, an ambivalence that almost—but not quite—overwhelms
the memoir’s quest for hope. In many ways, the memoir mourns what
might have been—all those fantasies of the belle’s life a young Rosemary
was raised on—but via this act of mourning, melancholy is almost trans-
formed into possibility, moving beyond the frozen terrains of loss familiar
from The Civil War and beginning to query the costs of whiteness, if not its
privileges.
Fatal Flowers stops just short of jettisoning ambivalence and is thus still
engaged in mourning, not yet moving on to other ways of feeling south-
ern. This ambivalence derives at least in part from Daniell’s continued
fascination with the landscapes of the South, even as she recognizes the
interweaving of this terrain with the myths of femininity she both fears and
desires. If Steel Magnolias deploys pastoral southern geographies to smooth
over its muted ambivalence about southern femininity, Daniell struggles
to reconcile her love of place with the lures of the lady. Her travels shake us
free from the small-town fetishism of the film, exploring southern cities
as important markers of the region, settling as she does in Savannah. Yet
she is still seduced by the stage sets of southernness. In the last pages
of the memoir, she maintains, ‘‘Despite everything, I’m still a Southern
woman. Spanish moss, honeysuckle, kudzu spread their filaments deep
into my brain’’ (292), and the book’s epigraph extols the beauty of the
southern landscape, claiming that ‘‘in the South . . . the sun shines just a
little brighter.’’ Early in the text, Daniell has underscored that ‘‘the whole
bonding of region is bound up with racism [and] sexism,’’ but the portraits
of the book’s final pages suggest a longing to get lost within this bonding,
hinting again at the ‘‘discomfort of ambivalence.’’ However, another mo-
ment in Fatal Flowers inadvertently foregrounds the limits of ambivalence

as a challenge to the constraints of southern femininity. Midway through
the book, Daniell quotes her friend the African American novelist Alice
Walker on the performance of southern femininity. Describing her child-
hood on a tenant farm in Georgia, Walker notes, ‘‘Those women would act
‘nice’ to blacks, . . . but eventually their faces became their masks’’ (194–
95). Walker clearly recognizes that these white southern women perform
a rule-bound femininity, but her remark displays none of Daniell’s reluc-
tance to leave that femininity behind. Reading between the lines of Fatal
Flowers, one is confronted with the realization that the ‘‘discomfort of am-
bivalence’’ when abandoning southern femininity is usually the preroga-
tive of white women. While Daniell is right to point out that the perfor-
mance of femininity has historically served as a survival strategy for many
southern women, and while her own restaging of southern womanhood
via her narrative (and, one suspects, her life) has helped her to stave off her
mother’s madness, this replaying of southern femininity may finally be a
zero-sum game.
g R E D E S I G N I N G S O U T H E R N WO M E N
Well, I shave my legs and I’m a single parent, a working mother, and if believing
in equal pay . . . makes me a feminist, then I am damn proud to be one.
—Mary Jo Shively, Designing Women
If Fatal Flowers reads like a survival guide for southern women unable to
live within the Primer’s prescriptions, the popular sitcom Designing Women
(1986–1992) seeks a wider audience, refiguring southern women and the
‘‘new’’ New South (i.e., the post–Civil Rights South) for wider, national
consumption. Thus the series is less overtly about the South, as it medi-
ates the region for a wider sphere within the conventions of broadcast,
but the South and its women are still important tropes for the sitcom.
The series is set in Atlanta, Georgia, and hence its South is both the South
of Ted Turner and the South of Newt Gingrich. This is a South tightly
wired to global information flows and national power sources, a much
more cosmopolitan South than that of the Dukes of Hazzard or The Waltons.
This is a carefully mediated South, adroitly designed to showcase the re-
gion’s recent ‘‘growth’’ (in both economic and ‘‘moral’’ terms).17 It is also
less ‘‘fixed’’ than the South of the Southern Belle Primer, allowing a greater
fluidity between the region and the nation. The series was produced and

conceived by native southerners, part of an active southern diaspora popu-
lating Hollywood, a reality that highlights the real lack of boundedness of
areas we conceive of as distinct regions. Information (and citizens) flow in
and out of regions, creating a kind of interconnection between West and
South, rather than a fixed opposition, illustrating one path by which the
regional and national intertwine. As urban geographers have noted, the
specificity and uniqueness of places are at least partially constructed out
of their interdependencies with other areas.18 The South is not separate
from the nation, somehow inviolate; rather, it exists in a close, mutually
constructing relation to the nation. As a series, Designing Women envisions
a particular liberal South that both challenges and underwrites the domi-
nant paradigms of the Reagan-Bush era.
A 1987 state advertising campaign used the tag line ‘‘Georgia on my
mind’’ in its promotion of the region, referencing the popular song that
would become the sitcom’s theme late in its run. One print ad from the
campaign featured the lush interiors well known from plantation tour-
ism, picturing a well-appointed parlor filled with tasteful antiques, statu-
ary, velvet drapes, and a grand piano, a stage set not unlike the ones the
Designing Women might have conceived for their clients. A small inset
photo frames a white-columned plantation home. The copy waxes nostal-
gic, reminiscing about ‘‘fancy dress balls and garden weddings. Ladies in
pink hats. There was an order, a structure to life in those days. And over
it all, a sense that if every rule and structure were followed, this most
splendid way of life could go on forever.’’ 19
This paean to southern order neatly collapses a nostalgia for a purpose-
ful, ordered past (‘‘spend the afternoon in another century’’) into images
of ‘‘grand old homes and genteel folk,’’ particularly ladies like Miss Delia,
happy to send on her famous pecan pie recipe, erasing, as tourist advertis-
ing will, the brutal histories that southern ‘‘rules’’ helped to mask. But the
ad campaign elsewhere used its Georgia tag line to promote urban Atlanta,
a city on the move, full of commerce and excitement. Across the various
ads, old and new were seamlessly wed, mixing past and present Souths,
a strategy the sitcom also deploys in its boosterism for the region and for
Atlanta. In Imagineering Atlanta, Charles Rutheiser examines the generic
quality of Atlanta, its ability to stand in for ‘‘Anyplace, U.S.A.,’’ as well as
its mediated capacity to project ‘‘blanket generalizations of growth, pros-
perity, progressivism, and racial harmony in the capital of the New New
South’’ (53). He carefully tracks the city’s long history of self-promotion,

noting that in its 1980s and 1990s eagerness to attract international invest-
ments, the city ‘‘became its own Field of Dreams: if you build it (up), they
will come’’ (67).
Designing Women participates in this global marketing of Atlanta as the
center of a new New South and also reconfigures our notions of what
counts as the South, moving us away from the backwoods images of earlier
films like Deliverance, the small-town pastorals of Steel Magnolias, and the
fiercely republican terrain of Newt Gingrich’s Cobb County, an affluent
bedroom community bordering Atlanta.20 Given this structure, the series
is much less likely to ‘‘freeze’’ its representation of southernness along the
traditional lines of plantation tourism, preferring instead to imagine the
South via a focus on progress and liberal values. This sculpts a space within
which the national audience, in its consumption of the series’ South, can
imagine that both the region and the nation have progressed. Still, for all
its attempted cosmopolitanism, Designing Women recasts Atlanta (and, by
association, the South) via some familiar players, including that center-
piece of regional mythmaking, the southern lady. During the second sea-
son, a recurring character named Dash Goff, an eccentric southern writer,
creates a new paean to southern womanhood, explaining that the lovely
ladies of Sugarbaker’s have ‘‘belled’’ him, leaving him ‘‘dazed, wobbly, and
squinty-eyed. . . . This is what is known in the South as being belled.’’
In its mediations on the nature of the belle, the series shares terrain with
other works considered in this chapter while also breaking new ground.
Although it does not echo the sometimes macabre humor of Fatal Flowers,
Designing Women shares with that text its quick dismissal of heterosexual
romance. Throughout its seven-year run and now via daily worldwide syn-
dication, the series explores what a femininity that is no longer tightly
bound to romance might look like and also illustrates how it might func-
tion for women both on the show and beyond. If, as Charlotte Brunsdon
reminds us, ‘‘femininity is not easy, either for feminism or for women,’’
this exercise in refashioning femininity below the Mason-Dixon line seems
an important one for feminism to take seriously.21
Designing Women revolves around the lives of four white, varyingly
middle-class southern women who run an interior design firm, Sugar-
baker’s, in Atlanta. They are also aided by a black ex-con delivery man–
turned-partner, but more on Anthony later.22 At first glance, the series,
like most situation comedies, seems to take romance as a central topic.
Many of the episodes deal with Mary Jo’s dates ‘‘from the armpit of hell,’’

Anthony’s various fix-ups, Suzanne’s geriatric pensioners, and Julia’s rela-
tionship with a seldom-present boyfriend. Charlene was actually courted
and married off, complete with the sitcom-familiar birth of a baby, as part
of a continuing story line. And apart from Delta’s weight gain (or perhaps
congruent with it), romance and coupling were the aspect of the show
that was most discussed by the popular women’s press during the show’s
run.23 Still, when one carefully examines the series, its move away from
romance becomes apparent.
No episodes focus on romance alone, and except for Charlene’s mar-
riage, few of the romances are ‘‘successful.’’ Even when they are (and sur-
vive past an episode), they take up very little future story time: Charlene’s
husband is often gone, as is Julia’s boyfriend, and Suzanne’s suitors drift
by in a continuous, undifferentiated stream, the subjects of quick one-
liners. In fact, during 1990–1991, Charlene’s husband was conveniently in
the Middle East for most of the season, and Julia’s beau died during the
first few weeks, with an incredibly short mourning period, even by tele-
vision’s standards. Like Steel Magnolias, the series’ two-dimensional white
male characters serve mainly as a backdrop for the women’s relationships
to each other, although the sitcom goes further than the film, also dis-
placing traditional domesticity as goal and telos of women’s lives. Although
Charlene’s baby, Olivia, made occasional appearances late in the series,
kids are as rare as spouses. The 1992–1993 season opened with Mary Jo’s
claim that she had not had a date since 1956. This disregard for romance
and family is all the more noteworthy given the show’s setting in the South,
which is so traditionally figured by the media as a prime site of romance
and the familial. Here the southern background of the show does not facili-
tate the tales of bridal bliss that so often blossom in popular imagery of
the region.24
Romance is treated with a high level of ambivalence and parody, and it
is not really a structuring theme of the show in the traditional ‘‘will they or
won’t they fall in love?’’ scenario. In fact, the ‘‘romantic’’ scenes are often
the dullest in the series, temporarily stalling the humor. The intent of the
show seems to be to open up a space for women to talk about romance (or
anything else), and to complain about not having men, while never really
liking them much when they do get them. In one typical episode, Mary
Jo thinks she has found ‘‘Mr. Right’’ only to find out he is a complete jerk,
a realization she makes public by broadcasting his identity and behavior
on community television. Designing Women, within the structure of any of

its many episodes, displaces notions of romance, family, and marriage in
favor of female friendship. These designing women are interested in other
topics, as are their viewers, who may well see the interaction between the
four women as more than platonic.25
Designing Women’s appeal lies not in a focus on heterosexual romance
but in the structuring of the series around its four women characters: the
series revolves around the spaces they convene in, around their south-
ern ways of talking, around their deep immersion in popular culture and
everyday life, around their interests in femininity, and around their friend-
ships. Unlike most television shows that featured women before it, De-
signing Women focuses on women’s relationships to each other in a setting
separated from the realms of domesticity and romance and thus allows for
a different treatment of topics that concern women, including women’s
ties to femininity. It could be seen as a forerunner to a show like Sex in the
City, tossing four women together within a precise locale and letting them
riff off the trials and tribulations of being women today.26 These concerns
replace romance as the keys to the production of knowledge in women’s
spaces, knowledges about home, work, and relationships that do not nec-
essarily feed back into the circuit of heterosexual desire. A 1986 promotion
for the series chimed, ‘‘And it’s not just about women business. It’s about
the business of being a woman,’’ a campaign that linked women, femi-
ninity, and an entrepreneurial South, all images that were certainly good
for the business of Atlanta.
Like Fatal Flowers and Steel Magnolias, Designing Women is overtly con-
cerned with the discourse and power of femininity. Although the sitcom’s
explorations of femininity do not always foreground southernness (sug-
gesting an appeal to a broader market than the Southern Belle Primer or Fatal
Flowers), the characters’ accents, ‘‘look,’’ and mannerisms consistently sig-
nify ‘‘southernness.’’ The character Suzanne, a former southern pageant
queen, serves as perhaps the most stereotypically southern of the women.
Thus she is often the catalyst for the series’ explorations of femininity, and
she continually offers beauty and fashion tips, almost incessantly preoccu-
pied with looks and shopping. She is often doing her nails at work (or is
accidentally gluing them to her lips) and pretends to spend $4,500 on a
pearl necklace to cheer herself up. She drives a Mercedes and is always
entering the Sugarbaker’s office laden with shopping bags. Yet this seem-
ingly frivolous function of fashion in the series periodically takes other
turns as well, sometimes at the level of content: there are detailed episodes
about Delta Burke’s/Suzanne’s weight gain and about her valuation of her-

self based solely on appearance. The first topic was the central focus of
the episode ‘‘They Shoot Fat Women, Don’t They?’’, which won an Emmy
and garnered hundreds of letters from fans, Liz Taylor and Oprah Winfrey
included. Appearance was the theme of the episode ‘‘One Sees, the Other
Doesn’t,’’ in which Suzanne dates a blind man. Not initially realizing that
Danny is blind, Suzanne is afraid she is losing her charms (even though she
has just spent $2,000 at a resort spa). Later, when Danny asks her out, she
doesn’t know how to respond, and says to Anthony, ‘‘I’ve always been the
pretty one. I can’t date a blind man. Who would I be then?’’ Unable to
use the coy winking, half-smiles, and other flirtations that ‘‘she’s raised to
an art,’’ Suzanne is afraid, as Julia puts it, that ‘‘somebody who can’t see
her can really see her.’’ But she and Danny hit it off (as Suzanne gives him
verbal play-by-plays on her flirtations: ‘‘Now I’m batting my eyelashes’’),
teaching Suzanne that she is valuable for more than her looks and teaching
the others that there may be more to Suzanne than meets the eye. Danny
remarks to the other three women, ‘‘I knew she was beautiful. Sounds like
y’all didn’t.’’
Other episodes highlight the construction (and indeed the constructed-
ness) of femininity by tackling topics like pageant tricks, breast and nose
jobs, push-up bras, hairstyles, and makeup, often as part of the comedic
structure of the series, using femininity to get a laugh. In ‘‘Blame It on
New Orleans,’’ Suzanne refuses to believe that a drag queen is really a
man. As proof, he removes his wig. Undaunted, Suzanne asserts, ‘‘That
doesn’t prove anything!’’ and removes her wig as well (in a hotel bar, no
less). With their stocking-capped heads and over-the-top makeup, the two
look remarkably alike, spinning southern femininity and its constructions
in new directions. Although not exclusively a southern joke, this episode
(along with many others) does overtly reference the South’s long reign as
the primary regional producer of beauty queens.
In any one of these moments, the issues seem to be treated lightheart-
edly, but their effect over the course of the series as a whole is to repeatedly
reveal the artifice of femininity, particularly southern femininity. Through
Suzanne’s commentary (and the other’s reactions), we see that construct-
ing (or designing, if you will) beauty involves both labor and expense. In
an extratextual moment probably calculated to express something else,
the extent of this expense is exposed: an April 1991 TV Guide cover features
a full-length photo of Delta Burke. Surrounding the image are quotations
of the budget for her character for any one episode and the large caption,
‘‘What’s it cost?’’ Her makeup alone is ticketed at $600. According to the

cover, the total cost each week of bringing us this beauty queen is over
$75,000. Femininity may be many things, but it certainly is not cheap.
This exploration of femininity within the series’ woman-centered frame
troubles Susan Brownmiller’s assertion that femininity is inevitably tied
to romance. In her (and other feminist) readings, the goal of femininity is
‘‘to get a man,’’ and the machinations of femininity thus lead to ‘‘female-
against-female competition produced by the effort to attract and secure
men’’ (6).27 By divorcing the seemingly natural connections between femi-
ninity and romance, Designing Women, like Daniell’s memoir, suggests ways
in which femininity might serve other roles for women. Talking about
beauty secrets or the ‘‘power’’ inherent in ‘‘a set of D-cups’’ provides a
space to simultaneously acknowledge and lament cultural prescriptions
for beauty and behavior. The experience of shopping together, or of learn-
ing about pageantry from a female mentor (as Suzanne did), or of helping a
friend give birth, enables these women in different, if sometimes limited,
ways to develop alliances with each other. If Steel Magnolias also explored
the production of femininity in order to bring its women together, De-
signing Women takes this impulse further, welding its investigation of femi-
ninity and its labors to a liberal feminist agenda rather than to a defense
of a finally domesticated and sacrificial southern womanhood.
By revealing femininity’s constructedness, Designing Women exposes that
it is not natural or inherent, moving us away from the ‘‘core’’ of true
womanhood that Steel Magnolias reinstalls below femininity’s masquer-
ades. From within the structure of Designing Women, across the duration of
the series, the everyday enactment of femininity emerges, in French social
theorist Henri Lefebvre’s terms, ‘‘as the sociological point of feed-back,’’
pointing the way toward ‘‘irreducibles [and] contradictions that resist re-
pression.’’ 28 For Lefebvre, ‘‘Everyday life translated into language [or into
sitcoms?] becomes a different everyday life by becoming clear, the trans-
figuration of everyday life is the creation of something new’’ (202). Trans-
lating femininity’s artificiality ‘‘into language’’ may equal ‘‘the creation of
something new,’’ both for the designing women and for their viewers.
Furthermore, by resituating femininity within the conversations and rela-
tionships between women, the series destabilizes an all too easy tendency
within feminism to associate an interest in femininity with women who
are completely narcissistic or incorrectly male identified. Rather, femi-
ninity gets situated as a social discourse. The series explores the negative
aspects of southern femininity much less frequently than does Fatal Flowers
and is thus less ambivalent about deploying reconstructed femininities,

but both texts serve to illustrate the artifice of southern womanhood more
thoroughly than Steel Magnolias.
This refashioning of femininity’s relationship to feminism is particu-
larly important given the fictional setting of the series in the South. Not
only does the show posit a relational (rather than an oppositional) context
between femininity and feminism, but it also tries to trace this relation
as it unfolds in Atlanta in the 1980s and 1990s. Femininity has historically
been seen as part of white southern women’s power base and has been con-
sciously used in a variety of these women’s political negotiations, ranging
from the abolitionists, to the suffragists, to the anti-era movement, to
Hillary Clinton’s ‘‘southern-izing’’ makeover while first lady of Arkansas.29
The maxim ‘‘You can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar’’ is
emphasized by a range of Southern belles, from Scarlett to the design-
ing women to the author of the Southern Belle Primer. In such a context,
Julia’s feminist outbursts (and occasional sexual adventurings) can be read
through a southern frame: though they break with the southern code of
feminine etiquette and politeness, they still circulate within a wider struc-
tural focus on femininity. She can get away with her diatribes precisely be-
cause she still looks like a lady (that is, she is upper-middle-class and white).
This performance strategy is not equally available to all southern women.
At a wider level, the series suggests ways in which getting rid of ro-
mance and refiguring femininity can allow women, at least white ones, to
get together differently. Again and again, the series presents (and repre-
sents) spaces where the separation between public and private spheres can
be overcome so that women ‘‘can be together to see, talk, listen and relate
to one another,’’ creating ‘‘female social spaces in order to transform the
given reality.’’ 30 The space of Sugarbaker’s is just such a space: part home,
part business, its living room and kitchenette hover somewhere on the
border between public and private spaces, creating a secure site for the
recognition of female authority, as the women weave together their per-
sonal and business lives. Whereas Steel Magnolias offers up Truvy’s beauty
parlor (part of her home) as a similar hybrid space, Designing Women re-
fuses to wire the potential of this space back into traditional domesticity.
For the viewer, the sitcom may provide a symbolic space where the nego-
tiations of women’s friendships can be made out in the open, in a visible,
public manner, theoretically before male and female audiences, address-
ing women’s needs and desires. In such a space, women can address issues
usually contained within the private sphere in a public manner. By making
the relationships of women (both to each other and to femininity) its struc-

turing principle, the series suggests ways in which white women can nego-
tiate conflicts and design subjectivities within the public realm, embracing
many of the ideas of liberal feminism.
Designing Women also reconfigures the functioning of power within its
spaces. Very early in the series, Julia, as the ‘‘angry voice of feminism,’’
often operated within each episode as the mediating voice of reason, hold-
ing up a golden nugget of morality by the show’s end. The trajectory
over several seasons, however, was to disperse this position of authority
across the group of women, structuring networks of power in the series as
multiple, hybrid, interconnected, without a central, recurring authority
figure.31 Still, the series was unable to open up these fluid power lines to
include nonwhites, an observation that returns us to the figure of Anthony
and moves us closer to an evaluation of feminism and femininity within a
southern frame.
g ‘‘ WO M E N A N D B L AC K S ’’ I N D E S I G N I N G W O M E N
Well, I don’t care what anyone says about the New South. . . . I mean, anytime you
put one black man and three well-heeled white women together, it’s just gonna look
strange, and that’s all there is to it. —Suzanne Sugarbaker
And now we return to Anthony. His role in Designing Women at first seems
similar to the one that Patricia Mellencamp lucidly describes for Ricky in
I Love Lucy: that show’s ‘‘resistance to patriarchy [was] made more palat-
able because it was mediated by a racism which views Ricky as inferior.’’ 32
Ricky’s ethnicity allowed the women’s space: if he had been white, Lucy
would not have gotten away with so much. While such an explanation may
be partially true for Designing Women (though perhaps more for the invisible
figure of Suzanne’s maid, Consuela, than for Anthony), it cannot entirely
explain the complexity of Anthony’s function within the sitcom. The re-
lationship of white femininity to racism in I Love Lucy was, as Mellencamp
points out, covert, but Designing Women addresses race much more directly.
Anthony’s role has changed over time, and in many ways, references to
popular culture work within the series to destabilize racism (particularly
Suzanne’s) much as they also work to call gender stereotypes into ques-
tion. For example, in one episode, Anthony and Suzanne end up forced
into a ‘‘date’’ because Suzanne has accidentally purchased him at a bache-
lor auction. Referencing the taboos against miscegenation in the South,
Suzanne is nervous about going out with Anthony, but the other women

refuse to let her back out. The evening ends up better than planned, de-
spite Suzanne’s attempts to sabotage it (she wears a bathrobe and slippers,
hoping to discourage any romantic advances), and in what seems like an
exceptionally sappy moment, Suzanne announces, ‘‘Why, Anthony, you’re
my best friend!’’ Without missing a beat, Anthony replies, ‘‘Why, thank
you, Miss Daisy,’’ allowing the series to resist a too easy portrait of rich(er)
white women patronizingly ‘‘loving’’ black ‘‘help.’’ This particular episode
ends ambiguously, with the suggestion of a ‘‘wild night’’ between Anthony
and Suzanne.
The show also self-reflexively plays off of the notion of a black man
at an auction, allowing Anthony to comment on slave history, a role he
frequently assumes throughout the series. Throughout the sitcom’s run,
discussions of popular culture allow the series to address the South’s racist
legacy, insisting that the ‘‘Grand Old South’’ was not so grand for every-
body. When Sugarbaker’s is transformed into an antebellum tour home
in one episode, Anthony repeatedly notes that he would rather not replay
that past (though Julia’s monologue about ‘‘brave’’ southern matrons bor-
rows a good deal of its rhetoric from Catherine Clinton’s portraits in The
Plantation Mistress).33
Anthony’s placement in a space with four white Southern women also
exerts a subtle challenge to the South’s (and the nation’s) long-standing
circulation of the myth of the black rapist, especially since Anthony is
later figured as a business partner and not as ‘‘help’’ as he initially was.34
Apart from this thematic treatment of race, Anthony’s structural and spa-
tial presence within the series is less clear. Spatially, he is both inside and
outside of the group, often present within the ‘‘main’’ room, mingling with
the women, yet sometimes off in ‘‘the storeroom,’’ separate and apart. His
retreats to the storeroom usually occur when the women are getting too
‘‘womanish’’ for him: for instance, when Suzanne explains what push-up
bras do to her D-cups (they block her vision), or when Charlene gives
a sex survey. The artifice of masculinity is also addressed, with Anthony
puzzling over ‘‘what makes a man a man’’ in several episodes.
His inclusion in the group (both spatially and, in later seasons, as a
business partner) seems to trouble rigid binarisms of inside/outside and
male/female, perhaps suggesting a model of community or alliance across
sexual difference. He inhabits a sort of liminal space, moving in and out
of the women’s daily lives, destabilizing firm oppositions between insiders
and outsiders, masculinity and femininity, and, in brief moments, black
and white.35 At the level of representation, Designing Women hints at the

Anthony’s position is as unclear throughout the Designing Women series as it is in this
publicity still. Here he is framed both as object of desire and simply as leashed ob-
ject. In the series, he functions as a kind of liminal character, never fully a part of the
women’s world, but authorizing their ‘‘liberalism’’ nonetheless.
possibility of social arrangements not solely based on ‘‘unity through gen-

der.’’ 36 Anthony’s culturally specific position (as both African American
and implicitly as gay) allows him to function within the group without dis-
turbing its nonpatriarchal networks of power while simultaneously fore-
grounding relationships between races, classes, and genders. He connects
with the women at levels other than sexual difference without negating
the power balances of the women’s relationships because his own access
to white patriarchal power is inhibited. But over time, even that deli-
cate balance has been hard for the show to maintain. Although the series
continues to recognize disparities between the characters, it has done so
by a leveling move designed to make the characters more alike, in terms
of both money and taste: Charlene and Anthony (as representatives of a
lower class standing), in buying a house and a business, respectively, and
in both going to college, have ascended the social hierarchy to positions
more like those of the others. Suzanne lost a lot of money, equalizing her
position, as well. Perhaps recognizing disparity within a group is easier if
the group is pretty similar to begin with: too much difference has proved
too difficult to work through. This difficulty points to a certain elitism in

Designing Women: first, a privileging of gender can make the examination
of other categories like race and class difficult, if not impossible; second,
a tendency toward a certain ‘‘middle-class-ness’’ blurs the importance of
other issues.
For example, the relationship between masculinity and race is a con-
stant problem for the sitcom. Although at one level it tackles the mis-
cegenation taboos strongly entrenched in southern history by placing
Anthony among four white women, the series can only do so by alternately
emasculating him or coupling him with ‘‘suitable’’ (read ‘‘black’’) women.
Several episodes clearly code Anthony as gay—including ‘‘The Bache-
lor Auction,’’ where he parades down the runway in tight construction-
worker garb looking a bit like a castoff from the Village People—and a na-
tional ad for the reruns has Anthony (with earring prominently displayed)
asking a white construction worker shown only in shadow what ‘‘real men’’
(read ‘‘straight, white’’ men) like about Designing Women. The implication
clearly is that Anthony is not a real man, and therefore it is safe for him to
hang out with these white Southern women, whose attitude toward him
is sometimes subtly patronizing, especially early in the series. What is less
clear is if Anthony’s nonthreatening status is a result of race or sexuality,
and the series has difficulty dealing with both issues. Although Anthony is
coded ‘‘gay,’’ the sitcom never overtly approaches the issue and, like most of
broadcast television, has had its particularly homophobic moments, espe-
cially in one episode that focused on lesbianism.37 Rather than address-
ing Anthony’s ‘‘latent’’ gayness, the series actually moves to deflect it by
periodically pairing Anthony off with various dates, a move that simulta-
neously erases the ‘‘threats’’ of homosexuality (i.e., he likes women) and
of miscegenation (but not white ones).
The episodes that have dealt with Anthony’s dates point to a further dif-
ficulty for the show. Although it is at least attempting, if not entirely suc-
cessfully, to deal with the myths of black masculinity in the South, unpack-
ing what Lillian Smith called the Southern ‘‘race-sex-sin spiral,’’ Designing
Women is unable to incorporate women of color within the new spaces it
structures.38 One of Anthony’s first dates showed the series at its stereo-
typical worst: he appeared at the hospital when Charlene was giving birth
with a loud, flashy Tina Turner look-alike, complete with boom box, and
continually apologized for her unmannerly (read ‘‘unwhite’’ and ‘‘unlady-
like’’) behavior. Julia and the other women dismissed her as vulgar while
simultaneously ‘‘discovering’’ an elderly black woman who, before dying at
the end of the episode, conveniently provided a ‘‘comforting’’ (and equally

stereotypical) mammy image. Her death allows the white characters to
access emotion, covering over the troubling treatment of women of color
elsewhere in the episode and series. The scene also served as an eerie pre-
diction of the opening moments of the miniseries Scarlett, again illustrating
how white desire for cross-racial union is not in and of itself transgressive,
serving as it often does to provide emotional texture to whiteness while
denying black agency and subjectivity.
Designing Women begins a move past the additive racial logics of Ken
Burns’s The Civil War, attempting to bridge racial and sexual difference
by including Anthony within the women’s spaces, expressing a desire for
racial union and mining very different terrain than the all-white world of
Steel Magnolias. Nonetheless the series still imagines blackness via white
desire, celebrating feisty southern ladies and a newly urban and entrepre-
neurial South during a historical period that continued to roll back the
hard-won gains of the Civil Rights era. The series’ desire to figure a more
progressive South recognizes positive changes in the region and simulta-
neously serves to mask the degree to which a city such as Atlanta, em-
blematic of the Sun Belt South, was developing along profoundly uneven
registers throughout the 1980s and 1990s. The city had a majority black
population by the early 1970s and was largely hailed as a black Mecca, but
all was not well behind the city’s glossy image. While the ladies of Sugar-
baker’s were busy redesigning Atlanta from their fictional location at 1521
Sycamore, whites were fleeing the urban core for suburban communities
in Cobb County, and the number of black families living in poverty almost
doubled within a decade, approaching one-third of all households.39 Some
might deem it unrealistic to expect mainstream television sitcoms to ad-
dress such realities, but Designing Women was an overtly topical and politi-
cal series, lodged in the real, taking up many issues near and dear to the
project of liberal feminism, including sexual harassment, equal pay, and
pornography (itself an Atlanta-specific topic, given the city’s huge adult-
entertainment industry). While it may be argued that the series avoided
racial politics because race ‘‘doesn’t sell’’ on network television, similar
arguments had been made about television’s inability to address feminist
issues. Clearly, the series was able to tackle the latter and might also have
spoken on race in a progressive manner had it not remained so locked into
a lenticular mode which framed southern women only as white women.
In fact, it is important to recognize how the series’ structural focus on a
certain politics of femininity (and feminism) actually impeded its ability
to tackle other issues deeply relevant to contemporary southern life. Race

and class get subsumed and erased via the series’ investigations of gender
within a liberal feminist frame.
The 1991–1992 season ended with Anthony almost marrying another
date, also looked down on by the designing women, who try to protect
Anthony from her aggressive advances. Their maternal stance vis-à-vis
Anthony’s love life uncomfortably echoes the Christian ‘‘protection’’ ad-
ministered by the plantation mistress toward the slave. Literary theorist
Minrose Gwin has noted that ‘‘the relationship between black and white
women . . . may be seen as paradigmatic of the central ambiguity of south-
ern racial experience,’’ 40 an ambiguity probed in the cutout tableaux of
Kara Walker or the reconfigured plantation household of Octavia Butler’s
Kindred. In the show’s final season, when Anthony was accidentally mar-
ried off, Designing Women continually struggled (ultimately unsuccessfully)
to ‘‘place’’ African American women in relation to the white main charac-
ters. In this inability to represent a site of interracial female relationship
or friendship or to image racial inequality, the sitcom stops far short of the
terrain explored by Walker and Butler. Designing Women is finally unable
to create a space that can either acknowledge the South’s racial history
or productively deal with difference, revealing the limits of exposing the
artifice of femininity in a southern frame, particularly if that femininity
is always assumed to be white.41 Here the series repeats the frequent plu-
ralist gesture to include ‘‘women and blacks,’’ where all the women are
white, and all the blacks are men.42 It also suggests the dangers involved in
privileging the performance of femininity apart from specific contextual
frames, for finally, Designing Women’s reconstructions of femininity (and
my own positive evaluation of them) only apply in a too-white world.
g FEMININITY AND FEMINISM IN A SOUTHERN FRAME

A Southern belle is perfectly capable of being elected President of the United
States.—Maryln Schwartz, A Southern Belle Primer
The relationship between feminism and femininity is a vexed one, par-

ticularly within a southern frame. Works as diverse as Steel Magnolias, Fatal
Flowers, and Designing Women explore the tensions between the two terms,
sketching different possibilities. Steel Magnolias weds the dynamic of the
consciousness-raising group to discussions of southern hairstyles, largely
evacuating the politics of feminism in favor of a new domesticity where
gals get together in the service of family values and romance. Fatal Flowers

The ‘‘designing women’’ consistently play with the borders of femininity, illustrating
its constructed and performative nature. Although this episode, ‘‘The Rowdy Girls,’’ is
meant to mock Suzanne’s racism (she appears at a talent show in blackface), the series
as a whole is unable to imagine a progressive model of black femininity, highlighting
the limits of the show’s liberal politics.
and Designing Women are suspicious of this return to domesticity and more
overtly engage a Dixieland feminism, happily imagining the southern lady
as president. Yet despite their different political valences, all three texts
privilege gender to such a degree that considerations of race and class
are pushed to the margins. While Steel Magnolias, like Scarlett, deploys a
‘‘freeze-frame’’ racial logic to figure a world untroubled by racial differ-
ence, Designing Women reconfigures the additive racial logic of The Civil
War, moving closer to an integrated vision, but finally fixating on the white
southern lady. None of the texts is simply and totally racist, reactionary
or conservative; rather, each is laced with contradictions and latencies.
Nonetheless all three illustrate the difficulty of moving beyond lenticu-
lar racial logics when the white southern lady and her performances of
femininity fill our frames of vision.
Debates about performance, gender, and politics have been a central
element of feminist and queer theory for well over a decade, arguments
that sometimes felt oddly reified, fixed as binaries rather than positioned
along continuums. Playing out around disputes over performers like Ma-
donna or films like Paris Is Burning, these theory wars queried the ‘‘sub-

versive’’ powers of performing gender and the liberatory effects of playing
with femininity.43 Identity politics were often posited against a politics of
difference, frozen as separate political paradigms in which never the twain
would meet, a debate that created its own form of lenticular logic, a nar-
rative of either/or. Such binary constructions made it difficult to shake
notions of identity free from notions of sameness or to mobilize forms of
identity that could both respect and embrace difference. Popular culture
had trouble discerning such relations as well. Neither Steel Magnolias nor
Designing Women can fully imagine modes of feeling southern that can also
account for difference; the television series attempts such maneuvers, but
in its privileging of white femininity, it slides back into fairly fixed south-
ern identities. Debates about the progressive possibilities for performing
gender cannot be resolved via abstraction. Certainly, the performance of
white southern femininity need not inherently circulate sameness, but as
the preceding chapters suggest, the southern lady as rhetorical figure and
familiar icon comes with a history that is hard to shake. That history mat-
ters and must be accounted for. A turn to history—specifically, southern
history—will serve to illustrate the necessity of evaluating gender perfor-
mance within the specific contexts of place and time. Southern histories
and southern places can help us mediate between the constructivist and
essentialist camps.
During the past twenty-five years, feminist historians of the South have
cataloged a variety of the ways in which white southern women have
entered into the sphere of politics. One of the first and most often cited
works of this recovery project is Anne Firor Scott’s The Southern Lady: From
Pedestal to Politics, 1830–1930 (1970). Tracing the degree to which women’s
work in voluntary organizations often prepared them for entry into the
public sphere, Scott illustrates that the suffrage movement, although at
first slow to take hold in the South, had developed a good deal of mo-
mentum in the region by 1915. Scott further notes that the southern suf-
fragettes ‘‘were always reminding each other of the importance of being
ladylike’’ and that their campaigns showed ‘‘certain strongly marked re-
gional characteristics’’ (180). The suffragettes’ speeches and letters indicate
fairly clearly that these women were consciously deploying southern femi-
nine strategies to advance their cause, and Scott goes so far as to suggest
that white southern women willfully used the conventional trappings of
regional femininity as a ‘‘useful protective covering’’ even after the myth of
the lady ‘‘had largely lost its force’’ (226). Historians and theorists such as
Hazel Carby have insisted that these women’s relationships to femininity

were more complex than Scott’s account can recognize, for as Fatal Flowers
so powerfully highlights, masks, once donned, are not always so easily
shed. Although southern suffragettes certainly recognized the use value of
acting the lady, their own accounts suggest that their attachments to this
figure were not only strategic. For many, the myth of the lady still held
great sway. There is a tendency in certain modes of southern women’s his-
tory to view the ‘‘myths of the lady’’ as a sinister plot foisted on women
rather than a complex system of meaning that both contained and em-
powered white women, a system they participated in, benefited from, and
also challenged. As Drew Gilpin Faust has powerfully illustrated, these
women’s strategic maneuvers ‘‘could not be separated from the preroga-
tives of class and race on which ‘ladyhood’ rested.’’ Their perceptions of
blackness fundamentally impacted their political organizing, undermining
their ‘‘willingness to challenge patriarchy.’’ 44 The figure of the lady im-
pacted their organizing efforts as well as their views on gender, class, and
race, and it shaped and continues to shape academic histories of southern
women, as chapter 1 illustrated.
The back cover of the original paperback of The Southern Lady maintains
that ‘‘these women arrived at the political scene wearing hats and white
gloves, minding their manners, and . . . relying on respectable ancestry
to camouflage their radicalism.’’ The momentum of the text focuses on
this ‘‘radicalism,’’ arguing that by 1930, many southern women were be-
ginning ‘‘to affect the public life of society,’’ leaving the imagery of the
lady behind (229–30). This narrative of strong southern women liberat-
ing themselves shares much with Clinton’s The Plantation Mistress, both in
its antebellum and ‘‘new woman’’ sections. And as will happen in Clin-
ton’s volume, The Southern Lady lovingly recounts the hard work of the
plantation mistress (managing those slovenly, childlike slaves) and rarely
accounts for the racial implications of the strategies it maps out. White-
ness is largely naturalized in The Southern Lady, so that race as a topic sel-
dom surfaces, an economy of racial visibility similar to that of Scarlett or
Steel Magnolias. Thus we recognize the degree to which feminist scholar-
ship participated in the broader lenticular logics of the post–Civil Rights
era, constructing a rhetorical South that brought together academic and
popular cultures. It is time to shake up the canon of southern women’s
studies, acknowledging how privileged ‘‘Ur’’ texts inadvertently support
certain stock characters of southernness, making other axes of power hard
to see. We need a southern studies that breaks free from the lenticular logic
that so powerfully fixes what the South can mean. The Southern Lady does

devote some four sentences of the chapter on the southern suffrage move-
ment to considerations of the racial politics of the suffragettes. The text
notes that ‘‘some southern women talked as if their primary concern was
to counterbalance the Negro vote’’ (182) but goes on to conclude that this
was a ‘‘minor’’ strategy, one of many in a ‘‘large repertory of arguments’’
available to the suffragette (183).
Such a conclusion not only implies that the deployment of racist argu-
ments in the service of feminism is permissible, but it also comes danger-
ously close to lauding the individual suffragettes as shrewd strategists who,
while not racist themselves, could see the benefit of stirring up a little
antiblack sentiment. Thus The Southern Lady is unable to discern how a cer-
tain dependence on the traditional wiles of southern femininity simulta-
neously implied precise positions on race. Work by scholars such as histo-
rian Angela Davis suggests that southern suffragettes used race as a trump
card in their bid to get the vote much more often than this early his-
tory implies.45 Additionally, the letters and memoirs of suffragettes and
other club women indicate that they often held white-supremacist views.
For instance, North Carolina crusader and prominent clubwoman Sallie
Southall Cotten wrote, after a visit to Cuba in 1914, that she found the
country quite beautiful, but ‘‘I would not want to live there! Its people are
a hopelessly mixed race—black and white with full unquestioned and un-
objected to equality . . . and to this I seriously object forever. Is it necessary
or desirable to degrade a superior race in order to elevate an inferior race?
Why be superior if we are willing to relinquish superiority?’’ This and simi-
lar statements suggest that white women’s tactical use of race often owed
at least as much to their racism as to their strategic sensibilities. Further-
more, the research of historians such as Jacquelyn Dowd Hall indicates
that this perspective was often shared by activists for other causes, includ-
ing the white antilynching campaigns.46 White southern women’s move
into a broader public role historically coincides with a wider regional (and
national) move to curtail the rights of blacks, and it is important to rec-
ognize the way these two moments reinforced each other.47 If Designing
Women is able to claim a wider symbolic public space for women through
the mediating figure of Anthony, early southern feminists often deployed
other myths of the black male to similar ends. This strategy has a long
history in the South, a history that should leave us wary of playing the
southern lady for feminism.
In addition to the troubling racial politics often attached to ‘‘strate-
gic’’ uses of southern femininity by suffragists, one must also remember

that for the most part, the South did not ratify the Nineteenth Amend-
ment. In fact, only the border states of Texas, Tennessee, Kentucky, and
Arkansas voted in its favor. This pattern was repeated a half-century later
during the struggle to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment, despite the
attempts by southern feminists to beat the ‘‘total women’’ at their own
game. Pro-era southern activists used tactics such as cookie baking and
flirtation to no avail, suggesting that it is difficult to beat ‘‘true’’ ladies on
their own turf. The wide refusal of Sun Belt states to endorse the mea-
sure has often been cited as the prime cause for its failure (fifteen of the
nineteen holdout states were southern).48 Clearly, as these two important
historical junctures illustrate, ‘‘tactical femininity’’ did not win the day.
Yet despite the limited proof of the success of such strategies, many still
call for southern feminists to be ladylike. For instance, southern feminist
Margaret Ripley Wolfe asserts that because ‘‘southern women like being
female,’’ they will never ‘‘renounce their femininity.’’ 49 She praises white
southern women who ‘‘hammer away at issues’’ while ‘‘maintaining gra-
ciousness and charm,’’ arguing that feminism in the South needs to be
regionally feminine. Yet in advancing her argument (which is really a lib-
eral feminist plea for ‘‘equality’’), she must maintain the ‘‘difference’’ of
southern women by disassociating them from issues of sexuality and race.
Hence she can imply that a feminism that embraces lesbianism will have
little success in the South (144), while also insisting that more progress has
been experienced ‘‘in race relations than in sex equity’’ (143). Her argu-
ment celebrates successful professional white women in a manner already
familiar from Designing Women, A Southern Belle Primer, and the Scarlett-at-
ibm images of chapter 1, conveniently ignoring the rollback in Civil Rights
and the increase in black poverty during the past few decades.50
All of these accounts insist that because the South is so conservative as
a region, women need to deploy traditional femininity as a ‘‘defense,’’ as
‘‘protective covering.’’ They thus stress traditional southern femininity’s
value as a survival strategy. For instance, in Womenfolks, Shirley Abbott
calls white southern women’s use of feminine wiles a ‘‘minority strategy’’
(169); they learn to ‘‘dissimulate’’ as a ‘‘means to survival’’ (170), wearing
curtains if necessary. This dissimulation also allows them subtly to widen
their spheres of influence, wedding feminism and femininity. In her essay
on precisely this relationship, media critic Charlotte Brundson insight-
fully posits that ‘‘the issue of femininity is not easy, either for feminism or
for women,’’ and argues that feminism must strive to understand women’s
investments in femininity as a lived experience. Cultural theorist Cora

Kaplan voices a similar concern when she notes that ‘‘it is wrong to see
this struggle as between feminism and femininity. There is no feminism
that can stand wholly outside femininity as it is posed in a given historical
moment.’’ 51
These are important insights, but as feminists, we must, while recog-
nizing women’s investments in specific modes of femininity, also retain a
space to talk about the various ways such modes can still serve to bolster
up the dominant order. One woman’s pleasures, after all, can be tied to
another’s pain. To suggest that feminism must still at times operate a cri-
tique of specific forms of femininity (even while trying to understand their
pull) is not to position feminism ‘‘wholly outside femininity’’ but rather to
insist that being feminine is not all a southern woman should be. To label
the deployment of southern charms a ‘‘survival strategy’’ begs the question
‘‘Survival for whom?’’ If these strategies of charm and graciousness are so
tightly imbricated in a southern history that has often deployed the lady to
other ends (and both the examples of the era and the Nineteenth Amend-
ment suggest they are), can they ultimately be useful to a feminism that
is interested in issues beyond ‘‘equal pay for equal work’’? More precisely,
should feminism’s goal be to widen women’s access to the public sphere if
that access is limited to white, relatively well-off women? We would do
well to consider the possibility that the oft-cited ‘‘failure of feminism’’ in
the South might have as much to do with a lingering attachment by south-
ern feminists to certain myths of home and femininity as with the region’s
‘‘inherent’’ conservatism.
g S O U T H E R N C A M P S : D R AG Q U E E N S A N D
L E S B I A N S I N T H E B I B L E B E LT
reverend legion: And what is the difference between being

a regular Baptist and a Southern Baptist?
betty bowers: Just Hell and Heaven.
—from www.bettybowers.com
If Atlanta’s development proceeded unequally during the Sun Belt years,

positioning the city as a space of both possibility and poverty for African
Americans, middle-class white flight also facilitated a thriving gay and les-
bian culture in this southern metropolis. As Charles Rutheiser notes, the
city’s Midtown area emerged in the 1970s as ground zero for a nationally
recognized gay community, helping cement ‘‘Hotlanta’s’’ reputation in the

gay media (60). Numerous drag clubs sprang up around the area, creating a
gender-bending, punk-laced environment that would eventually give rise
to several nationally known drag queens, including RuPaul, Floydd, and
Lady Bunny, all of whom began their drag careers in Atlanta. According
to RuPaul, the South produces drag queens as easily as beauty queens, and
in her autobiography, Letting It All Hang Out, she maintains that she learned
the art (and artifice) of femininity after moving to the South. The drag
scene RuPaul migrated to in New York was a southern diaspora, a little
‘‘slice of Georgia in New York City’’ (78). Although drag is not an exclu-
sively southern development, it does resonate within the region. It can
be seen as a response to the excessively performative nature of southern
femininity, a relation already mapped in popular discourse when Suzanne
Sugarbaker compares wig styles with a drag queen. Drag modalities re-
purpose white southern femininity, modeling new ways of being southern
that can sometimes break free from a tired old recycling of the myths of
the lady and the belle.
RuPaul cites the American Music Show, an Atlanta cable access series, as
the space that launched her supermodel career. American Music Show is a
kind of alternative variety show, bringing together a wacky assortment
of misfit southerners. The show, over twenty years old, is still on the air
twice a week on local cable and claims to be America’s longest-running
public access tv series. Also airing semiweekly is DeAundra Peek’s TV Show,
featuring one drag persona of Rosser Shymanski. These shows air on a sta-
tion that includes weekly broadcasts such as O Believers of God and Highest
Praise, conservative Christian series that structure a very different take
on the South and its audiences, creating competing versions of southern-
ness within one slice of cable. The reach of the two shows extends beyond
Atlanta cabledom into the virtual realms of cyberspace. Both are denizens
of ‘‘Odum’s All Double-Wide Mobile Homes Trailer Park,’’ at home on the
World Wide Web. Visitors to the site are invited to tour several trailers,
including Peek’s and the RuPaul Fan Club’s. Traveling through the virtual
lot, one comes across subtle (and not so subtle) riffs on southern tradi-
tion, including special recipes (like one for MeeMaw’s Vienner Pot Pie
In-Minutes) and a fund-raising drive for the Crappy Pond Beautification
Committee. This site and others, like Ruby Ann Boxcar’s (which stages
an elaborate tour of a double-wide at the intersection of Robert E. Lee
Lane and Dixie Drive, complete with antiquing tips), work against the
monumentalizing drive of much of southern tourism. These interiors shift
and mutate, celebrating the misfit, the castaway, the disposable, claiming

them all for southern heritage. It’s a class-based politics of performance,
deploying a white trash veneer to mock the etiquette-driven, rule-bound
fixations of southern culture and ‘‘hospitality.’’ DeAundra Peek and Ruby
Ann Boxcar are Mary Kay gone bad, trumping even Tammy Faye Bakker
in their cosmetological finesse and retooling the image of both the red-
neck and dominant white femininity. Odum’s vamps southern culture, a
culture where homosexuality has been criminalized and pathologized, fig-
uring different Souths. This move toward an expansive southernness in
Atlanta (and beyond) is particularly important given the right-wing ten-
dencies of Cobb County, which lies on the outskirts of Atlanta and has
profited from white flight and Sun Belt economics. Cobb sent Newt Gin-
grich to Washington in 1983 and came to national prominence in 1993 by
passing a resolution condemning the ‘‘gay lifestyle.’’ 52
Another Atlanta-based Web site promotes Betty Bowers, ‘‘America’s
Best Christian.’’ Unlike the deliberately low-tech aesthetics of cable ac-
cess or of Odum’s site, these pages are glitzy and Flash enabled, adopting
the look and feel of high-end commercial sites. At first glance, the site
seems ‘‘legitimate,’’ but the visitor quickly realizes that this is Christian
drag, intent on mocking the self-righteous and moralizing tone of right-
wing fundamentalism and the televangelist. The opening page proclaims
that Betty is ‘‘a better Christian than you’’ and includes links to main sec-
tions of the site, including ‘‘Politics,’’ ‘‘Ministries,’’ and ‘‘God’s Gift Shop,’’
among others, as well as ‘‘Ask Betty,’’ a one-stop shop for Christian eti-
quette tips. Here Betty advises visitors against ‘‘dressing like lesbians,’’
observing that ‘‘women who wear slacks are clearly of the devil. Whether
they have realized that they are lesbians or not is beside the point. I have.’’
She further notes that ‘‘the dear loving Lord has damned every feminist
who ever walked this Earth in a comfortable shoe to an eternal lesson in
feminine submission. In Hell.’’ Other columns answer burning questions
such as ‘‘What Should a Christian Lady Wear to an Abortion Clinic Bomb-
ing?’’ or proclaim that ‘‘Since the Poor Will Always Be with Us, There Is
No Rush to Help Them.’’ By pushing the rhetoric of the far Right into the
realm of parody, revealing its illogical nature, the site stresses the meanings
of right-wing fundamentalism for gays, lesbians, wives, and minorities.
One particularly brilliant ‘‘campaign’’ illustrates this logic at work.
Under the ministries section, bettybowers.com takes on the ‘‘We’re stand-
ing for the truth that homosexuals can change’’ campaign of the funda-
mentalist activist group Focus on the Family. Bowers (along with Land-
over Baptist, another southern-based parody site) offers up the ‘‘We’re

standing for the truth that Negroes can change’’ ministry. Closely parallel-
ing the format of Focus on the Family’s national ad campaign, this ‘‘new’’
ad proclaims that ‘‘hope for change is possible for those still struggling
with acting like a Negro,’’ and prominently features images of Clarence
Thomas, Alan Keyes, and Bob Barr, all hailed as successful ‘‘ex-Negroes.’’
The ad goes straight to the heart of assimilationist rhetoric, announcing
that for ‘‘Negroes, . . . true happiness will only come when they learn to act
like normal people—us.’’ The text goes on to praise ‘‘courageous South-
ern Christians’’ who were ‘‘left to defend Biblical values with little more
than fire hoses and attack-dogs,’’ reaching out ‘‘to people who ‘act black,’ ’’
people ‘‘we would normally choose not to have anything to do with.’’ The
ad recommends ‘‘harsher prison terms’’ for those who refuse to give up
their destructive behaviors, like ‘‘using unattractive language,’’ listening
to ‘‘profane rap,’’ or ‘‘speaking back to the lady who hires you to clean.’’
Across its many pages (and in a forthcoming book), this site and others
speak back to the vast media empire of groups like Focus on the Family
(itself well stocked with Web sites), revealing the hidden assumptions that
underwrite their rhetoric. They trouble southern whiteness rather than
reify it, suggesting that there is more than one way to be white and south-
ern, refusing an ‘‘us/them’’ logic.
José Muñoz has described the possibilities laced through the disiden-
tifying subject ‘‘who tactically and simultaneously works on, with, and
against a cultural form,’’ holding onto an object not meant for the sub-
ject’s desire, infusing it with new life.53 The campy revampings of south-
ern identity being woven on the Web and cable access, not to mention
in Atlanta’s drag clubs, reclaim the figure of the southern belle, rework
southern mores, and create new southern spaces. Within these imagined
communities, feeling southern is about feeling campy and fabulous, re-
sketching the contours of southern femininity that Rosemary Daniell and
other southern women have found so oppressive. Via television, videotape,
and the Web, DeAundra Peek, Ruby Ann Boxcar, and other southern-
ers envision new counterpublics that link local communities to broader
spheres, competing with the neo-Confederates and the Christian Right
over the meaning of the South. If Daniell tries to knock southern femi-
ninity off its pedestal via the force of bad-girl behavior, the inhabitants of
Odum’s and Landover Baptist also try to destabilize southern standards
of taste, femininity, and decorum. Theirs is not a melancholic or a guilty
southernness; these southerners are gleeful and talking trash, sassy and fed
up with the majority South’s support of right-wing politics and rhetoric.

Atlanta and other southern regions can also claim more ‘‘traditionally’’
politicized histories of activism around issues of sexuality and gender.
For instance, the Atlanta Feminist Lesbian Alliance (afla) began meet-
ing as early as June 1972 in Midtown. An organization that grew out of
lessons learned in the antiwar and Civil Rights movements, afla func-
tioned as both an activist group and a ‘‘safe group space’’ for Atlanta’s les-
bian community, eventually purchasing a home that operated as its base.
One 1988 grant proposal describes the group’s mission as including, but
not limited to, ‘‘the liberation of women; eliminating discrimination of
women based on sexual orientation; ending racial, anti-Semitic, and eco-
nomic oppression; eliminating nuclear weapons and reducing the threat
of war; creating a positive, enabling environment for fat and differently-
abled women; and ensuring that the world’s . . . resources are used in a
responsible manner for the benefit of all and not exploited for the profit
of the few.’’ This document describes the group as composed of ‘‘about
135 women at any given time, both oldtime dykes and women in the pro-
cess of coming out,’’ across a wide range of ages, primarily but not exclu-
sively white. Members worked on issues ranging from gay civil rights to
reproductive freedom to aids discrimination. From early in the group’s
history, members challenged southern feminist strategies of a tasteful
and feminine activism, highlighting the shortsightedness and homopho-
bia such practices entailed. For instance, in a 1974 letter, afla member
Vicky Gabriner complained to southern now member Jackie Frost about
controversies that arose over the participation of afla and the Socialist
Worker’s Party in Atlanta’s pro-era parade in January 1974. Defending
the right of such groups to political visibility, former Weathermen and
sds member Gabriner wrote,
So we were victorious on a principled stand, and also in the realm of
‘‘practical politics.’’ Practical Politics is always the great bugaboo when
it comes down to scary subject matters. ‘‘Of course, you should be able
to do this or that,’’ they will argue, ‘‘but it won’t work out practi-
cally.’’ . . . Compromises are made constantly. But some compromises
are more than compromises, they are total surrender. Each situation
has to be thought out. When women in the women’s movement, or
the era movement, ask lesbians to sit back in the era struggle, or not
bring up their demands at a women’s conference, because they might
turn off other women or legislators, these are not tactical demands, al-
though they may seem to be. These women are really asking that we

not exist at all—in the movement, in the society, in their fantasies—
nowhere! 54
AFLA also actively pursued the National Gay Task Force guidelines
about involvement in local media processes and wrote letters to state tv
stations asking to be included in ascertainment procedures for license re-
newals, framing their needs as representative of a ‘‘significant community
group.’’ The group appeared on shows such as Today in Georgia in 1978, dis-
cussing lesbian issues, and corresponded with the fcc. Beyond incursions
into ‘‘mainstream’’ politics, the group also functioned as a kind of southern
‘‘lesbian Mecca,’’ and their archives at Duke University include folder after
folder of letters sent to afla from many rural and small-town lesbians,
feminist or not. The tone of relief and gratitude expressed in the letters is
touching and palpable, signaling afla’s role as an important nodal point
on a map of alternative Souths. They provided a model for, and worked
in conjunction with, other women’s groups across the South, creating a
network of southern lesbian feminism. Their house provided a physical
presence and center, serving as a meeting space, library, and work zone.
The library, set up as the nonprofit Southern Feminist Library and Archives
(sfla), housed a collection of more than eight hundred books, 450 peri-
odical titles, and several drawers archiving the ‘‘herstory’’ of afla. Clearly,
the group recognized that their labors were unique. Largely a separatist
organization, afla was not without its moments of camp. The group orga-
nized the Dyke Tour of Homes, both a social event and a send-up of the
southern tradition of garden tours and pilgrimages. Homes featured on
the 1984 tour included one described as ‘‘down-home, thriftstore, devil-
may-care,’’ and another portrayed as a ‘‘dyke den of iniquity.’’ The cover
of the 1984 photocopied brochure featured a huge cockroach emblazoned
with a tiny lesbian hammer. Not exactly Southern Living.
If the better parts of queer Atlanta weren’t willing to cede terrain to
the growing tide of republicanism across the South, such resistance is not
only a metropolitan phenomenon. In 1993, tiny Ovett, Mississippi (popu-
lation 300), came briefly to national prominence when a lesbian couple,
Wanda and Brenda Henson, bought a farm and dubbed it Camp Sister
Spirit. The 120-acre parcel of rural Mississippi land was to house a dream
of the Hensons: a feminist education retreat and center. Their goal was to
continue the work they had begun along Mississippi’s Gulf Coast, running
a food and clothing bank, counseling battered women, and lobbying for
reproductive and prisoners’ rights. They also wanted room of their own,

Brenda and Wanda Henson
redefine the contours of southern
femininity, refusing to give up the
rural South to conservative forces.
Photo courtesy of Brenda Henson
and Camp Sister Spirit, Inc.
tired of the harassment they had experienced in rented spaces, intent on

building a physical space that could serve as a center for grassroots femi-
nist activity, education, and outreach. Almost immediately, the women
began receiving death threats, and local fundamentalists organized against
them, funded by both statewide and national right-wing groups, such as
the American Family Association. The afa also initiated local measures
to adopt an antigay resolution similar to the proposal approved in Cobb
County. In a rhetoric just a step away from Betty Bowers’s, a local minister
told a Village Voice reporter that the community could love the sinners but
hate the sin. Everything would be okay if the women would just behave and
blend in, abandoning their ‘‘agenda’’ and assimilating into ‘‘normal’’ (i.e.,
right-wing) life. In December 1993 the couple appeared on Oprah, work-
ing to draw public attention to the violence being waged against them. I
was living in Chicago at the time, and after being contacted by a southern
friend, I went to the show’s taping, part of a group organized to support the
couple. On a chilly morning just west of downtown Chicago, I was met by
both a metal detector and a large group of fundamentalist Mississippians
who had been bused in by right-wing organizations. The show was, as talk
shows are wont to be, heated and lively, a weak sort of public forum that
structurally positioned both the Hensons and their opponents as freakish
southern rednecks, even while Oprah clearly supported the women, liken-
ing their case to Civil Rights struggles in Mississippi. My mother called
from Louisiana after the show aired, feeling that the women might have

The women of Camp Sister Spirit are busy constructing rooms of their own deep in
rural Mississippi, challenging notions of a single ‘‘authentic’’ South. Photo courtesy of
Brenda Henson and Camp Sister Spirit, Inc.
helped their cause by being less assertive and aggressive, striking a more
feminine pose.
But the Hensons were (quite rightly) less interested in a politics of femi-
ninity and more focused on getting coverage, hoping that national visi-
bility would literally save their lives. And their strategy worked; by mid-
February 1994, Attorney General Janet Reno sent Department of Justice
mediators to Ovett to watch over the situation. In a letter to the National
Gay and Lesbian Task Force, Reno wrote: ‘‘The intolerance and bigotry
demonstrated by some of the people of Ovett have no place in this coun-
try.’’ As I type, the Hensons are still going strong, building up their camp
and hosting music festivals, educational programs, and the food and cloth-
ing bank, feeding more than one hundred people a month. They’ve net-
worked with other local charities, creating what they term a feminism of
‘‘doers,’’ local, practical, and engaged in the community. Their work ex-
tends to Mexico and Central America, organizing donations, labor, and
supplies for other women’s struggles. Along with a core group of women
who helped raise the initial funds, the Hensons wanted to create a place
for an ‘‘indigenous lesbian culture, . . . a place to work and to care.’’ Like
the women of afla, they saw the need for a safe space, a haven from which

their political and cultural vision could grow. Some of their neighbors have
come around, expressing cautious support, aware that in eight years time,
the lesbians down the road have not yet converted all the daughters and
wives of Ovett to ‘‘the gay lifestyle.’’ 55
We can read Camp Sister Spirit as waging a battle over Ovett, over the
small-town South and its possible meanings. This is not the idealized pas-
toral South of Steel Magnolias; rather, it is danger laced and hostile, shots
ringing out in the dark, but nonetheless a space worth fighting for, de-
spite the ease with which the national media repeatedly figured the area
as something right out of Deliverance. The Hensons and their supporters
battle for place, for the right to say to their right-wing antagonists, ‘‘We
are here. We are southerners. You do not define the meaning of this re-
gion. There are other Souths.’’ Their very visibility, their laying claim to
land, their lavender-hued fence and trees, all signal presence, a presence
read as threat by some of their neighbors. The small-town South is usually
demonized or glorified, the site of inbred bigotry or ‘‘family values.’’ The
Oprah episode featured taped snippets of the ‘‘real South,’’ recorded in a
Mississippi family restaurant, a steady stream of ‘‘country folk,’’ all over-
alls and drawl, their accents underwriting a kind of sonic concentration
and expression of redneck-ness. Such representations allow a national dis-
avowal of the broad extent of social injustice, locating it all conveniently
‘‘down there’’ in the South, a backwoods aberration. This dynamic makes
it difficult to see that the South is in America, and that America is in the
South, their boundaries blurred and indistinct, racism endemic and not
neatly contained below the Mason-Dixon line. Camp Sister Spirit short-
circuits these binary logics, imagining a South more fluid and more mobile
than either Oprah or the Village Voice can fathom. This South encompasses
both risk and possibility, danger and desire. Here history matters, but it’s
not all that matters. Places can and do change. And this struggle over place
is not just local; the camp connects with national and international net-
works of action, fights nationally organized opponents, and, much as in
the earlier case of afla, receives letters of support and solidarity from
around the world.
At Camp Sister Spirit, there is a thirty-three-bed bunkhouse ‘‘for
womyn-born-womyn only,’’ and many of afla’s activities were lesbian
only, both groups seemingly embracing a model of radical separatism easily
associated with an essentialist identity politics, a paradigm that might
seem ill at odds with the campy, parodic stylings of DeAundra Peek. The
road from Odum’s to Ovett might seem long indeed, leading to two very

different modes of feeling southern. At the Hensons’ camp, feeling south-
ern acknowledges feeling fear and experiencing bigotry, but the women
also feel hope and possibility, seeking a moonlit serenity that can be as
down-home friendly as the virtual trailers at Odum’s, itself no stranger
to fear or hatred. The Hensons are brave and fabulous in their own ways,
responding to the norms of southern femininity by rejecting their sur-
face appeal while still cultivating a tradition of caring, community ser-
vice, and outreach. They reject certain modes of southern femininity but
lay claim to others, including compassion, neighborliness, support, and
caring, repurposing M’Lynn’s ‘‘essential womanhood’’ to more progressive
ends, shaking it free from white middle-class domesticity. Those patrol-
ling the grounds of the Hensons’ camp may look and walk like an essen-
tialized lesbian womanhood—womyn indeed—but these produced iden-
tities understand the powerful social construction of femininity in the
South. Their very difference from this norm necessitates the patrols in the
first place. Rather than reading afla or Camp Sister Spirit as diametri-
cally opposed to Odum’s and its drag queens, positioned along opposite
poles of the essentialist-versus-constructivist debate, we might instead
recognize the degree to which each labors to destabilize traditional modes
of southern femininity. Each reworks southern feminine performance to
new ends, expanding the modes of femininity available within (and be-
yond) the region. DeAundra Peek and Wanda Henson cannot be reduced
to constructivist and essentialist theoretical models. Their camps don’t
align that way; they are more fluid and more mobile, not neatly mapped
within an imagined region’s boundaries.
Here we see the beginning of modes of identification that don’t end-
lessly circulate around sameness. Southern identity gets problematized
and reconfigured: ‘‘I am southern. I am lesbian.’’ ‘‘I’m a southern belle.
I’m a man.’’ Lesbian camps and campy drag both illustrate strategies, im-
perfect yet viable, for troubling the normalizing power of iconic southern
femininity. Across their range, they move us away from abstract debates
about identity politics versus a politics of difference toward models of
identity that account for difference. Feminists of color from Norma Alar-
cón to Gloria Anzaldúa to Chandra Mohanty to Trinh T. Minh-ha have
theorized the import of such paradigms, refusing easy binaries, exploding
insider/outsider oppositions. The inhabitants of Camp Sister Spirit and
Odum’s function as ‘‘inappropriate others’’ within a southern frame, criss-
crossing possible registers of regional identity.56 They also stage parallel
publics and counterpublics, alternative camps, troubling regionally reified

notions of whiteness, gender, and class. These camps function as parallel
political spheres, providing alternative services to those whom the state
or dominant ideology rejects. They sometimes work at the level of rep-
resentation, understanding that representations simultaneously support
and structure ideologies and ways of being in the world. They sometimes,
as in the case of both afla and Camp Sister Spirit, engage the state overtly
via direct action and interventions into ‘‘mainstream’’ politics. They offer
models for a politics of engagement, working nationally and globally (via
mediated information streams and organized campaigns) while also build-
ing vibrant local communities underwritten by a slightly utopian hope in
other possible Souths. Thus they engage the ‘‘space of our own’’ mentality
of the neo-Confederates but spin it elsewhere, thinking through and trou-
bling separatism for their own ends. They trade anger for hope, repressed
guilt for cautious possibility.
This is not a tightly closed separatism, inward focused, conservative,
and withdrawn; rather, it is the protected realm needed by oppressed
groups in order to regroup and strategize. It’s a base camp, not a closed
camp, a space of possibility. Camp Sister Spirit also has a male-friendly
bunkhouse, expanding its original idea for a womyn-only space. The camp
is more utopian than separatist, engaging the local from a safe, protected
space, forging strategic links out. It troubles a lenticular logic (seeing only
black or white, sameness or difference, male or female) and points the
way toward not only new representations but also new modes of feel-
ing and new political possibilities. This is an expansive notion of what
counts as the political, of how we might intervene in the world, a model
without a fixed valence or assured outcome—but then again, few politi-
cal struggles come with guarantees. Certainly the campy performances of
RuPaul have sustained a broader public appeal than the women of Camp
Sister Spirit, largely forgotten post-Oprah, suggesting the ease with which
a local politics of performance can be assimilated into the mainstream,
often stripped of oppositional possibility. Likewise, strategic and ‘‘know-
ing’’ deployments of white trash sensibilities can function as simply an-
other route by which whites assert their ‘‘ethnic’’ difference, à la Scarlett or
the neo-Confederates, ultimately reinforcing whiteness. But the difficulty
of fixing the politics of certain practices of southernness should not blind us
to their potentials, particularly their potential to unmoor southern iden-
tity from a fixed relation to certain icons of southern history and tradition.
It is possible to be of a place and apart from it, creating new modes of
southern identity, sketching the contours of a critical regionalism.

4.
FEELING SOUTHERN
Home, Guilt, and the

Transformation of
White Identity
g
Guilt . . . is . . . the
biggest crop raised in Dixie.
—Lillian Smith, Killers of
the Dream
Ida McTyre Perry sees ghosts. Or more accurately, one ghost, over and
over again. He haunts her as she moves through everyday spaces of south-
ernness, puncturing the carefully constructed veneer of graciousness in
which she has encased her life. Perched as she is on the brink of insanity,
stumbling through the pages of Randall Kenan’s short story ‘‘Tell Me,
Tell Me,’’ Ida offers an excellent vantage point from which to explore the
high cost of southern hospitality, particularly as it plays out for the white
subject moored in a past with which she refuses to come to terms. Ida
Perry lives in Tims Creek, a fictional North Carolina town mapped out
through the twelve short stories of Kenan’s Let the Dead Bury Their Dead,
a small southern environ laced through with the problems and pleasures
of the modern South. Across the various tales (and in an earlier novel),
Kenan challenges Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County as the literary home
of the mythic South, insisting instead on directly confronting the ghosts
of southern history and memory while tracing the interrelation of black
and white, rich and poor, straight and gay, young and old, in this lush yet
haunted southern setting. Subtly reworking stock stereotypes of the south-
ern gothic and grotesque while also revisioning southern history, Kenan
traces the connections between old and new southern geographies, link-
ing the hog pen to the strip mall, the farm to the interstate, the South to
areas beyond its borders.
‘‘Tell Me, Tell Me’’ intercuts the imagined horror of Ida’s perpetual
present—her surety that a ‘‘pickaninny’’ has invaded her bedroom—with
an investigation of both Ida’s everyday world and the frozen memory-
scapes locked within her head. Her present is communicated via dialogue,
a panicked late-night call to her friend Bela that runs throughout the short
story, a discursive strategy that amply illustrates both Ida’s fear and her
tenuous grasp on reality, voiced through Bela’s doubts. The third-person
narrations that intersect the phone conversation further reframe the first-
person account, refracting Ida’s tale again, moving us through history and
memory and hinting at the dark secrets Ida has carefully chosen to forget.
As the tale unfolds, we learn quite a lot about a certain mode of white
female subjectivity in the South. We also learn of memory and madness, of
guilt and the denial of guilt. We learn that this intricate dance of memory
and repression damages the white mind of the South, underwriting the
lonely spaces Ida inhabits, spaces that slowly drive her mad. Finally, we
learn what we’ve suspected all along, that Ida’s stalker is indeed an appa-
rition, conjured up from the subconscious registers of her guilt. And Ida
knows this, too, even as she actively denies it, for she recognizes the young
black boy to be the ghost of a child her husband had brutally tossed into
the ocean some fifty years before, a murder she witnessed, and to which
she ultimately smiled her consent.
Kenan’s tale carefully places Ida within a particular setting in the
small-town South. The narrative takes the reader on a mini-tour of the
plantation-style home in which she is carefully installed, amid precisely ar-
ranged antiques, five bedrooms, and a well-stocked pantry. This expansive
home is clearly her reward for having supported her now-dead husband,
Judge Theodore ‘‘Butch’’ Perry, a man she knows to have been the ‘‘son of a
goddamned bitch,’’ but one who had the power to take her places, ensuring
class mobility and the social standing that Ida craved. She seems to have
achieved this life of gentle ease and southern grandeur as she settles into a
white wicker chair at the Old Plantation Inn for a meeting of the Friends
of the Crosstown County Library. ‘‘Under portraits of belles and horses,’’
she feels at peace in the setting, listening to ‘‘the warm light conversation
of the ladies in their soft Southern cadences,’’ to ‘‘the civilized tinkle of ice
cubes in crystal’’ (246). But her contentment and deep self-satisfaction are
only a thin emotional veneer covering over a nagging disquiet, a disquiet
made manifest when a small black child in faded dungarees appears out-

side the restaurant, staring back at her through fancy French doors from a
rain-drenched street. His appearances throughout the story puncture the
illusion of civility and decorum framing southern myths, as he haunts the
very spaces of southern womanhood. He follows Ida through her life, his
figure invading the luncheon, the beauty shop, her garden, her volunteer-
ism, her home, her friendship with Bela, careening her out of control both
in her car and in her carefully maintained life. These spaces are not only
haunted by the boy: they are also plagued by a deep emptiness, a loneliness
we come to realize is the price Ida has paid for her privilege and her will-
ful acts of forgetting. Her isolation is most acute within the walls of her
cherished home, where the ‘‘weight of nothingness and past disappoint-
ments tends to bear down’’ (245), revealing the unmitigated emptiness of
a whiteness divorced from history and memory.
The story also plumbs the intricate workings of post–Civil Rights
racism, drawing links between the brutality of the Jim Crow era and the
lingering injustices of the present, carefully noting Ida’s trajectory from
the overt racism of her youth to the smug covert racist stylings of her
widowhood. Thus the tale also maps the movement from the overt racial
logics of the early twentieth century to the lenticular logics of more re-
cent times, revealing the blinders both logics lock around white subjec-
tivity and knowing. There are tricks she has learned to play with herself
to avoid confronting her own racism, past or present, linguistic and so-
matic maneuvers designed to hide her ‘‘true’’ feelings from both self and
other. While Ida’s own thoughts and her conversations with Bela are pep-
pered with words like ‘‘nigger,’’ she tries to police her language around
the various African Americans—a paramedic, a doctor, a minister, her
handyman—who appear within her world. When on her son’s advice, she
unwittingly visits an African American gynecologist (all in an effort to
avoid the Asian physician who has replaced her lifelong doctor), Ida con-
gratulates herself for valiantly overcoming her prejudices, ‘‘exonerated in
her own mind’’ (244) as she meets the doctor’s gaze. Throughout the story,
Kenan powerfully narrates the machinations of guilt within a particular
mode of white southern thinking, charting its manifestations and reper-
cussions. Confronted with the black physician, Ida suspends her doubt and
feels ‘‘an incomparable sense of goodwill’’ (258), smugly at ease with her
own largesse as she refuses to see through the careful facade of her covert
racism.
This wall of self-admiration almost crumbles when Ida, troubled by her
own mortality, reflects on her years-long relationship with her handyman,
Feeling Southern 207

Joe Abner. In an internal monologue that praises Joe Abner for his ‘‘char-
acter’’ (and, hence, his difference from ‘‘so many of them’’), Ida realizes
that she knows very little about this man with whom she has had close con-
tact for twenty-five years, very little about his thoughts, hopes, desires,
even though she feels a surge of ‘‘bewildering . . . and quickly suppressed
happiness’’ each time he ‘‘arrives for a day of work’’ (245). ‘‘Suddenly Joe
Abner reared up in her imagination as a grand but impenetrable mystery’’
(253), a man defined solely through her own needs and emotional regis-
ters. But just as quickly as this renegade reflection enters her mind, ‘‘she
thought on it no more,’’ determined not to know him any better, fixed in
her resolve to maintain her way of life. ‘‘At base, she did not want to know
the truth of her condition’’ (261). Again and again, blackness underwrites
Ida’s emotional repertoire, providing the springboard from which feelings
and emotional possibility enter into her empty world.
She manages her latent guilt via repression, through carefully orches-
trated acts of fragmentation that allow her to wall off aspects of her past
and her psyche, painstakingly compartmentalizing her world. When the
young boy’s ghost begins to threaten the fragile stage sets of her parti-
tioned reality, Ida is seized by a seething anger, an anger that wells up in
response to ‘‘his look full of accusation’’ (248), an accusation she cannot
fathom because she has divorced feeling from memory, effect from cause.
As with the neo-Confederates building fortresses in cyberspace, guilt is
managed via anger, but ‘‘Tell Me, Tell Me’’ pointedly reveals such anger
as the hollow defense mechanism that it is. Kenan asks us to remember
the violated black bodies on which white southern edifices (including Ida’s
anger, Ida’s home) were built, prompting us to see connections between
southern pasts and southern presents in the maintenance of white privi-
lege and white womanhood. The short story also pries open the gap be-
tween public and private personae in the South, charting a white southern
strategy of displaying emotion without exploring its stakes and contours.
This strategy is all talk and no action, display without accountability, a
tactical maneuver that fixates on white southern feeling divorced from
context and history. The story’s closing line insists, ‘‘All are guilty, none
is free.’’ The South must come to terms with this guilt and name it, trad-
ing Ida’s willed forgetfulness for a public accountability that enables new
modes of feeling southern. Such an effort opens a space of possibility, a
space from which a new understanding of white southern identity might
emerge, creating the grounds for a more productive model of cross-racial
praxis and alliance. Dixie’s past offers brief glimpses of what forms such

The series Any Day Now links past and present in its portrayal of the friendship of M. E.
Sims and Rene Jackson by intercutting scenes of the characters’ coming-of-age during
the Civil Rights era with their relationship in the present. In this publicity photo, past
and present collide as the actors from ‘‘then’’ and ‘‘now’’ are framed together, suggesting
models of historical memory that reject the lenticular.
an alliance might take, as well as powerful lessons about the difficulty of

reconstructing southerners and their emotional repertoires.
As the previous chapters have attested, the avoidance of white south-
ern guilt can take many forms, from the angry rebel yells of the neo-
Confederates to the sepia-toned melancholia of The Civil War to the willful
displacements of Scarlett or Designing Women, but others have attempted to
confront this defining register of southern feeling more directly. Some-
times these attempts arise in unlikely places, including the confines of
mainstream television. August 1998 saw the premiere of Any Day Now, a
Lifetime television drama set in both the early 1960s and the late 1990s
in Birmingham, Alabama. The series revolves around the friendship of
two southern women: Mary Elizabeth Sims (usually called M. E.), a white
homemaker and struggling writer, and Rene Jackson, a successful black at-
torney.1 Rene returns to the South in the first episode to attend the funeral
of her father, a Civil Rights activist and lawyer. Although deeply ambiva-
lent about the region, she decides to move back to Birmingham to take
over her father’s practice. She also resumes her friendship with M. E.,

picking up on a nine-year childhood closeness that had ended abruptly
after an angry argument when both girls were nineteen. Each episode
weaves together past and present, interspersing scenes of the women’s
adult lives with tinted black-and-white footage of their childhood in the
1960s, traversing old and new Souths. The opening scenes of the title se-
quence metonymically condense this journey through the wonders of high-
tech video editing. To the song ‘‘Any Day Now,’’ black-and-white images
of ‘‘old’’ Birmingham—images of police dogs attacking black protesters
and of National Guard tanks; of a sign proclaiming Birmingham ‘‘Magic
City’’—scroll from right to left across the top of the screen. Below, color
images of today’s Birmingham scroll from left to right, including shots of
the city’s skyline and the monuments of a new Civil Rights tourism. The
short sequence functions as a kind of tour of the progress of the South, the
statue of the police dogs monumentalizing white resistance to the move-
ment while also locating it in the past, a time now cast in bronze. The
series itself takes a more complex approach to history and memory and
to guilt and desire as it struggles to come to terms with southern pasts.
Like Designing Women, with which Any Day Now shares the actor Annie
Potts, this newer series espouses a liberal feminist politics of the now
variety, interested in equal rights for women, as well as in the contours
of women’s friendships and women’s desires. Any Day Now also explores
southern femininity, looking at what makes a woman a woman, particu-
larly in the South, although this is not the driving focus of the series. Snip-
pets from the past explore Rene’s desire for a special bra, the Pink Angel,
as well as the behaviors of ‘‘proper’’ ladies, revealing the normalizing stric-
tures of southern femininity in the early 1960s. Interestingly, the young
Rene is a more ‘‘successful’’ lady, almost always sporting a dress to M. E.’s
rugged dungarees, moving through the world with notably more grace
and subtly reworking images of the white southern lady in order to claim
idealized femininity for Rene herself. Still, one early episode thematizes
the racial borders of iconic southern womanhood fairly directly, as the two
young girls watch the Miss America pageant, itself often a paean to south-
ern femininity, from M. E.’s ‘‘liberal’’ grandmother’s living room floor.
Grandma Otis allows the girls to play with her tiara, a leftover icon of her
own ascent into idealized femininity as Miss Camellia, 1922. As the girls
play along with the broadcast, Rene is a much better ‘‘contestant’’ than
M. E., but M. E. doubles over in laughter as Rene sashays across the room,
observing that it’s all too funny, since ‘‘there’s never been a colored Miss
America.’’ The camera lingers on the young Rene’s crestfallen face and on

the oblivious reactions of her playmate and her grandmother. Only after
Rene runs crying from the house does M. E. even notice her discomfort, so
neatly is she stitched into precise understandings of who counts as a lady.
By the episode’s end, the two girls, following tv’s formulaic drive, have
bonded again, reunited as they toss the tiara, symbol of iconic southern
womanhood, from the door of the abandoned boxcar that is their club-
house. The camera follows the tiara on its slow-mo descent into the mud
outside. By the 1990s, the women have flipped roles, with Rene the single
career woman and M. E. the wife and mother, although neither has an
ideal life.
In fact, it is this collision of present and past that makes the show so
interesting, creating a space for the exploration of southern modes of feel-
ing. In her analysis of I’ll Fly Away, a critically acclaimed series set entirely
in the Civil Rights–era South, Mimi White has noted that such ‘‘historical
fiction can . . . serve as a safety net for general social reception,’’ neatly
locating racism back then, and engaging ‘‘memory, imagination, and ex-
perience via a safe distance’’ (121). White is particularly interested in the
series’ referencing and packaging of the ‘‘real’’ past, actual events from the
Civil Rights era. In their retro detail and particularly in their tinted black-
and-white imaging, Any Day Now’s flashback sequences might also be read
as nostalgic tours of history, evoking a kind of cathartic emotional release
designed to let the viewer feel and forget history on a weekly basis. Here
is the March on Washington, here is Bloody Sunday, here are the fire hoses
and the dogs, allowing experience to accumulate without accountability.
Certainly much of the status of the series as ‘‘quality television’’ resides
in its appeal to history, lodging as it does its bid for ‘‘seriousness’’ in the
emotive registers of the real. It also multiplies screens across its episodes,
foregrounding television as the mode by which Civil Rights struggles trav-
eled, claiming a relevance for tv that is clearly meant to apply to today
(and to the series itself ) as much as to the past. Nonetheless the series’
connection of the 1960s to the 1990s helps destabilize a voyeuristic histori-
cal nostalgia by thematically and visually (if sometimes clumsily) linking
past wrongs to present ones, both within specific episodes and across the
series as a whole. Past and present don’t stay suspended in separate frames,
frozen in a lenticular logic. For instance, an episode that looks at the 1960s
humiliation of Rene and her mother when they are pulled over by police-
men resurfaces in a later episode when a 1990s Rene—guilty both then
and now of driving while black—is forced to the ground at gunpoint by a
cop who suspects that her rental car is stolen. While we might necessarily

be suspicious of the commercialization of memory, particularly traumatic
memories, and of television’s tendency to gloss over the complexities of
the Civil Rights era, we gain little insight into what drives the desire for
mass-mediated history by simply rejecting television’s framing of the past.
Any Day Now approaches history and memory differently than The Civil War,
moving away from a frozen white racial melancholia, a difference worth
accounting for even as we imagine other memorial movements.
The series actually bills itself as the ‘‘only program on television to offer
a weekly exploration of race relations,’’ and in its traversal of the ups and
downs of M. E. and Rene’s friendship, it often delivers on this promise.
While Any Day Now, like most of fictional prime-time television, particu-
larly programs aimed at a female demographic, revolves largely around
the personal and the familial, the series does connect the African Ameri-
can characters to larger systematic networks of struggle, and the Civil
Rights movement is often imaged as a group labor of massive resistance
orchestrated by and for African Americans. In a departure from most of
commercial mass media, we experience the movement via the narrative
trajectories of black characters rather than primarily through white char-
acters’ actions and emotions. Episodes like ‘‘It’s Not about the Butter’’
attempt to link the more covert affronts of everyday 1990s racism (the
clenched purses, the nervous glances, the million small racial assumptions
of the white mind) to both the overt racism of the Jim Crow South and
the overt racism of the present. After M. E. has mistaken a black woman
at a restaurant for a waitress, she and Rene argue about whether her as-
sumption was racist. Rene says, ‘‘There’s a part of you who looks at a black
person and sees a servant. Why can’t you admit that?’’ When M. E. insists,
‘‘You’ve got to admit things are better now,’’ Rene shoots back, ‘‘I’m so
tired of hearing that. Don’t think equality and freedom are equal.’’ Later,
she asks, ‘‘When was the last time you had to think about race?’’ M. E.’s
realization that she and Rene can look at the same scenario and see two dif-
ferent explanations prompts M. E. to tackle a new writing assignment, an
exploration of the daily play of race and racism in both the white South and
her own family. Her investigations bring her to confront both her mother’s
tight-lipped silences on issues of race, as well as the overt and ongoing
racist activities of her Klan-member uncle, now busy crafting hate on the
World Wide Web.
The series can be heavy-handed in its moral tone, and it sometimes mis-
steps, as well, particularly in the episodes that use Rene to mediate or
rebuke more militant black voices. Continuing her father’s legacy, Rene

fights for civil rights within the halls of justice, challenging the system
from within, but collective modes of action and protest in the present are
less easily imaged or imagined. Rene’s upper-middle-class status and her
successful career (particularly in contrast to M. E.’s more tenuous grasp on
economic stability) might also subtly suggest that racial equality has been
achieved in the late 1990s.2 The series, even while recognizing the disarray
of M. E.’s domestic realm, still hints that Rene’s life is empty without a
husband or a family, simultaneously allowing much of the familial action
of the series to unfold among the white characters. At those moments, Any
Day Now comes close to divorcing Rene from a larger black community
or tradition, a televisual maneuver Herman Gray has called assimilation-
ist (86), but the series continually reinscribes race both in its thematic
concerns and in its focus on the racial contexts of southern history.
Despite its flaws and sentimentality, I’m sometimes amazed that the
series is on the air at all, attempting to represent cross-racial alliance
within the commercial arena, modeling both public and private con-
versations about race within a southern frame. These conversations are
sometimes awkward, but this awkwardness also serves to illustrate how
impoverished our cultural vocabulary is in matters of race, racism, and
difference. M. E. and Rene might stumble and backpedal in their discus-
sions, but at least they’re talking. The series aims to remember the past
and wants to mobilize those memories toward a better future: to discount
those impulses is to overlook a small space from which we might glean
critical insight and begin to move elsewhere. If Designing Women endlessly
pushed toward a universal sameness in its characters, unable to sustain
a representation of difference, Any Day Now attempts to trouble the as-
similationist drive of much of television and shifts discursive strategies. If
Anthony, as Herman Gray maintains, fits into Sugarbaker’s because he is
separated from black social life and culture, Rene instead functions as a
shuttle character, moving between black and white worlds, a faint model
of identity-in-difference, of negotiating routes between sameness and dif-
ference. She also resists M. E.’s moves toward the universal (‘‘why can’t we
just get over race?’’) by insisting on difference (‘‘what is this ‘we’?’’), as well
as on possible connection. Across the structure of the series, these two
southern women negotiate this connection week after week, addressing
white guilt and black anger as well as issues of trust, betrayal, friendship,
and love. Often Rene labors as the patient teacher (serving white affect),
but M. E. sometimes does her own emotional work, plumbing the rela-
tionship between affect and accountability. If M. E.’s mother, in wishing

that her daughter would just ‘‘hush’’ about the family’s racist past, sup-
presses guilt and risks becoming Ida Perry, M. E. herself seeks different
relations, attempting to come to terms with the ghosts of southern his-
tory. The show is still a liberal humanist project, largely situated within
a middle-class terrain, but it is nonetheless interesting within the space
of commercial television, a vision of the meanings of race in a southern
context that tries to hold black and white within the same frame. In an
era that exhibits a persistent inability to imagine integration as part of the
everyday South, the series begins to break free of the lily-white landscapes
of Steel Magnolias and Scarlett, moving beyond their separatist mentalities.
From very different registers, both ‘‘Tell Me, Tell Me’’ and Any Day Now
mine the messy depths of emotion, memory, and desire, excavating dif-
ferent modes of southern feeling and hauling them into view, tracing what
forms southern conversations about race might take. As such, each high-
lights the degree to which emotions shape our private and public lives,
linking cultural and political paradigms, often forestalling both memory
and movement. These tales may simply seem more talk, yet another itera-
tion of what Fred Hobson has called the southern rage to explain, but such
narratives function culturally, opening up or closing down possible mean-
ings and modes of understanding. To the extent that they parse out white
southern feeling, we might view them as ‘‘paradigm scenarios,’’ a concept
deployed in contemporary emotion theory to describe how emotions are
culturally learned and maintained. Philosopher Ronald de Sousa notes that
we learn an affective vocabulary by linking specific emotions with sce-
narios from early life, scenes reinforced by later cultural experiences and
narratives, in effect teaching us what emotions to feel at particular times
in response to particular cues. Anthropologist Catherine Lutz observes
how each culture models prototypical ‘‘scenes’’ for emotional concepts,
a sociocultural constitution of emotion that helps ‘‘characterize and cre-
ate a relationship between individuals and groups’’ within a society (211).
If, as Lillian Smith so eloquently observes, guilt is a particularly southern
crop, white southern culture has deployed specific paradigm scenarios for
managing (and often defusing) that particular emotion. ‘‘Tell Me, Tell Me’’
restages such scenarios to reveal their powerful logic, their almost uncon-
scious pull, investigating Ida’s angry responses to the specter of guilt, one
emotion disavowing the claims of another on an individual and a culture.
Any Day Now also takes up the theme of guilt, tracking the diverse re-
sponses this southern modality produces in different white characters,
while also noting the varied African American reactions to dead-end con-

fessions of white regional guilt, openly discussing white guilt and black
anger. M. E. and Rene get mad at each other, busting out of the narrow
confines of southern hospitality and emotional repression. They yell; they
argue. And as often happens on tv, they neatly resolve their differences,
usually within an hour. The resolutions are not so neat in the Internet chat
rooms the series sponsors. Here diverse women pick up the threads of the
show, talking back to its failures and talking to each other. The Web site
for Any Day Now is in many ways a typical series home page, including an
episode guide, character and actor biographies, and opportunities to chat
with the show’s producer and staff. However, the site also extends the
series’ focus on race and racism, including a ‘‘Sixties Time Line’’ and ‘‘Civil
Rights Photo Gallery,’’ as well as a ‘‘Get Involved’’ section that provides
links to antiracist community groups as well as ‘‘activities’’ designed to get
‘‘you and your friends’’ talking about racial issues at home. A sort of new-
fangled etiquette column provides tips for dealing with sticky situations
such as a ‘‘family member making racist remarks.’’ These columns turn to
experts, often academics who study race, such as Darnell Hunt, chair of
African American studies at ucla. Such viewpoints complicate the series’
neat resolutions and fuel discussion on the message boards, dialogues that
have often explored the workings of white southern guilt and black and
white anger. (In contrast, Lifetime’s Designing Women site describes the
cast as ‘‘four southern belles’’ and includes polls such as ‘‘Which Designing
Woman Are You?’’) Any Day Now (as series and as cultural phenomenon)
and Kenan’s short story explore the intricacies of southern feeling and
also limn the generational and familial transmission of southern culture’s
scenes of instruction, suggesting the powerful force of inherited traditions
as well as the possibility for using that force differently.
Emotions are not simply individual, subjective phenomena. They help
shape how we make meaning from the places we inhabit, how we remem-
ber home, how we think family. We can examine the cultural and regional
specificity of patterns of emotion, suggesting both their limits and pos-
sibilities. If emotions are complex amalgamations of beliefs, social nar-
ratives, and embodied sensations, might narrating the South differently
spin emotion (and the efficacy of affect) elsewhere? I am interested in how
various southern narratives do emotional labor, mapping different ways of
feeling southern, either mobilizing (or immobilizing) emotion and affect
to a variety of ends. Can certain southern stories become primers for pro-
cessing emotion, giving it a political and moral efficacy that moves beyond
emotion as a subjective state, revealing southern guilt as cultural and limit-

ing, offering instead other emotional registers as necessary and integral
to southern identity? How might such narratives move us toward other
understandings of the South and its iconic figures and places, understand-
ings less interested in freezing the region via narratives of authenticity
and more interested in confronting the ambivalences of homeplace? How
do they model relations between affect and praxis, between emoting and
doing, between southern feeling and feeling southern?
g F E E L I N G G U I LT Y : T E L L I N G H O M E P L AC E
IN SOUTHERN FEMINIST MEMOIR
I had to think again about what I understood was mine and what was somebody
else’s.—Minnie Bruce Pratt, Rebellion: Essays 1980–1991
When times got tough for Scarlett O’Hara, her impulse was always to re-
turn to Tara, for ‘‘never she came wearily home . . . and saw the sprawling
white house that her heart did not swell with love and the joy of home-
coming’’ (304). As chapter 1 illustrates, Scarlett’s sentiments about Tara
overdetermine the emotional registers of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the
Wind, and six decades later, this complicated alignment of home, south-
ernness, and femininity remains a prominent cultural equation. Although
sentimental feelings about ‘‘home’’ are certainly not limited to the South
or to southerners, ‘‘home’’ does have a stronger valence in the region.
Studies indicate that the Deep South is the ‘‘most homebound region of the
country,’’ with many southerners living ‘‘90 percent of their lives within
twenty-five miles of their final residence.’’ 3 Statistics aside, the popular
construction (in the North as well as the South) of the region as the site
of graciousness and hospitality contributes to the strong sense of ‘‘down-
homeness’’ associated with the area. In much of the discourse on and of the
South, place (as region) and home come together in the notion of ‘‘home-
place,’’ a phrase indicating the degree to which the meaning of the South
often slides into the meaning of home. The tight interweaving of tropes of
home, femininity, and region that the preceding chapters have chronicled
mark the borders of ‘‘the South,’’ even as the relationships between these
terms slip and slide. Thus for many white southerners, ‘‘going home’’ is
more than a return to a physical space or a site of familial origin; it en-
tails as well a sense of region and regional difference, of ways of feeling
southern.4 Such meanings still reverberate in many expatriate southern-
ers’ accounts of going home, memoirs that narrate both white subjectivity

and the regional scenes of instruction that helped bring those subjects into
being, telling regional tales.
Post-Faulkner, one of the abiding clichés of white southern identity
must surely be the expatriate’s compulsion to ‘‘tell about the South.’’ In But
Now I See, Fred Hobson explores the literary outcome of this compulsion,
tracing the emergence around 1940 of a new mode of white southern self-
expression, a genre of autobiography he terms the ‘‘racial conversion nar-
rative.’’ Hobson notes that these works borrow from earlier, often Puritan,
conversion tales in their appropriation of religious tropes, in their confes-
sional tone, and in their pursuit of redemption, though here the salvation
is secular. Writers as diverse as Lillian Smith, Willie Morris, and Mab
Segrest are more concerned with ‘‘getting right with man’’ than ‘‘getting
right with God’’ in their mediations on guilt below the Mason-Dixon line.
Hobson also traces the role played by racial guilt in these midcentury nar-
ratives, noting the cultural transformation of a nineteenth-century white
southern shame into a new mode of southern feeling: guilt. He attributes
this shift to several factors, including many writers’ widespread travel
and residence outside the South; their realization that the region’s racial
status quo could not last; the upheavals of the Great Depression and World
War II; and, finally, a nascent bridging of the gap between the South’s reli-
gious impulses and a race-based social action. Hobson also identifies in a
subset of the authors he studies a tendency toward disillusionment, a cer-
tain ‘‘letdown’’ after the initial joy and emotional intensity of conversion.
These white southerners repeatedly express their alienation in the wake
of the absorption of the southern Civil Rights movement within a larger
Black Power movement. Many of them were seeking forgiveness and re-
demption, and faced with black anger, the zeal of the newly converted
often dissipated. When Hobson briefly observes that ‘‘perhaps that was the
trouble with secular conversion all along’’ (106), I’m left wishing he had
pushed this insight further, distinguishing between authors and drawing
bolder conclusions.5 What are we to learn from this pattern of conversion
and disillusionment? What else might be said about the tendency among
whites to overinvest in the pain of the other, deploying it in the service of a
sort of religious, individualized high? Perhaps we might discern the limits
of a racial conversion driven by an anxious guilt, a guilt that riddles not
only the life of Kenan’s Ida Perry but also those of the carefully sketched
subjects of white southern feminist memoir. Within the pages of these
narratives, white racial guilt and a nostalgia for homeplace are not easily
reconciled. The remainder of this chapter examines a number of autobio-

graphical stories by white, female academics, all native southerners. These
memoirs provide an interesting nodal point where academic and personal
tales collide, once again mining the points of intersection between popular
and ‘‘official’’ histories in the framing of southern subjects.
In her memoir Mississippi Mind: A Personal Cultural History of an American
State, feminist and American studies professor Gayle Graham Yates de-
scribes her feelings about returning to the South as follows: ‘‘I cried, ‘I’m
going home. It’s okay now. I am going home.’ . . . And I was going back
to my Place, the homeplace South once again to hear its songs, to march
to its drumbeats, to raise its hymns, to listen to its dissonance, perhaps
once more to be quieted by its lullabies. . . . Whatever was playing, it
would be my song’’ (3). This particular passage epitomizes a certain nostal-
gia for home, a sensibility that weaves its way through the memoir and also
characterizes much southern autobiographical writing, including Rose-
mary Daniell’s Fatal Flowers. This sentiment often emerges most powerfully
when the author lingers on details of home and landscape, complicating
well-meant attempts to analyze systems of power and oppression in the
South.6 Elsewhere in her book, Yates writes at length of her own ado-
lescence during the Civil Rights movement and carefully traces various
histories of oppression and racism in her home state of Mississippi. Yet the
project is framed by a certain celebration of homeplace; ‘‘home’’ (largely
seen by Yates as a site of femaleness) is glorified as a safe and secure space,
whereas abstract systems of power (viewed as male) are linked to oppres-
sive practices. The structure of her text reinforces this divide: her personal
reflections are often the most nostalgic, while the historical asides and
transcribed interviews she includes turn toward the social.
Yates’s descriptions of home center primarily on ‘‘women’s culinary tal-
ents’’ and never examine how the domestic sphere connects to larger appa-
ratuses of socialization (6), how lessons learned at home function as scenes
of instruction for the larger world. This narrative strategy illustrates an-
other mode by which well-meaning texts fall prey to a lenticular logic:
the separation of the private from the public disconnects and fixes the two
realms, locating warm feelings about home in one frame, racist social sys-
tems in another, severing connections between the two. Her unwillingness
to undercut the illusions of a safe and secure home ultimately prevents an
analysis of the multiple and intersecting ways in which the ‘‘home’’ buoys
up other systems of power, intricately linking the two domains. In Yates’s
account, homeplace becomes the ground of identity as well, for she insists
that ‘‘the markers of place do matter, . . . they are decisive for who one

will be’’ (9). Place, home, and identity are welded together and endowed
with the timelessness of a Mississippi ‘‘spring’s dogwood blossoms’’ (279).
The paradigm scenarios of southern emotion are tied to familial scenes
of instruction and to such poignant portraits of the southern landscape.
Indeed, certain southern settings—especially homeplace—generate an
almost knee-jerk emotional response for many white southerners, func-
tioning as powerful affective triggers. We learn these reactions culturally,
and they are reinforced via popular narratives and images of the region,
from the opulent sites of tourism tracked across previous chapters to the
lush verandas of Tara and its copies. Even the more modest homeplaces
memorialized by Yates drip dogwood blossoms. If, as Reconstructing Dixie
has repeatedly argued, southern settings help underwrite southern mores
and manners, in turn inscribing certain relations of gender, class, and race,
we need to think more carefully about how to reroute these familiar emo-
tional paths, reworking the meanings of homeplace. Home might serve as
the ground for complex identities in motion (recall Camp Sister Spirit),
but such movement is difficult, if not impossible, when memories of home-
place are severed from their larger cultural context, partitioning the per-
sonal and the public and locating racism outside the sentimentalized spaces
of the white home.
Although Yates devotes a considerable amount of her ‘‘personal cultural
history’’ of Mississippi to portrayals of people of color, these miniature
portraits are structured much like the similar sketches in Catherine Clin-
ton’s ‘‘additive’’ Tara Revisited. That is, white and black portrayals stand
side by side, but the complex task of tracing their interlocking contours is
largely neglected. Additionally, although these accounts are no doubt in-
tended to reveal the evils of racial oppression, the overall logic of the book
tends to frame racism as a problem primarily confined to the past. For in-
stance, one of the African American men featured in the memoir is former
football star Marcus Dupree. Yates (following a book penned by fellow
southerner Willie Morris) briefly charts Dupree’s record-breaking foot-
ball season during his senior year in high school, noting how both white
and black fans embraced him. Much is made (by both Yates and Morris)
of the fact that the young man is from Philadelphia, Mississippi, the same
town in which three civil rights workers had been slain less than twenty
years before. Now, ‘‘the son of the sheriff who participated in the kill-
ings . . . is the . . . water boy who brings Dupree his drinks . . . during the
game’’ (235). Yates concludes that this event illustrates how ‘‘the walls of
racial segregation and white supremacy had indeed come tumbling down.’’

In the face of such optimism, Rene Jackson might remind us that a limited
equality on the football field hardly signals freedom.
The book also includes a section entitled ‘‘The History of Race Rela-
tions.’’ Here Yates insightfully points out that ‘‘race, in all my lifetime . . .
and probably in the whole history of the state, has been the dominant
cultural divider of individuals, groups and behaviors’’ (54). Still, the nar-
rative trajectory of Mississippi Mind subtly allocates racism to the dustbin
of history, particularly when Yates notes that ‘‘when peace came [after the
Civil Rights movement, it was] to a Mississippi purged of a large chunk
of its racial hatred. It has racists still, but most of them know now that
they are racists’’ (61). Racism is here ascribed to easily identifiable others,
those who overtly spout racial hatred, those who behave like M. E.’s Uncle
Jimmy. The covert workings of a lenticular racism structure the space for
such an assertion, a feel good belief in human progress. ‘‘People and all
their doings, mean and good, and nature, too,’’ are summarily recast as
‘‘part of [the] whole of life’’ (277). This universalizing portrait of humanity
erases different embodied histories and the inequalities of access to privi-
lege, naturalizing racism as an inevitable stage in human progress, one we
have happily moved beyond. Despite its attempts to include difference,
Mississippi Mind finally frames southern identity generically, marshaling
into representation a fairly universal subject within a universal homeplace.
Such modes of southern feeling subtly impede the narration of identities-
in-difference, making it hard to transit the subject from a narrative insis-
tence on the unique self toward a situated understanding of communal
selves.
A second southern memoir, Born in the Delta: Reflections on the Making
of a Southern White Sensibility, at first appears quite different from Yates’s
work. English and women’s studies professor Margaret Jones Bolsterli’s
tale is structured more like a traditional memoir than is Mississippi Mind—
gone are the interviews and historical asides—and it stages far fewer for-
ays into the world outside the home. Bolsterli lyrically examines southern
mores and traditions, perceptively commenting that ‘‘what passes for tra-
dition in the South is frequently evasion disguised with charm’’ (48), noting
that stories often stand in for conversation or ideas. In some ways, both
these memoirs enact this very process, spinning lovely, if sometimes angst-
ridden, tales, which tend to glorify home, displacing racism’s contexts and
causes. If Mississippi Mind examines both the social and the familial but in
separate frames, Born in the Delta largely fixates on the familial, projecting
the social back onto the individual and the domestic while divorcing feel-

ing from its social context. The narrator of Born in the Delta acknowledges
the racist past of the South but also moves to dissociate herself (and, seem-
ingly, all white southerners) from precise responsibility for this legacy.
Even as white southerners who don’t ‘‘shirk’’ their responsibilities vis-à-
vis race are praised (65), the discursive strategies of the memoir again and
again conceal the causes of racism. Often racism and slavery are natural-
ized, as when Bolsterli writes that both were ‘‘inherited along with the
land’’ (7), a heritage the Delta’s ‘‘heirs . . . were powerless to change’’ (6).
Elsewhere, racism proceeds on its own momentum, a force her mother
surely knew ‘‘was terrible’’ but which ‘‘she felt powerless in the face of’’
(33). ‘‘Racism permeated every aspect of our lives. . . . It was part of the
air everyone breathed’’ (126). As these descriptions accumulate, racism
seems to be self-generative, divorced from any human agency or social
context. Rarely does the text suggest that human actions caused and per-
petuated racism; rather, it just was there, like the air, the cotton, and the
Delta sunshine. Such feelings about racism are part and parcel of the re-
gion’s racial paradigm scenarios. White southerners are schooled in such
acts of evasion as surely as they are schooled in manners, storytelling, and
charm. Born in the Delta covers over these scenes of racial instruction by
deploying an autobiographical trajectory intent on ‘‘privatizing the pro-
gression of the unique self,’’ creating a subject who moves from racism to
liberation.7 Nonetheless this carefully constructed narrative subject can
be read against the grain to reveal nagging doubts and tensions, clues that
we need continue our search for new modes of southern feeling.
The limits of the text’s investigation of the complex workings of race are
most clearly revealed when the narrative turns to descriptions of blacks
and whites together. These passages faintly echo Gone with the Wind, for
they often posit black servants as the actual bearers of power in a com-
plicated system of communication. Bolsterli asserts that segregation bore
little relation to ‘‘apartheid’’; rather, it was ‘‘an effort to prescribe the paths
of communication between the races’’ (66). Along these paths, the ser-
vants, who ‘‘felt free to comment on us,’’ were the ones ‘‘privy to . . .
family secrets’’ (66–67). At one point in the narrative, Bolsterli describes
her fear as a child on hearing the screams of black children. She notes, ‘‘I
would not presume to describe the terror of the black children’’ because
‘‘all I am trying to do is trace my pattern in the tapestry that depicts south-
ern experience’’ (62). Although she claims to excise black perspectives in
the service of her tale, the narrative simultaneously bears witness to just
how deeply black and white are intertwined in her imagination, provid-

ing a compelling example of Toni Morrison’s claim that black presences
in white texts often provide ‘‘a subtext that either sabotages the surface
text’s expressed intentions or escapes them through a language that mys-
tifies what it cannot bring itself to articulate’’ (66). Such linguistic leak-
ages abound in Bolsterli’s memoir, for within a few pages of her claim to
speak solely of her experiences, the narrative can only speak her whiteness
via an appropriation of blackness. One of the autobiography’s most pro-
longed engagements with an African American ‘‘presence’’ occurs when
Bolsterli describes her childhood relationship to the family cook and ser-
vant, a woman who has no family name in the text and thus no history
of her own throughout the story. Bolsterli goes to great length to describe
her ‘‘friendship’’ with Victoria, a relationship full of lively conversations
‘‘somewhat like the exchange of confidences between prisoners’’ (73). The
text repeatedly ascribes an equality and depth to this comradeship be-
tween an adult female servant and a young girl, noting how their relations
were marked by ‘‘a sweet trusting that compels clarity’’ (73) and mutual
entertainment (77). On its surface, the memoir pictures Victoria and Mar-
garet as ‘‘help[ing] one another pass the time’’ (77), but such a vision erases
the reality that while Margaret whiled away the hours, Victoria labored
for wages. Neither the child Margaret (as subject of the memoir) nor the
adult Bolsterli (its narrator) can acknowledge the domestic’s point of view,
a perspective that has been well chronicled during Bolsterli’s lifetime.8
The narrative finally tries too hard to insist that the affinity was mutual.
Throughout the telling of the tale, faint glimpses of Victoria as subject break
through this cover story of friendship and alliance, for the narrator is
forced again and again to assert the reciprocity of their relations. Bolsterli
insists that ‘‘I cannot entirely believe that they all hated us. . . . [There must
have been] exceptions’’ (77), and offers up Victoria as her proof. Recount-
ing a phone call she placed to Victoria after many years without contact,
Bolsterli imagines that the woman responded with ‘‘genuine surprise and,
I swear, pleasure: ‘Why, Miss Margaret, how you is?’ ’’ (78). That this now
elderly African American woman still refers to the significantly younger
white Margaret as ‘‘Miss’’ reveals more of the power dynamic of their re-
lationship than the narrator is prepared to acknowledge. Although the
memoir repeatedly underscores that in the South, folks tell stories rather
than have conversations, this story of Victoria evades its own appropria-
tion of blackness as a catalyst for excitement, for Bolsterli notes in pass-
ing that Victoria’s lively passion helped color her family’s ‘‘passionless and
pale’’ world (71). Here, as in Gone with the Wind, we glimpse a white desire

for commonality or connection across the races, although its expression
in Born in the Delta is much less muted, less latent. If Mitchell’s text coun-
tered its own desires for racial union via a fierce and overt racism, actively
suppressing its ache for union, such longings are fully on the surface of
Bolsterli’s memoir, almost painfully obvious. While we shouldn’t discount
these longings, recognizing their importance to changing white southern
feelings and identities, it is also important to evaluate what work such de-
sires perform in particular narratives and to query what more they might
do. The black presence in Born in the Delta supports the tale of the white
southern daughter, still a story of a unitary and progressing subject, not
yet the dialogue the narrator had hoped for. Blackness comes to function
as a relief valve for white emotions, a discursive encoding that processes
white feelings, relieving the pressures of a racist culture on white subjec-
tivity. An imagined connection with African Americans lets white south-
erners feel better, even when that connection proceeds solely via the terms
of white desire (which is not to say that no connection existed). Despite
its good intentions, the memoir positions blackness as both cause of, and
remedy to, white guilt, deploying blackness as a testament to her own and
her family’s humanity.
White guilt is a major (though frequently unexamined) motif of both
Yates’s and Bolsterli’s memoirs. It weaves its way through the woof and
warp of the narratives, sometimes a visible thread, often simply shadowing
the spinning of tales, providing texture. Its circulation in southern letters
is not unique to these texts. Often, guilt functions as the flip side to the
nostalgic sentiments foregrounded in these memoirs. For instance, after
sentimentally claiming that Victoria and other black servants ‘‘spiced’’ up
the life of her family, Margaret avers that she felt ashamed that ‘‘her friend’’
Victoria was required to eat alone in the kitchen, apart from the white
family (73). Just as quickly, the narrative absolves Bolsterli of this guilt,
asserting that as a child, ‘‘I learned early the shame of betrayals in which I
played a part, but for which I was not responsible’’ (73). Near the close of
the memoir, Bolsterli waxes nostalgic about the abundance and difference
of southern food, lingering over details of ‘‘greens and hamhocks, black-
eyed peas, sweet potatoes, okra, cornbread, and deep-fried chicken’’ (121).
Her reminiscences are shattered as she comes to the realization that had
‘‘Africans [not been] invited into the ‘big house’ to cook for whites’’ (120),
white southerners would never have enjoyed these cuisines. Faced with
this knowledge, she feels ‘‘betrayed by [her] heritage’’ and guilty that no
one told her these things (121). Apart from her euphemistic referral to

slave relations as an ‘‘invitation’’ to serve whites, such prose also reveals
the degree to which Bolsterli continually locates the source for her guilt
elsewhere, abstracting its origins, discounting her familial instruction in
such evasive practices. In the final pages of Born in the Delta, the narra-
tor describes her feelings about having once ridden in a train car that was
segregated during the southern portion of her journey. ‘‘I felt debased’’
(130), she writes, a perspective that goes far in describing the limits of a
self-focused guilt.
‘‘I felt debased’’ places the impact of segregation squarely on the nar-
rator’s shoulders. Her feelings (as a white southern woman of the privi-
leged classes) take precedence over those of the African Americans who
were the primary victims of segregation. This white rhetoric of guilt casts
everyone as victims, insisting ‘‘we all suffer because of this system,’’ with-
out acknowledging that differences in the trajectories and intensities of
suffering matter. Such rhetorics impede a disinvestment in the privileges
conferred by whiteness. In Mississippi Mind, Yates recounts feeling angry
at a black male colleague who insisted on paying the lunch tab for sev-
eral white women scholars, thus dismissing the women’s ability to support
themselves. The memoir then recounts her guilt at having let him pay only
because he was black. She simply retells the tale, offering no solution to
her dilemma, and this narrative structure illustrates one of the risks of
guilty tale-telling. Nothing happens. The guilt is not transformed into any
future insight or action. It remains simply as blockage or confession.9 As
an emotion, the experience of guilt is primarily focused on the self, not the
other, even while guilt may stem from a sense that one has harmed another.
Feelings of guilt arise when one feels criticized or hated for some action
done (or left undone), but the outcome of these feelings is a focus on their
disruption of the self rather than on the harm done the other.10 Bolsterli,
faced with a segregated train and guilty about Jim Crow logics, feels her own
pain, not the pain of those forced into separate cars. Her guilt produces an
inward-looking reaction. Rather than deploying anger to defuse the guilt
(as would Ida Perry or the neo-Confederates), Bolsterli (as narrator) fix-
ates on her guilt, endlessly recycling it throughout the memoir as sustained
confession. To paraphrase Hobson in relation to other white racial conver-
sion narratives, Bolsterli seeks forgiveness, for now ‘‘she sees.’’ After the
Civil Rights movement, this has become a stock story of white southern
feeling. A more radical conversion would work through guilt, compelled
by a vision of justice rather than by a need for forgiveness, a move toward a
complex ‘‘we’’ rather than a relentless focus on the white autobiographical

Minnie Bruce Pratt insightfully
probes the racial contours of
southern femininity and history
in her various writings. She also
blurs the lines between theory
and practice, exploring issues
of oppression, racism, and
atonement in her powerful
poetry and in her work as an
activist on multiple fronts.
Photo by Marilyn Humphries.
Courtesy of Minnie Bruce Pratt.
‘‘I.’’ In the end, it is not enough for white southerners simply ‘‘to see’’ or
even to tell; we need also to act, and as these memoirs occasionally make
manifest, guilt can all too easily trump action, particularly when coupled
with a nostalgic longing for home. Nonetheless guilt is not inherently a
negative or destructive emotion. As psychoanalysts such as Melanie Klein
have noted, guilt can lead to a sense of feeling persecuted, culminating in
an immobilizing anxiety, or guilt can imply the ‘‘never fully exhausted wish
to make reparation.’’ 11 In the paradigm scenarios of white southern emo-
tion, guilt often fixates as self-absorbed anxiety or mutates into hostile
anger, but guilt might also take other paths, reconfiguring white southern
relations to home and history.
Minnie Bruce Pratt undertakes just this journey in her autobiographi-
cal narrative ‘‘Identity: Skin Blood Heart,’’ originally published in 1984
and reprinted in 1991 in the longer memoir Rebellion: Essays, 1980–1991.12
Throughout this volume, but especially in ‘‘Identity,’’ Pratt, a ‘‘native’’
southerner, feminist activist, and lesbian, explores the geographic terrains
of her childhood, revealing what exclusions were necessary to maintain the
illusion of home as a ‘‘safe’’ space. She tracks the various histories of oppres-
sion that allowed white middle-class southern women of her generation
to feel safe at home, histories that intersect with the histories of racism,

lynching, and Jim Crow. Pratt underscores that the physical landscape and
architecture of her childhood homeplace influenced her in countless ways:
‘‘Yet I was shaped by my relation to those buildings and to the people in
the buildings, by ideas of who should be working in the Board of Educa-
tion, of who should be in the bank handling money, of who should have
the guns and the keys to the jail, of who should be in the jail; and I was
shaped by what I didn’t see, or didn’t notice, on those streets’’ (33).
This geography functioned as a powerful ‘‘sort of backdrop’’ for the les-
sons in white privilege her family and her culture reinforced as she came of
age in the late 1950s. As Lillian Smith observed almost forty years earlier,
‘‘Every little southern town is a fine stage-set for Southern Tradition to use
as it teaches its children the twisting turning dance of segregation’’ (Killers
of the Dream, 95). Pratt deploys a spatial analysis of the town to map this
dance, moving the reader along on a tour of her small central Alabama
community, ascending first to a macroview of the region, spied from the
clock tower of the county courthouse, a space from which she views the
rigid grids of the area under the tutelage of her father. Thinking back to
what this masterful overview afforded her as a child, she notes as well the
things rendered invisible from that perch above the town, including the
sawmill and the poor whites and blacks who lived and labored near it.
Pratt’s evocation of what is not seen or noticed is crucial here, for her nar-
rative zeroes in on how dominant systems in the United States—systems
supporting whiteness—maintain their authority by naturalizing relations
of power and race via both visible and invisible markers of place. As her
constricted eye begins to expand, as she sees differently, she is no longer
able to hold home apart from abstract systems of power, no longer able to
freeze home and state in separate frames or grids, neatly assigned to sepa-
rate genders, moving beyond the lenticular partitioning that characterized
Yates’s memoir. Pratt charts where she could and couldn’t go as a white
southern girl, outlining her relative mobility amid the signs of segregation,
examining how the South’s spatial codes organized experience and made
terrain meaningful. She comes to see the spatiality of racism and under-
stands that southern places are both objects and products of struggle. The
architecture and worn paths of the South, both at home and in town, are
no longer innocent. Neither are femininity and manners.
Rebellion opens with an essay of the same name, an essay all about man-
ners in the South. As this twice-used title suggests, Pratt calls southern
traditions of etiquette into question, highlighting how these rituals ‘‘can
be used to cage us and keep us from shouting for changes’’ (24). She calls

on southerners to break through the facade that their rituals support, for
manners imply borders, determining ‘‘who to let in and who to keep out’’
(19) while also naturalizing the privileges of skin and of class. Still, she
recognizes that for many southern women, ‘‘to embroider the surface of
doom with style and manners was the only way to keep [one’s] sanity’’ (23),
and she details the real anxieties she felt as she began to strip away these
layers of accumulated ritual and femininity. Although she first fears this
process will reveal a ‘‘disintegrating, rotting nothing’’ (57), the infected
heart of southern femininity that so plagued Daniell, Pratt instead dis-
covers strengths that her dependence on femininity had concealed, learn-
ing new ways of being a southern woman less dependent on charm and
evasion. Nonetheless the process of coming to terms with both her femi-
ninity and her lesbianism is not easy for Pratt. It entails a high cost, in-
cluding the court-sanctioned loss of her sons, but she does not shy away
from exploring these difficult times.
As she processes her memories and her feelings, Pratt’s memoir begins
to move through the ambivalence about southern homes and femininity
that is evident in the memoirs of Yates, Bolsterli, and Daniell, acknowledg-
ing the powerful seductive pull of nostalgia for origins while also recogniz-
ing the need to use the emotional tugs of homeplace differently. Rebellion
also troubles the myths of the strong southern lady evident in so much of
regional writing, noting that the southern heroine’s ‘‘will to endure is still
not the same as the will to change, to true rebellion’’ (13).13 For Pratt, the
antics of the bad girl acting out against the constraints of southern femi-
ninity are intriguing, but they are not enough. She is not content playing
steel magnolia or fatal flower; her rebellions take her elsewhere.
Pratt also troubles the tales southerners tell, their very modes of speak-
ing, recognizing that ‘‘under the rippling surface of their stories is a deep,
deep silence’’ (20). Rebellion breaks that silence, calling for a new South,
but the text also stresses that more than talk will be required in the recon-
structing of homeplace. ‘‘Identity’’ opens with Pratt’s recounting of her
early-1980s encounters with the black janitor in her building along D.C.’s
‘‘H Street Corridor,’’ recalling how, in response to his ‘‘yes-ma’ams,’’ she
hears her ‘‘voice replying in the horrid cheerful accents of a [southern]
white lady. And I hate my white womanhood that drags between us the
long bitter history of our region’’ (28). Her narration of this encounter
is quite different from a similar moment in Born in the Delta when Bol-
sterli describes her own run-in with a black airport employee in Chicago.
Bolsterli relates that this ‘‘huge, surly black man communicated only in

grunts’’ until he realized that Bolsterli and her sons were headed South,
at which point he ‘‘whirled around . . . with a dazzling smile’’ (98), hap-
pily grabbing her luggage, the two bonding over a southern homeplace.
While it’s certainly possible that the man simply missed the South and was
happy to meet a fellow southerner, Bolsterli’s narration of this meeting
of expatriate southerners across the color line narratively equates black
and white feelings about home, universalizing southern emotions about
homeplace. Pratt deploys a similar scene of instruction to tease out the
different emotive registers southern homes might generate across racial
lines, recognizing that her desire for an easy connection with a ‘‘fellow
southerner’’ depends on a wish ‘‘to stay a child: to be known by others,
but . . . to feel no responsibility’’ for the unequal world southern man-
ners built (29). Rather than end the account with a focus on her shame and
guilt, the remainder of her narrative chronicles her process of ‘‘trying to
learn how to live, to have the speaking-to extend beyond the moment’s
word, to act so as to change the unjust circumstances’’ (30).14
In narrative terms, this process involves tracking her family’s history
and learning to see white privilege, but the purpose of this endeavor is to
facilitate change, not merely to confess her complicity with her region’s
and her family’s violent past. Unlike the memoirs of Yates and Bolsterli,
Rebellion names guilt in order to move through it, acknowledging the lures
of ambivalence or nostalgia, but also expressing their limits. Pratt writes:
‘‘When we begin to understand that we have benefited, in our privilege,
from the lives and work of others, when we begin to understand how false
much of our self-importance has been, we do experience a loss: our self-
respect. To regain it, we need to find new ways in the world, those very
actions the way of creating a positive self’’ (59).
Pratt’s journey isn’t merely cognitive or analytical; it is deeply grounded
in feelings. Throughout ‘‘Identity: Blood Skin Heart,’’ Pratt reiterates the
importance of emotions in unlearning the paradigm scenarios of privileged
southernness. The piece is laced through with verbs of affect, as Pratt again
and again writes, ‘‘I felt’’; ‘‘I feel.’’ These powerful emotional experiences
shake Pratt to her very core, as she reflects that ‘‘I did not feel that my
new understanding simply moved me into a place where I joined others
to struggle with them . . . I felt in a struggle with myself, against myself.’’
This struggle felt like destruction (53). She observes that this was a state
laced through with fear and also with anger, an anger that her ‘‘anxiety-
ridden’’ father used to fuel his psychic investments in white supremacy and
hate, a movement replicated by many of the neo-Confederates. Pratt is

not simply describing her feelings; rather, she is authoring new paradigm
scenarios of southern feeling, mapping out the transit route from guilt to
mobility, narrating new southern subjects. The feelings of fear and anxiety,
of loss, that she details are powerful vectors of southern affect, crucial
emotional nodal points marking the borders of a well-meaning southern
whiteness. They are also the feelings that can short-circuit the processing
of guilt, blocking the possibility for change in white identities, locking us
into our fears: fears of saying the wrong thing, fears of being blamed, fears
of learning the depth of our own racism. These are the feelings that cannot
be named in Steel Magnolias or Designing Women; those texts variously re-
press white fears of acknowledging blackness, white inability to imagine
real connection. If Born in the Delta remains trapped in an endless loop of
confession and denial, a space where Bolsterli does not ‘‘know what to do
with all this’’ feeling (78), Pratt models a way out of the endless recycling
of a persecutory and finally narcissistic guilt.
The transformation of white guilt into other modalities is represented
as hard but rewarding work, a labor of the mind and of the heart, a labor
fueled by a broader sense of justice that requires accountability, repara-
tion, and action. Pratt learns from the scholarship of women of color; she
does her own historical research, revising the tales she was told as a child,
and accounting for the many bodies—black, Native American, Asian—
hidden in southern history and myth. She also learns to listen, to hear the
voices (and criticism) of others, without claiming those voices as her own.
This work helps her to understand ‘‘that I was using Black people to weep
for me, to express my sorrow at my responsibility, and that of my people,
for their oppression’’ (58), a knowledge that M. E. (as well as perhaps many
white viewers of Any Day Now) is still struggling toward. By examining her
own position within structures of dominance and by working to change
those very structures, Pratt develops a powerful notion of agency born
not of individualism and free will but of history and geography, a situated
subjectivity that intersects with different embodied histories, including
her own. She poignantly illustrates that for many white southerners, to
know one’s place is not necessarily to know the place one is from, but she
does not entirely discount the lessons of home. Even as she critiques the
racialized geographies of white southern identity, Pratt continues to draw
from certain southern traditions that she finds valuable, looking for things
she ‘‘could be proud and grateful for’’ even as she transforms them (61).
From her family heritage, she takes up and reworks a sense of rootedness,
a skeptical way of thinking, an ongoing resilience, and a certain twist on

manners that she could reclaim. She also drew on a tradition of ‘‘white
Christian-raised women in the South, who had worked actively for social
justice since at least 1849’’ (62), gaining sustenance from this minor strand
of white southern history. In sketching the contours of this counterhistory,
Pratt’s narrative simultaneously reveals that her ‘‘progress’’ as an autobio-
graphical subject is not simply the result of history’s ‘‘natural’’ progression
or of evolution, some teleological drive to antiracism somehow lodged in
us all.
The path Pratt narrates is not an easy one to tread. There’s pain involved
in reconceptualizing racial contact and its terms, and Pratt labors to give
this pain a voice, recognizing that the psychological maneuvers required
in reconfiguring white identities are intense and difficult. She knows that
she will inevitably make mistakes, and that learning from these mistakes is
part of establishing meaningful dialogue and connection. There are times
when she must examine her own preconceptions, the stereotypes lodged
deep in her psyche, and come to terms with her own homegrown racism.
She also pays a price for her transformation of self. Her pain at losing her
two sons to the South’s homophobic judicial system is eloquently voiced,
and she struggles to reconcile this pain with other insights born of her ex-
panding consciousness, with the freedoms she is gaining. This transforma-
tive pain is all the more intense when white southerners move from feeling
differently to acting differently, a process modeled both in Pratt’s writing
and in her life. If her memoir urges white southerners to reconstruct their
identities via action in the world, she has done more than just talk this
talk. She has walked the walk, welding theory and praxis across decades of
activist struggle. Rebellion chronicles her commitment to a wide range of
social justice issues, and Pratt’s Web site (www.mbpratt.org) energetically
details her current activist efforts. There, on a page labeled ‘‘La Lucha: The
Struggle,’’ she revisits her memoir Rebellion and adds, ‘‘What is crucial for
me now is this: We must act on what we understand to be unjust, or our
hard-won consciousness is useless, nothing more than sand running back
and forth through an hourglass.’’ She urges moving beyond ‘‘changes in atti-
tude’’ toward advocacy for social change, linking her insights into southern
racism to larger, global struggles against imperialism and inequity.
Her Web site and much of her poetry are not particularly southern, and
Pratt now lives outside the South, in a type of voluntary exile. Many in the
South might be reluctant to claim Pratt as one of their own, particularly
if they were to run into her arm in arm with her transgendered lover and
fellow writer and activist, Leslie Feinberg. Certainly, Pratt’s more ‘‘south-

ern’’ work—the memoir ‘‘Identity,’’ selected southern-themed poetry—
is more likely to appear on southern studies syllabi than are the love let-
ters to gender-bending, identity-shaking, lesbian experience of S/HE. But
to separate Pratt’s explorations of southern identity from her hard-hitting
critiques of globalism, her efforts to free Mumia Abu-Jamal, or her lesbian
and transgendered activism is precisely to miss the point of her lessons
from and about the South. For Pratt, as for the Hensons of Camp Sister
Spirit, the South—in its limits and its possibilities—is not neatly con-
tained below the Mason-Dixon Line. Rather, her reconstructed, activist,
white identity is possible because of her southernness. It is simultaneously
the source of her limits and her strengths. Overcoming those limits and
accessing those strengths takes work, work that requires a more rigor-
ous critique of homeplace than many southern memoirists are willing to
undertake, but Pratt fearlessly burns through her nostalgia for the South,
linking its tales and temporalities to wider frameworks of meaning and
experience. She may be ambivalent about the South, but her ambivalence
is not debilitating, locking her into a lenticular emotional register. In many
white southern autobiographies, including those by Yates, Bolsterli, and
Daniell, ambivalence functions as a sign or symptom: of blockage, of emo-
tional work left undone; we read its effect across their texts in moments
of leakage or excess. Pratt transforms ambivalence from sign to strategy,
a way of signaling a dissatisfaction with the fixity of southern landscape
and identity and of moving her reader elsewhere.15 Here, ambivalence be-
comes a conscious tactic, a skillful maneuver that underwrites a refreshing
mobility and new affective modes.
Pratt’s ability to move in and out of southern terrain, seeing connections
and refusing the neat separations that fix the South in a univocal frame as
antithesis to the non-South, powerfully emerges in her most recent vol-
ume of poetry, Walking Back up Depot Street (1999). Drawing equally from
Jean Toomer and Pablo Neruda, as well as from Homer, Virgil, and Dante,
the collection takes an epic turn, introducing the reader to Beatrice, a
white woman heading north from Dixie. Across its many poems, the vol-
ume tours the reader through varied circles of the segregated South but
also spirals out to other locales, tracking the ‘‘great migration’’ and the
diffuse legacies of southernness throughout points north, east, and west.
It also brings together a chorus of voices, from Ibo slave to mill worker,
from Klansman to urban lesbian, refusing to let a single testament limn
the borders of the region even while providing Beatrice as our guide. Pratt
draws from a wealth of documents, weaving together evocative snippets

that include biography, journalism, oral histories, and blues and gospel
lyrics, structuring a multivocal and diverse portrait of the South in the
world. Throughout her journeys, Beatrice also serves to rework the myth
of the southern lady, illustrating the damage done in white women’s name
and pointing the way toward other paths the southern woman can (and
has) tread. If Rosemary Daniell convincingly illustrates the debilitating
effects of traditional southern femininity on many white women, reveal-
ing the sickly decay festering beneath bolts of white satin, Pratt reveals
the source of that decay: the racial violence underpinning much of south-
ern history, the dark yet open secrets the Ida Perrys of the world refuse
to name. But Pratt also shows us how the courageous might acknowledge
and move through such revelations, rebuilding new, more flexible selves
intent on connection and change. In the process, she reclaims the South,
fashioning new meanings from the repressed histories of the region, let-
ting, in the words of Lillian Smith, the poet battle the demagogue over
the soul of the South.16
New modes of southern feeling are embedded in history, but history
does not give us any guarantees, a cautionary tale my project has frequently
reiterated. A fixation on southern history can all too easily lock us into a
nostalgic melancholy for days gone with the wind, but within this history,
we also find the keys to reconstructing Dixie. If Mitchell’s tale helped us,
many pages back, to begin this journey below the Mason-Dixon Line, a
return to the time frame of the Jim Crow South will help us think through
both the labors and the possibilities entailed in the making of white anti-
racist southern subjects, history lessons for the future. In Rebellion, Minnie
Bruce Pratt repurposes the southern past, tracking a movement toward
connection that is reflected in the antiracist work of a small tradition of
white southern women throughout the past two centuries. This historical
turn is important not because it mitigates against the racism propagated
by whites (it doesn’t), or in any way approximates the massive antiracist
work undertaken by black southerners, but because it refuses a logic of the
inevitability of racism and separatism, an inevitability that can function to
absolve whites from responsibility for the past, as it does in Born in the Delta
or in the cyber-South of the neo-Confederates. To suggest that reformu-
lating white southern identity was possible ‘‘then’’ (the 1850s, the 1920s) is
to resist an evolutionary view of race relations as well as to point out how
hard progress and change can be to sustain. If Gone with the Wind allowed
us to glimpse a nascent southern structure of feeling in Scarlett’s desire
for Mammy, a longing for connection that humanizes Scarlett even as it

dehumanizes Mammy, other white southerners were mining this desire
for racial contact in new ways at the precise moment Mitchell pens her
epic, precipitating a different meaning to cross-racial union and imagin-
ing a new white southern subject. To return to the past at the close of
this project is not to lock us into a distant history. Rather, this turn back
will help us rethink the present and the future, discovering a continuity
of antiracist practice across the twentieth century that refuses both the
overt and covert logics of racism, insisting on the possibility of alliance,
change, and new Souths.
g K AT H A R I N E D U P R E L U M P K I N A N D
THE REMAKING OF SOUTHERNERS
I began to be unsure that mere place of origin qualified one to speak.

—Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin, The Making of a Southerner
Both born in Georgia near the turn of the century, Katharine Du Pre
Lumpkin and Margaret Mitchell were contemporaries. Both women were
members of reasonably well-off families proud of their Confederate an-
cestry, and each spent her childhood immersed in tales of Georgia’s his-
tory and recent past. Feminist scholar Helen Taylor relates that the young
Margaret was ‘‘taken to parades commemorating [the] Confederate dead,
taught Civil War songs and details of battles and forced to listen for hours
to discussions of . . . the burning of Atlanta’’ (46). In her memoir, Lump-
kin describes a similar childhood milieu, including the popular pastime of
‘‘playing Klan.’’ Each woman went to college, each experienced during her
teenage years the death of a parent, and each went on to record the tales
she grew up hearing about the Old South in her own narrative—Mitchell’s
novel Gone with the Wind (1936) and Lumpkin’s autobiography The Making
of a Southerner (1946).17
Together, the two tales highlight possible strategies for reconceiving
stories about home in their relation to southern feeling and changing
Souths, particularly for southern women. Both narratives rely centrally
on familial oral histories of the Civil War period, reconfirming the im-
portance of popular stories about family and home to the social apparatus
that constructed white middle-class southerners of the period. These two
daughters of the South both came of age and began writing their stories
during a time of intense racial violence in the South, a period character-
ized by Nell Irvin Painter as one permeated by a fear of the racial other.18

Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin,
June 1928, Madison, Wiscon-
sin. Lumpkin completed a
doctorate in sociology with
minors in labor history and
international relations. Photo
courtesy of the Katharine
Du Pre Lumpkin Papers,
no. 4171, Southern Historical
Collection, Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill.
For whites, this fear usually manifested itself as a sense of impending dan-
ger to the home and family, and it is this fear—ungrounded as it is—that
propels Mitchell’s representations of both race and sexuality, representa-
tions laced with the complexities of the white southern mind of her era.
Written to address the volatile atmosphere of the Jim Crow South and to
challenge segregation, Lumpkin’s tale explores the origins of this fear, re-
sulting in a very different portrait of race and race relations, as well as of
the plantation South. Unlike Gone with the Wind, which, even if unread,
lives on in the popular imaginary, Lumpkin’s text, initially well received
in the popular press, was for many years forgotten, only recently having
returned to critical attention.19
On its surface, the autobiography’s stylistic choices appear fairly tra-
ditional, a portrait of an unfractured ‘‘I’’ speaking as a universal subject,
but the memoir slowly reveals a doubled consciousness. It deploys what
Sidonie Smith in Subjectivity, Identity, and the Body has called a ‘‘mimetic’’
universalism in order to call into question ‘‘natural’’ categories of differ-
ence (155). In Lumpkin’s proposal for the book, she foregrounds this mi-
metic quality, insisting that her book will reframe social science research
and revisionary history as autobiography. She recognizes the uniqueness

of her method, noting that ‘‘no work of this kind has been attempted by a
white southerner broadly trained in the methods and materials of the social
sciences.’’ As Lumpkin crafts a carefully expanding ‘‘I,’’ she subtly resists
an autobiography of heroic individualism, narrating instead new modes
of white subjectivity, envisioning new southern subjects and new Souths.
The Making of a Southerner functions as a guidebook toward new modes of
southern feeling, proposing a radical etiquette grounded in new ethical
paradigms of interpersonal interaction. As such, Lumpkin stages inter-
ventions into white southern women’s autobiographical practice, recon-
figuring the relationship of individual to community.20
The autobiography is divided into six books and a conclusion, with an
afterword composed in 1980 added to a 1981 reissue. Book 1, ‘‘Of Bond-
age to Slavery,’’ could easily have served as background research for the
rosy picture of plantation life Mitchell painted in Gone with the Wind. (Of
course, Mitchell wrote her novel earlier and had her own family tales to
draw from.) Lumpkin’s autobiography begins in the antebellum period,
and like Gone with the Wind, it portrays this era through a nostalgic lens.
The land around Lumpkin’s great-grandfather’s modest plantation home
is the terrain of the opening image, and here the narrator casually links
slavery to the southern landscape as she offhandedly comments on the dol-
lar value of several of her ancestor’s thirty-seven slaves while describing
both the house and the fields. She also refers to the ‘‘honest devoutness of
men like [her] forebears’’ (12), noting ‘‘how natural the slave order’’ was,
since it was ‘‘bred in the very bone’’ of her people’s heritage (13), in ways
recalling the language of Born in the Delta.
Her grandfather worked hard but was, of course, helped out a great
deal by his loyal ‘‘body servant,’’ Jerry, who, to the reader, seems the per-
fect Uncle Tom. Jerry reported on other slave’s misdeeds and led the slave
church services, and the narrative relates in some detail that the family was
very impressed with his memory: he could recall long Bible passages heard
only once and then pretend to ‘‘read’’ them himself in the separate slave
church services. Book 1 ends with Lumpkin’s description of her father’s
youthful training to be the future master, including acquiring his own body
servant at the age of ten and being able to ‘‘order the little darkies to do
this or that’’ (43), all in all quite a different portrait of the ‘‘young marster’’
than that of Kindred. At fifteen, young William Lumpkin enlisted as a Con-
federate soldier.
Book 2, ‘‘Uprooted,’’ continues to narrate the family’s saga from the
time of the Civil War until the birth of the author in 1897. It presents the

standard reactionary southern tales about the suffering of whites during
reconstruction, the impudence of blacks, and the threat posed by black
men to white womanhood. The chapter focuses on the fear and uncertainty
that characterized white lives during the period and spends a considerable
amount of time reciting white justifications for the Klan. It also insists
on the importance of home and family to southerners, underlining that
‘‘the meaning of ‘family’ was the warp and woof of our heritage’’ (103).
Throughout these first two books, Lumpkin simply repeats the stories she
heard throughout her childhood, presenting them as the truth of history,
using primarily a third-person narration. Thus the perspective is largely
that of her white male ancestors (often deploying the pronoun ‘‘he’’), and
like Gone with the Wind, it sketches African American lives only from the
point of view of whites, largely relegating blacks to the background as
emotional texture. Overall, the narrative voice in the first hundred pages
is by no means critical of the history that is being relayed. (In fact, when
I first read the memoir many years ago, I was annoyed by the uncritical
perspective of the autobiography’s first sections and often found myself
scribbling harsh comments in the margin.) Occasionally, however, a hint
of doubt will creep into the narration. For example, when speaking of
her grandfather’s discipline of slaves as ‘‘kindly,’’ Lumpkin wryly adds, ‘‘if
Father’s mind was [an accurate] reflection’’ (29). Likewise, the narrator
hints that her family’s stories and the southern romances she read as a child
seemed to have ‘‘become blurred and blended until later years’’ (9). These
statements are simply woven into her story, lodged beneath its surface but
still working their way into the reader’s consciousness. They also set the
stage for what is to follow in the rest of the memoir.
Book 3, ‘‘A Child Inherits the Lost Cause,’’ continues to spin the family’s
story, describing how Lumpkin’s father became a soldier for the Lost Cause
and how her family ‘‘was dipped deep in the fiery experience of South-
ern patriotism’’ (112). The narration recounts in great detail her youthful
training attending Confederate reunions and pageants, playing Klan with
neighborhood children, and joyfully singing ‘‘Dixie’’ over and over again,
powerful scenes of instruction in a school of white supremacy. Still, the
tone of the narration subtly shifts in this section, adding a hint of irony
to her descriptions of devotees of the Lost Cause. When near the close of
book 3, she describes her father’s campaign for the U.S. Senate, her tone
is gently mocking: ‘‘It would appear that my father had a special picture
in his head of what a ‘Southern statesman’ . . . should be. I am sure he
thought that such men as he pictured had actually lived and breathed and

spoken and served in his boyhood. I know I thought so’’ (143). This ironic
tone begins to call her childhood lessons about home and family history
into question, carving out a space for critiquing the veracity of her father’s
memory and rethinking her seemingly bred-in-the-bone inheritance of
the Lost Cause. Here Lumpkin’s doubled perspective underwrites the mi-
metic power of her text, troubling the universalism of received stories of
the South. Her narration calls the power of iconic southern symbols into
question, revealing the gap between moonlight-and-magnolia representa-
tions and the ‘‘real’’ of southern history.21 We begin to see a strategic use of
southernness emerge, a kind of careful mimicry that deploys the cadences
and patterns of southern speech and the famed southern sense of irony to
new ends. This turn will become increasingly important as Lumpkin’s tale
continues.
In ‘‘Sojourn in the Sandhills,’’ the narrator relates the family’s move from
the city to a farm, but a farm ‘‘none of us called . . . a plantation [because] it
was in poor farming country’’ (151). Here Lumpkin witnesses real poverty
among poor whites and African Americans for the first time and is shocked
to realize that the hired laborers feel resentment toward her rather than
the affectionate loyalty written into the happy plantation tales on which
she was raised. As her family leaves the area and she prepares to go to col-
lege, she notes, ‘‘Certainly I was ready to forget them and this ill-begotten
country’’ (173). But the narrator doesn’t forget her time in the Sandhills;
it stays with her even as she heads ‘‘home’’ to Georgia to begin college,
carrying in her head ‘‘the picture of the Southerner that we cherished, and
whose likeness we had been reared to aspire to’’ (178). The last two books
of the autobiography, ‘‘Of a New Heaven’’ and ‘‘Of a New Earth,’’ detail
Lumpkin’s increasing awareness, during college and beyond, of the need
for ‘‘social equality’’ among the races. In the space of less than forty pages,
Lumpkin begins to question ‘‘the making of Southerners’’ and reveals, as
well, her own remaking of the ideal southerner who inhabited her head.
Around 1912, Lumpkin became involved with the student programs of
the ywca and began a process of relearning race that her autobiography
suggests would continue throughout her lifetime.22 An integral part of
her ‘‘unmaking’’ (and one that Pratt’s Rebellion echoes) is her reeducation
in Southern history, an investigation that begins when the narrator asks,
‘‘How could I ‘know’ the South when all I knew was what had been handed
on to me as my heritage?’’ (201). The narrative highlights the importance
of interracial communication by picturing Lumpkin as she meets Afri-
can American students, one a fellow Georgian, in her New York graduate

Lumpkin and her friends at a ywca meeting, circa 1924. Lumpkin’s time in the ywca
helped to forge her antiracist activism and identity. Photo courtesy of the Katharine
Du Pre Lumpkin Papers, no. 4171, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
school and listens to their versions of life in the South, learning, like Pratt,
new ways of listening. The reader follows Lumpkin as she pores over cen-
sus reports, legislative documents, old newspapers, and new histories and,
finally, begins to learn about a very different South. This narrative enact-
ment of the process of change allows Lumpkin to retell the story of the
Klan that the first two books of the autobiography leave unquestioned;
it adds the experiences of poor whites to antebellum history; and after
Lumpkin learns of Frederick Douglass, it finally refigures the stories about
Grandfather’s slave, Jerry, by insisting that he probably knew how to read.
This moment works to reinscribe Jerry’s agency as resistant slave into the
narrative, and cumulatively, these explorations of the past serve to expose
the ideological and fallible quality of memory, especially as it constructs
familial narratives. We see Lumpkin’s monolithic view of the South shat-
tered when she (as Pratt will also do) investigates the material realities
of ‘‘home.’’ The memoir models new modes of recollection, piercing the
‘‘luminous membrane of memory’’ that encased Ida Perry (265), fixing her

within the sterile, lonely landscapes of her faux plantation home. The nar-
rator of The Making of a Southerner is not content to sit at the elegant tables
of the white South, seduced by southern voices and the civilized tinklings
of ice cubes in sweet tea.
Like Pratt, Lumpkin also recognizes that change comes slowly and not
without effort, for the reader follows along as the narrator continually
reevaluates her own perspectives. We learn of the difficulty of resolving
day-to-day dilemmas in antiracist work, of how often the effort was only
‘‘mental’’ and not concretely directed toward change, and of Lumpkin’s
own struggle to recognize white privilege. The narrative style constantly
reinterprets the strategies the student activist groups used, revealing that
the groups in which Lumpkin participated often viewed African Ameri-
cans patronizingly, seeing them only in relation to white perspectives,
only worrying about white guilt or fear, not yet convinced that full social
equality—let alone freedom—was really what was needed. The necessity
and difficulty of forging interracial connections, of hearing other stories,
is continually reiterated. Thus the final chapters shift the perspective of
the narrative away from Lumpkin and her family, beyond the personal,
in an attempt to see the history she has told from the perspective of an
African American: ‘‘And yet one day it struck me with stunning force that
these men and women were plainly unconcerned with the problem I faced.
I might be wrestling with [whether I believed in the] inferiority of race
but . . . to them it was . . . only a fiction, a myth. . . . A vicious myth to
be sure: one with a history, which could and did wreak havoc in the lives
of their people, but a myth pure and simple just the same’’ (215).
If The Making of a Southerner has been described as sincere, even plain,
it is certainly not without feeling.23 But instead of focusing primarily on
white emotion, Lumpkin also considers the feelings of black southerners,
asking white readers to project themselves into the point of view of the
other. She is not simply encouraging white southerners to ‘‘feel the pain’’ of
blacks in the South, to appropriate black suffering as the grounds for their
own conversion; rather, the memoir moves toward a model of alliance that
recognizes identity-in-difference, maintaining that black and white feel-
ings are not the same even while they are linked. Both the commonalities
and the differences matter.
As Lumpkin goes to work at a shoe factory and learns about the lives of
poor whites, the narrative explores new sources of alliance along race and
class lines and comes to recognize the tactics those in power use to divide
the disempowered. The young Katharine begins to understand the ma-

terial effects of race and class difference, and these insights knock roughly
against the discursive portraits of southern graciousness she grew up with,
eventually overwriting them. Like Pratt, Lumpkin presents herself as a
subject in history, tied to history, but also capable of impacting history.
Her tale reveals the ideological and historical forces that speak through
the individual, but it also understands that this ventriloquism is neither
total nor eternal. She finds new ways of being southern.
For all its emphasis on issues of race and class, The Making of a South-
erner, unlike Gone with the Wind or even Rebellion, does not appear to be
overtly about gender. Fred Hobson observes that while Lumpkin power-
fully illustrates ‘‘the evils of class’’ in the South, she ‘‘less effectively’’ ad-
dresses questions of gender (50). Such an assessment is fair, particularly
given Hobson’s comparison of Lumpkin to Lillian Smith, but if we shift
our frames of reference, we can discern Lumpkin’s careful parsing of gen-
der in a southern frame. She has elsewhere attributed her turn to activism
in part to the energy emerging from the suffrage movement, and in the
memoir, her take on the southern woman, much like her ironic tone, is
subtle, woven carefully via narrative form more than through content, but
nonetheless powerful and strategic, illustrating her crucial awareness of
relations between gender, race, and region. For instance, a reader might
ask why her book moves through more than one hundred pages of unre-
vised southern history before beginning to reconstruct the southern past.
At several points in the autobiography, Lumpkin comments on southern
women’s encoded language, which could say quite a bit while ‘‘sounding
smooth as butter’’ (103). Just as Scarlett recognized the strategic value of
keeping up appearances, so Lumpkin frames her narrative to lure her white
audience in. The book was first published in 1946, at a time when most
white southerners would not have been sympathetic readers for the final
chapters of the text. To begin as she did gave Lumpkin the chance to ap-
proach her readers on common ground—a narrative of southern history
popularized by both Gone with the Wind and The Birth of a Nation—and then
slowly move them elsewhere, away from an essentialized, nostalgic south-
ern identity, away from Tara, by revealing her own journey away from that
mythic place.24
Lumpkin’s narrative inverts the seeming priorities of Gone with the Wind,
for its focus on region and race appears to overshadow a focus on femi-
ninity or gender. Yet The Making of a Southerner, while overtly about race
more than gender, subtly crafts an autobiographical ‘‘I’’ who is female, in-
dependent, college-educated, and apparently not obsessed with romance,

breaking new ground for southern women by example. When discussing
her college years, Lumpkin briefly reflects on the degree to which her ex-
periences were not typical of the women of her generation. She explains
that her mother had once trained to be a teacher and that, in her family,
both boys and girls were told by their father, ‘‘Those who have brains were
meant to use them’’ (186). She suspects she took her father at his word
on that one, although she also recognized that ‘‘the situation was anoma-
lous,’’ for she knew very well that the southern ‘‘woman’s place’’ was on a
pedestal (185–86). That ends the narrative’s discussion of white femininity
per se, but this concern with the connections between place and femininity
will resurface a few pages later. By carefully filtering her tale away from
overt considerations of white femininity and the play of romance, Lump-
kin figures the connections between gender, race, and region in new ways
while also revealing them to be socially constructed. To focus primarily
on white femininity (as Rosemary Daniell did forty years later) might lead
her narrative back into the frozen images of race and gender that populate
the familiar myths of the South. Lumpkin instead thinks gender via race,
reconfiguring southern identity at its very core, troubling the notion of
the absolute difference between black and white that overtly underwrote
Jim Crow. She claims an alliance across color lines and class lines, at least
partially through renouncing the homogenizing force of southern white-
ness, southern femininity, and southern ‘‘tradition.’’ Her pointed refusal to
figure the southern lady in her traditional trappings is part of this strategy.
Given her shift in emphasis, it is not surprising that when Lumpkin returns
to a focus on gender, describing an event that occurred during her early
years in the ywca, her examples underscore (rather than naturalize) the
racialized quality of southern femininity.
While at a conference, a group of young Christian leaders, including
Lumpkin, were asked to meet with ‘‘a Negro woman’’ who wanted to
speak with them about the ‘‘race problem’’ (189). The narrative under-
scores that the young ladies were shocked, not because the woman wanted
to speak with them, but because they were asked to meet her as ‘‘Miss
Arthur,’’ an act that, by granting Miss Arthur the status of a lady, broke the
intricate social conventions designed to ‘‘keep the Negroes in their place’’
(189–90). The recounting of this experience highlights the degree to which
southern ‘‘places’’ (both as the products of etiquette and as physical spaces)
constructed femininity as either on a pedestal or unavailable, depending
on one’s race.25 Through her careful narrative style, Lumpkin not only ma-
nipulates the codes of southern femininity by initially conforming, in her

early chapters, to appearances; she also employs these codes to call into
question the entire system of etiquette and femininity that underwrites
southern ‘‘places,’’ especially homeplaces, to begin with. Unlike Scarlett,
Lumpkin’s manipulation of southern codes is not only for personal gain;
simply playing with the borders of feminine style is not enough for this
southern woman. Instead she finally shatters the ‘‘butter-smooth’’ veneer
of her text, plainly revealing that this is not just another memoir by a
daughter of the Lost Cause. This narrative act allows her to speak out
firmly against the places and practices that shaped her childhood.
You might say that Lumpkin skirts the figure of the southern lady, but
she does so to introduce the figure of the black woman, subtly shifting who
counts in the rubrics of southern womanhood. The southern lady of this
text is black, a woman fully aware of the force of southern etiquette, but
one who demands her place at the table, outlining truly civil uses of south-
ern ritual and decorum. Contemporary scholars have noted the myriad
ways in which black women deployed etiquette to gain access to the public
sphere and to politics, and Lumpkin’s tale serves to highlight this process,
examining the ways in which the ywca’s black officers challenged received
notions of tradition.26 Lumpkin shifts the positionalities through which
southern womanhood can be understood precisely by focusing on race and
class rather than on gender, understanding, in Caren Kaplan’s terms, that
‘‘one becomes a woman through race and class . . . not as opposed to race
and class’’ (Questions of Travel, 182), deploying a very different strategy than
the designing women. This is not the only tactic a white southern woman
of Lumpkin’s era might have deployed, but it is a workable one, one that
destabilizes the myths of the southern woman much more effectively and
thoroughly than a relentless focus on the plantation mistress.
Throughout her career as an academic, Lumpkin’s scholarly work as a
sociologist replicated this displacement of gender as a primary focus of
research. While at Columbia in 1919, she wrote a master’s thesis on the
‘‘Social Interests of the Southern Woman,’’ tracing the powerful hold of
tradition on women in the region. When she later pursued a doctorate in
sociology at the University of Wisconsin, after her years in the ywca, her
research interests shifted toward issues of race and class, a shift perhaps
prompted by the realization that gender as a solitary frame of reference ob-
scures as much as it reveals. She continued to focus on issues of child labor,
economic policy, race, and southern history for the remainder of her life,
although her interest in gender again resurfaces in her 1974 biography of
abolitionist and fellow southern daughter Angelina Grimke. Nonetheless

The Making of a Southerner is very much aware of gender, and that awareness
is reflected in the form the memoir takes.
Lumpkin deploys a strategic southernness, a subtle and politicized
mimicry that seemingly accepts certain southern truths in order to re-
work them, functioning less via the parodic excesses of DeAundra Peek
and Ruby Ann Boxcar than through a strategic essentialism that recalls
the politics of Camp Sister Spirit. Like the Hensons, Lumpkin wants to
take back the South, reclaiming it from demagogues. Lumpkin’s mimicry
extends further than that of the Hensons, who more fully reject the overt
trappings of southern femininity, but they end up imagining similar Souths.
As Homi Bhabha reminds us, the mimic is ‘‘almost the same but not quite,’’
simultaneously both resemblance and threat, and Lumpkin mines these
possibilities both in her narrative and in her life, using the camouflage of
resemblance to menace tired old ways of being southern. Steel Magnolias,
Scarlett, and Designing Women playfully toy with the exterior of southern
womanhood, but their campy revelations about the constructedness of
femininity finally work to reinstall a vaunted and reified white southern
woman, the essential lady at the core of southern myth. Rosemary Daniell
converts that core of womanhood into a decaying mess, but this mess still
retains a certain fixity. Lumpkin (and Pratt) instead perform a certain femi-
nine style, a strategic southernness, to introduce a new cast of southern
women. In The Making of a Southerner, Miss Arthur transforms into a south-
ern lady via a narrative of connection that refuses the dehumanizing turns
of Gone with the Wind. This is an important iconic shift. We might see in
Miss Arthur the prototype for that heroine of chapter 2, the black female
Captain Confederacy.
If Lumpkin’s discursive strategies structurally address gender, mimick-
ing southern femininity in order to remake it, her text does remain silent
on one central marker of identity—sexuality, an area directly acknowl-
edged by Pratt and the Hensons. Lumpkin lived most of her adult life with
one of two women, Dorothy Wolff Douglas and Elizabeth Bennett, but
never spoke publicly about her sexuality. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall writes elo-
quently of Lumpkin’s silences, observing that ‘‘the anticommunism and
homophobia of the 1950s had dropped a curtain between then and now’’
(‘‘Open Secrets,’’ 119), making it difficult to know, in any final way, ‘‘how
sexuality figured in her identity’’ (121). From our position at the beginning
of a new century, we might wish that Lumpkin had spoken out about these
vexing questions of identity before her death in 1988, neatly tying together
her life and her politics, making it that much easier to honor her work and

her commitments, learning from her how to remake southerners in our
own time. But lives are rarely so neat, and Hall insists that partially be-
cause of Lumpkin’s work and life, ‘‘we do know that southern history . . .
has been crosscut by valiant radicalisms and transgressive identities and
desires.’’ Perhaps Lumpkin felt the need to prioritize the markers of the
self, choosing to foreground race in her tales of the Jim Crow South even
if that compelled other silences. Maybe she retreated into a still-prevalent
southern policy of ‘‘not telling’’ sexuality, one southern ritual from which
she could not quite shake herself free. Maybe she felt her sexuality was no
one’s business but her own. Of course, there are consequences to each of
these choices, but not ones easily understood by fixing Katharine Du Pre
Lumpkin’s life within a narrow frame. Even as she foregrounded certain
axes of difference and not others, Lumpkin’s memoir and life refashion
the fixed registers of identity politics via a vision of alliance and coalition,
illustrating new ways of feeling southern from which we still have much
to learn.
g FEELING SOUTHERN AND THE REMAKING OF WHITENESS

I am my father’s daughter in the present, living in a world he and my folks helped to
create. . . . I honor the grief of his life by striving to change much of what he
believed in.—Minnie Bruce Pratt, Rebellion: Essays 1980–1991
Although some fifty years separates the writing of The Making of a South-
erner and Rebellion, situating them temporally on either side of the Civil
Rights movement, Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin and Minnie Bruce Pratt
each wrote from a time and a place situated in struggle, creating works
designed not simply to record history but to change it. They each desired
to move the South somewhere else at the moment of their writing, imag-
ining new Souths. Each layered personal history over southern history,
sketching a ‘‘we’’ that implores other white southerners to join them where
they are, providing guideposts for the journey. Both memoirs trouble the
figuration of the mythic landscapes of the South in order to problematize
just what southern identity might mean, but neither abandons the South.
Lumpkin doesn’t freeze the origin of southernness behind the white col-
umns of Tara, but neither does she give up on the region. She recognizes
that because she carries ‘‘her roots’’ with her, simply forgetting the old
ways is not an option: ‘‘I turned against my old heritage of racial beliefs
and racial practices. Yet . . . I was haunted by the old dogma that but one

way was Southern, and hence there could be but one kind of Southerner’’
(235). Lumpkin goes so far as to assert that the seed of doubt that en-
abled her transformation resides latent in all white southerners, a legacy
of the South’s defeat (236). Thus she spins southern tradition, rewriting
the meanings of loss embedded in Civil War memories, claiming that very
ground as a space for change. Like Pratt, she seeks to repurpose southern
ritual and myth, refusing the ‘‘assumption that our plantation tradition
alone was authentically Southern’’ (239). In formulating a new southern
heritage, she turns instead to the ‘‘different strains of southern heritage
that have been handed on’’ both by poor whites and ‘‘by the Negro mil-
lions whose people had been held in slavery,’’ celebrating ‘‘the strivings of
these various southerners after a different South.’’ The 1981 afterword to
her memoir again foregrounds the central importance of black agency to
southern change, noting how much remains to be done in struggles for
true freedom. She calls for a dual focus on political change and personal
change, insisting on the centrality of the ‘‘face to face’’ in changing the
world (250–51).
In foregrounding the value of the ‘‘face to face,’’ Lumpkin asserts the
primacy of feelings to the formulation of new southern selves, outlining
a both/and model of southern feeling, recognizing both self and other.
Southern feeling is tightly tied to the politics of everyday life. In their
memoirs, both Pratt and Lumpkin explicate a path through persecutory
guilt toward accountability, a path along which the timeworn traditions
of white southern ambivalence function differently, as means rather than
ends, and as strategies rather than signs. Via this affective mobility, each
memoir models in language a desire for alliance, sketching new southern
subjects and performing emotion differently. Rebellion and The Making of
a Southerner both know that to change the South means to change both
economic conditions and social identities. As such, they wed a politics
of affect to a politics of justice, linking emotion and accountability, for-
mulating a model of justice that extends beyond the legal to the cultural.
From Gone with the Wind to The Civil War, old tales of southern grandeur
inculcate a particular emotional register, one hard to mobilize differently.
Yet throughout Reconstructing Dixie, we have seen something else within
these stories, latent structures of feeling, of cross-racial longing, that hint
at other possible Souths, Souths variously imagined in Kindred, Captain
Confederacy, Any Day Now, and Camp Sister Spirit. The lives and memoirs
of Pratt and Lumpkin mobilize these longings, articulating a submerged
strand of white southern meaning, a desire for connectedness, confirming

that southern feelings are socially constructed but not determined. We
can feel differently about ourselves and our homes. We can draw on other
traditions of white southern identity to counter the retreat into the past
that buoys up a conservative white southernness. We can refuse a logic
of separation. We can forge connections. In the angry plaints of the neo-
Confederates, we hear fear, a fear that without the Confederate flag or
nostalgia for the Old South, there’s nothing left for white southerners be-
yond a legacy of oppression. But the stories penned by Pratt and Lumpkin
offer another take on ‘‘white heritage,’’ a heritage that we can embrace,
but one hard to see through all the stock characters of southernness parad-
ing through the twentieth century. A relentless and stubborn fixation on
certain old Souths precludes new Souths as well as meaningful dialogue,
locking us into angry or guilty modes of southern whiteness.
Lumpkin and Pratt try to clear new ground, envisioning modes of iden-
tification that are not fixated in sameness, that are attuned to difference,
refashioning identity politics via coalition and alliance. They acknowledge,
as did Lillian Smith, that feelings of rawness may overwhelm the white sub-
ject intent on change, and they talk us through these feelings, guiding the
way, modeling accountability.27 Emotions help us mediate between iden-
tity politics and a politics of difference, underwriting new possible para-
digm scenarios where affect and emotion work in the service of a broader
social good, beyond an individualized humanism. Both Pratt and Lumpkin
recognized the value of alliance. Lumpkin’s letters from the 1920s, written
during her days with the ywca, struggle to articulate the language of coali-
tion, laboring toward an expression of identity-in-difference. Having lis-
tened to the black student workers’ complaints about segregation within
the organization, Lumpkin laments the group’s current strategies, arguing
for a new method that would allow all participants to ‘‘have contributed
their difference’’ leading to ‘‘a new discovery and one which neither could
have made without the other.’’ She desires ‘‘a cooperative evolving’’ of what
is to be done, one attuned to, and formulated in light of, the demands
of her black women colleagues. She recognizes that solutions to ‘‘certain
blocks in our inter-racial efforts’’ must be ‘‘wrought in experience . . . be-
ginning with the determination to recognize oneself as only one-half of a
proposition. . . . we are two instead of one and yet . . . a unit.’’ 28 Affinity
rather than identity.
Pratt proposes a political model that will shatter the rigid grids of her
childhood geographies; she wants an organizing strategy ‘‘that is more
accurate, complex, multilayered, multidimensional, more truthful, [see-

ing a] world of overlapping circles’’ (33). The metaphor of overlapping
circles is a powerful conceptual tool, one that shatters the fixed binary
logic of a lenticular vision, exploding rigid separatist modalities and re-
fusing partition. This is a model of double vision, linking emotion and
liability without resorting to the logics of fragmentation that underwrite a
covert racial politics. Ida Perry suppressed her guilt over her region’s racial
past, alternating between a self-righteous anger and a forgetful denial,
an emotional break that eventually drove her crazy. Many liberal south-
ern autobiographies instead fixate on white guilt, unable to find a way
through it. Lumpkin and Pratt reconnect these emotional circuits, illus-
trating an alternative model of white southern identity that crisscrosses
the twentieth century, a model that values difference and strives toward
accountability. Both understand that how we see ourselves can be trans-
formed through an ethical encounter with the claims of otherness, that we
can imagine other worlds because we can imagine transformations of the
self. Both also saw the intricate connections of the local to the global, with
Lumpkin arguing that the South can help us understand the global flows
of labor, and Pratt insisting that the privileges of whiteness in the United
States rest ‘‘on the backs of women of color here and in Third World coun-
tries’’ (73).29 Thus, in recognizing that the South exists on many scales,
they envisioned a mobile and flexible politics of engagement, situated in
the local but spiraling elsewhere, capable of shape-shifting and mobility.
g A N A F T E RWO R D : B E YO N D T H E P O S T C A R D S O U T H
For southern fiction, I prefer the [2000] Florida election returns.—response posted
at Salon.com to the query, ‘‘What’s your favorite Southern literature?’’
Not long ago I returned to the small southern college where I had once
taken classes (and first discovered feminism and media studies, a southern
sojourn that sent me off to a northern graduate school) to give a lecture on
Elvis. The occasion for the talk was a museum opening featuring never-
before-seen photos of a young Presley performing at the Louisiana Hay-
ride. The museum’s permanent collection is fairly traditional, comprising
works ‘‘from a variety of aesthetic periods including American Impres-
sionism and Texas Regionalism’’ (according to their Web site), and two
overlapping exhibits of Elvis photographs marked the institute’s first foray
into presenting popular culture to its patrons. My talk was a beefed-up
version of an Elvis lecture I use in my undergraduate course ‘‘Stars and

Celebrities,’’ titled ‘‘All Shook Up: Race, Gender, Class, and Elvis.’’ The
crowd was a mix of the usual museum patrons, some a bit skeptical about
this turn to the popular; local Elvis fans; and a few interested undergradu-
ates, no doubt encouraged to attend by my former professors still teach-
ing at the college. I’d say the average age was probably close to fifty. As I
milled about the opening in the hour before the talk was to begin, I chat-
ted with the patrons, many of whom expressed obvious pleasure to learn
I was a native girl, born in Louisiana and mostly raised within a block of
the college, seemingly reassured that I was somehow qualified to speak of
things southern. Nonetheless I was a bit nervous about giving the lecture,
wondering how the audience might respond to a thumbnail sketch of my
thoughts on the South, race, and celebrity.
My talk, decidedly nonacademic and pitched to a general audience (for
instance, I never even used the term ‘‘lenticular’’), began in a lighthearted
mode, designed to draw the audience in with lively clips and select Elvis
stories before moving, about halfway through, to a look at what Elvis’s
career and continuing celebrity might tell us about race and southernness
in America today. The themes of the talk paralleled many of the themes
of this book. I suppose I was hoping to deploy those southern strategies of
charm I had imbibed growing up, flirting a bit before getting to the punch
line. The audience was definitely with me for the first half hour, laughing
at my jokes and nodding in agreement, even as I queried Elvis’s overt sexu-
ality and gender-bending androgyny, describing what I see as his masoch-
istic masculinity. My nervousness dissipated at that point: things seemed
to be going pretty well. Then I began to talk about how this very mascu-
linity was underwritten by particular configurations of race and class, and
the room fell silent.30 The cordial, friendly vibe of minutes before quickly
evaporated as I began to move through my thoughts on the difficulty of
racial union and alliance in the South, both in the past and today. Not a
single question greeted the end of my talk, although several of the under-
grads were eager to chat one-on-one, and the lone African American in the
crowd called me at my parents’ home that evening to discuss the lecture,
congratulating me on shaking up the ‘‘mink-wearing’’ set. Women who
had eagerly talked with me before I began now refused to make eye con-
tact and quickly left the museum. Clearly, I had violated some entrenched
southern mores, speaking too openly about the South’s open secrets. Like
Ida Perry or M. E.’s mother, many in the crowd would have preferred that I
‘‘just hush’’ about race, keeping quiet about certain pasts while maintaining
a veneer of gentility.

I think what surprised me most about my reception was not the silence
but rather the ease with which certain ideas about gender and masculinity
were actually accepted by the audience. No one flinched when I described
the S/M aesthetics of the whipping scene in Jailhouse Rock, a reception sug-
gesting that in an era of Madonna or Britney Spears, gender performance à
la Elvis is hardly shocking, having lost much of its once-transgressive force.
Race, however, still troubles the region, ruffling feathers, particularly in
conjunction with discussions of southern class and taste. The gendered
Elvis also fit neatly with other popular tales of slightly eccentric southern-
ers, highlighting the South’s uniqueness. This is a lenticular logic at work,
able to discern troubled gender as a marker of southernness but unwilling
to connect this insight with markers of race or class. To figure Elvis’s ico-
nicity as complexly classed and raced was to shatter the logic of separatism
and disconnection that underwrites the modes by which we figure differ-
ence today. In Dirt and Desire, Patricia Yaeger writes that the old models
for studying southern literature are no longer generative (xv), and Recon-
structing Dixie has argued that these models, as well as other familiar ways
of thinking the South, have run their respective courses, tripped up by the
containments of the lenticular. Approaches to southern culture that re-
main focused on quaintness, on gentility, and on a certain down-homeness
(or conversely on the essentially gothic South) are too easy, too comfort-
ing, too familiar, reproducing their own partitions and reinstalling the
stock figures of southernness that this book has sought to trouble. South-
ern studies needs an infusion from feminism, from American studies, from
scholars of race and ethnicity, from other ways of seeing the region and the
world. Understanding how the lenticular blocks the telling of new tales
points the way toward different southern stories.
The introduction to this book sketched the lenticular as an economy of
visibility for post–Civil Rights America, a mode of racial representation
in which histories or images that are actually copresent get presented so
that only one of the images is visible at a time. This logic functions co-
vertly, repressing connection, and, within a southern frame, can work to
deny a long history of often brutally regulated racial contact. If I claimed
early on that I would explore how race gets made via narrative and image
at precise moments in place and time, the subsequent chapters have also
revealed that the lenticular is operative not only at the level of representa-
tion, framing familiar figures of southernness in particular ways. This mode
of seeing also frames the world, underwriting particular moral, political,
and epistemological realities. The delimiting optics of the lenticular stall

emotion and impede mobility. This monocular logic is about the separat-
ing of cause from effect, of affect from material conditions. It’s a logic of
fragmentation, facilitating a covert racial politics and an inability to see
connections, divorcing emotion from liability. It also splits the subject,
fixating on sameness or difference but without mediation or connection,
enforcing particular emotive registers and old politics, blocking alliance.
We might think about the lenticular as a new mode of the pretense of
‘‘separate but equal,’’ refashioned for new times.
Across these pages, we’ve seen the lenticular in many manifestations.
In the outposts of cyber-secessionism or in the lily-white environs of Scar-
lett and Steel Magnolias (or in the hypervisible blackness of the culturally
sanctioned sports and entertainment worlds), we find a separatist lenticu-
lar logic, intent on holding black and white apart, fixating on one or the
other. In the white versions of these worlds, ethnicity and class variously
function to add texture to the threatening homogeneity of whiteness, cre-
ating a frisson of difference that imbues these spaces with passion while
also displacing blackness. Such a turn from the overt responds to the shift-
ing economic realities of the South, allowing a boosterism on behalf of
the new New South while also repressing the South’s increasing racial di-
versity. It is also symptomatic of the region (and the nation’s) recurring
inability to even imagine the possibility of racial contact or successful
alliance. (Another, perhaps less obvious, mode of the separatist plagues
academic accounts of the South, from the early work of some southern
women’s studies scholars to a subset of what we might now call ‘‘whiteness
studies.’’ In this latter work, talking about whiteness subsumes an under-
standing of difference, once again fixing the critical eye on white terrain.
For instance, many of the gleeful academic celebrations of ‘‘white trash’’
use class to celebrate ‘‘carnivalesque’’ behaviors that undermine prescribed
decorum without recognizing that these modes of acting out also have
racial implications.)31 The emotional registers underwritten by the sepa-
ratist mentality range from the genteel repressions of Steel Magnolias or
Ida Perry, repressions always threatening to burst through the smooth ve-
neers of southern hospitality, to the overt anger of the neo-Confederates.
Both repression and anger attempt to manage guilt, a guilt over the white
South’s responsibility for racial brutalities that we still refuse to name and
atone for. Locked within these guilty emotive registers, a new political
practice becomes impossible to imagine. Frozen in Ida Perry’s world, guilt
dominates one frame of the postcard, anger the other. These paradigmatic

reactions to guilt cannot achieve a synthesis, cannot process guilt, cannot
move us elsewhere.
Guilt also trips up the additive mode of the lenticular, a strategy more
often deployed in recent and seemingly liberal accounts of the region. True
to their liberal origins, these additive economies of visibility often long for
union, but their structural and ideological maneuvers finally make mean-
ingful connection difficult, if not impossible. In the nostalgic plaints of The
Civil War, union can only occur at the expense of blackness, as guilt gets
routed into a melancholic obsession with historical authenticity and a per-
vasive longing for an imagined lost nation. This melancholic turn impedes
successful mourning, turning the past and historical memory into a series
of sepia-toned stills rather than a source for action in the present. Liberal
reactions to guilt (in documentary or memoir and in culture more broadly)
set the stage for either endless melancholia or a narcissistic series of mea
culpas that fixate on the pain of the white subject, deploying blackness only
as emotional texture. In a related fashion, the antics of television’s Design-
ing Women again illustrate the difficulty of meaningful alliance when faced
with a fixation on certain stock southern figures. Although the series pur-
posefully redesigns the southern lady via a liberal feminism, its attempts
at alliance cannot account for race, inadvertently highlighting some cru-
cial lessons for feminist politics, particularly in a southern frame. In 1980s
and 1990s debates about feminist praxis, the politics of sameness and of
difference were often cast as opposing strategies, paradigms that could not
come together. Such an understanding of sameness and difference made
alliance hard to theorize, locking us into lenticular binaries that precluded
models of identity that might move beyond sameness toward productive
and principled connections with difference.
If both additive and separatist forms of the lenticular (albeit via different
strategies) inhibit other, more progressive modes of southern feeling, Re-
constructing Dixie has also charted various paths toward more multi-ocular
modes of seeing and knowing. These paths are neither easy nor well paved,
but they do offer access routes to other ways of being, ways less saturated
in guilt and nostalgia for familiar southern figures. From the ironic mas-
querades of Ross McElwee to the campy posturings of DeAundra Peek
and the Odum’s gang, from the speculative fictions of Butler’s Kindred or
Shetterly’s Captain Confederacy to the strategic essentialisms of Camp Sis-
ter Spirit and Katharine Lumpkin, from the bad-girl rage of Rosemary
Daniell to the full-on rebellions of Minnie Bruce Pratt, we begin to dis-

cern the contours of other southern subjects less invested in policing the
authenticity of regional tales. None of these subjects (real or fictional)
rejects the South or southernness; rather, each restages the meaning of
the region and of homeplace, refusing a careful partitioning of the public
from the private. Each also reclaims portions of southern heritage from
others who would rigidly define the South, undertaking a careful waltz
of dissemblance and resemblance, of sameness and difference. Lumpkin
and Pratt also illustrate the hard work involved in sustaining such modes
of feeling and in transforming feeling into action. We must confront the
ambivalences and ambiguities of southern feeling and identity not with
guilt, anger, or denial but with the honesty of Lumpkin and Pratt and Kara
Walker and Octavia Butler, imagining other possibilities for union while
imaging the high cost of our denials and evasions. From Lumpkin’s activism
in the 1920s to Pratt’s today, we further see that an alternative to the len-
ticular exists throughout the twentieth century, a different kind of seeing,
reminiscent of the doubled consciousness that W. E. B. Du Bois signaled
as fundamental to the survival of black Americans, a mode of vision that
a few white southerners have also accessed. While racism and the racial
logics of representation have shifted before and after Civil Rights, the anti-
racist strategies used to counter these regimes of power have been more
flexible and more wily, illustrating important continuities.
These antiracist maneuvers also precipitate the desire for union that is
latent in so many of the works that Reconstructing Dixie examines. In Pratt,
Kenan, Butler, Walker, and Lumpkin, this longing is explored with a clear
eye and with honesty: union is no longer the national romance of The Civil
War but instead a messy, hard, complex space of possible and perilous join-
ing. A politics of alliance emerges that acknowledges the hard work nec-
essary to recognize, name, and bring into being new structures of feeling.
Some models of alliance want it too easy and resist understanding the ma-
terial privileges of whiteness, undermining successful joining. What can’t
be overemphasized is the difficulty this process entails, particularly the
labor involved in reconstructing white identities within a southern frame.
Across the book, the emotional stakes and pitfalls of white southern iden-
tity are traced, mapped, and charted, illustrating how easily a desire for
change or union can get short-circuited, wired back into a network of
white desire and privilege. Successful alliance requires rethinking the al-
lure of certain stage sets of southernness, those scenarios of imagined gen-
tility that underwrite white fantasies of transcending race. For example,
to have a complex vision of race in the twenty-first-century South, our

visions of the southern household must be more complex as well, attuned
to the home as a scene of social transmission and instruction, often in
emotional paradigms that block cross-racial alliance. New unions will not
always obey the rules of etiquette and southern hospitality, although those
fabled courtesies might be repurposed to new ends, even as we recognize
the myriad ways in which etiquette has functioned to control both the self
and the other, erecting barriers to contact, intimacy, and alliance.
There are tensions, ambivalences, and ruptures within and across the
narration of the South and within the formation of southern identities.
There is no single South, no typical southerner, even while there are shared
moments of southern landscapes and experience. If much of the telling
of the South—in both southern studies and the popular media—tends
to reify predictable moments, other currents traverse the region, signal-
ing other possibilities. Even seemingly conservative portraits of the region
often—when pressured—reveal other southern stories, and Reconstruct-
ing Dixie has sought to tour the South (and its many representations) in
both their fixity and their motion. Along the way, we have visited a variety
of southerners who have much to teach us not only about the region but
about the nation. After all, the nation still seems invested in the region
(even if much of the academy is not), avidly consuming southernness, sug-
gesting that the region plays myriad roles in the national imaginary. In one
register, playing at being southern (via tourism or various cinematic and
televisual Souths) allows Americans to connect imaginatively with Old
South traditions of grandeur and elegance, escaping the perceived pres-
sures of a culture of political correctness in favor of a lost world of white
dominance and beauty, a world that—via the wonders of the lenticular—
is no longer complicated by race or racism. Alternately, the South can
function as demonized other, as the mythic and convenient repository of
racism and our racist past, conveniently serving to absolve the rest of the
nation from accountability or complicity. Southerners aren’t the only ones
deploying a monocular logic. In fact, Dixie’s role in the American story re-
plays a kind of lenticular logic, keeping regions as well as races separate in
the national imaginary. Lenticular logics partition, separating black from
white, North from South, public from private, gender from race. The na-
tional investment in the South replays this separatist logic, locating the
country’s racial history and racism neatly below the Mason-Dixon line.
Throughout the time that I’ve spent working on this project (an en-
deavor that sometimes feels as if it has taken my whole life), and in many
years spent beyond the borders of the physical South, well-meaning but

incredulous friends and colleagues have often wondered why I bother with
the South at all. Indeed, my own department wasn’t entirely sure there
was a relevance of things southern to cutting-edge media studies, and
some have audibly wondered why I tarried there. Others suggested that an
interest in the South was terribly old-fashioned, interrogating why anyone
might bother reconstructing Dixie in the first place. But such a mind-set
replays the South’s role in the nation in an academic setting, cordoning the
South off, much as the Oprah broadcast of gothic southerners did, as hope-
lessly out-of-date, as backward, as an embarrassing site of retrograde re-
gionalism. This attitude precisely misses what we can learn from the South
about both the region and the nation, if not the circuits of global capital-
ism.32 Certainly the inability to envision meaningful cross-racial contact in
the new millennium is a problem that infects the nation as a whole, and as
we’ve seen, the South offers powerful instructions in both the root causes
and possible solutions to this epidemic. Touring the South also reminds
us that the much bemoaned homogenization of American culture is not
total. Even if the South is in the nation, and the nation in the South, there
are nonetheless recognizable forms of southernness, points of rupture and
disjuncture in ‘‘Americanness’’ as a whole. What we might take from these
disjunctures—this triumph of the local—need not be the stereotypical.
Like Pratt, Butler, or Lumpkin, we might process southern separatism
and pain—the often violent realities of the local—in order to come away
with more than nostalgia or melancholy. Reconstructing Dixie suggests that
there are competing Souths, and that the meaning of these Souths was and
is a site of contestation. The region is also a site of exchanges, of flows,
of networks. As tourists, migrant farmworkers, multinational corpora-
tions, and returning African Americans travel through the South, and as
the South travels beyond its geographic borders via a consumable pack-
aging of the local, how the South is framed matters not only for the region
and its inhabitants but also for the nation and the world. When Jesse Helms
goes to Mexico to negotiate labor flows into Dixie, we know that a self-
contained and authentic South is simply an isolationist fantasy, albeit one
with powerful material effects.
Recently, other scholars of the South have mapped earlier moments of
possible alliance in the region, with Patricia Sullivan tracking a decade of
hope from the mid-1930s to the mid-1940s, and Pete Daniel limning the
lost revolution of low-down culture in the 1950s.33 Both authors struggle
to balance a sense of lost progress and potential with a parallel suggestion
that we do not have to repeat the histories they chart, providing blueprints

for a different future. There is much in the last thirty years that might
cause us to feel there’s little hope for racial union in America, that whites
can’t change, that the distance between races is more and more intrac-
table, that certain silences must inevitably fill our museums, our screens,
and our lives. But there are southern traditions that can provide us with
fresh hope, and I want to follow those leads: we can mine our southern
pasts for lessons about change and hope, as well as for cautionary tales.
Even if the alteration of white identity will be difficult (and may seem
impossible on a larger structural scale), we need models for change that
help us narrate different futures, models often beginning at the level of the
micro and the personal, although they mustn’t end there. The South is as
good a place to locate these practices as any.
The making of selves is not simply personal: it is deeply social, con-
ditioned by our cultural and material milieu, the very geographies we
inhabit. The fiercely divided cities that we live in, the segregated images
dancing across our tv screens as we click from upn to nbc, the separatist
logics of the Klan or, from a different register, of Farrakhan, make it dif-
ficult to imagine other worlds. And as cultural critics like George Lipsitz
remind us, the economic and social privileges tied to whiteness make it
particularly hard for white folks even to recognize the need for change, let
alone imagine transformative, cross-racial alliance. Yet a few have. What
can we learn from them? How can we transform white subjectivity? This
is not about absolving whites from complicity or responsibility but about
representing progress, about alliance with accountability, about modeling
possible future Souths. We need some way to imagine and move toward
increased opportunities for collective experience, and the South, from
Mitchell and Lumpkin to the neo-Confederates and Pratt, provides ob-
ject lessons, lessons both good and bad. Houston Baker Jr. has observed
that ‘‘the United States at large is already in Mississippi, and Mississippi—
for better or worse . . . is already in the United States.’’ 34 From the festi-
vals of lynching of the Jim Crow era to the death rows of the twenty-first
century, from the sharecropper shack to Jesse Helms’s support for a new
bracero program, from the Trail of Tears to the terrorizing of Vietnamese
fishermen on the Gulf Coast, from the poll tax to Florida 2000, the South
is in the nation, and the nation is in the South. But to focus relentlessly
on the negative, limning solely the brutal realities of this American life, is
to overlook the historical struggles that have sometimes shifted the fierce
geometries of power. One vector of those struggles begins in the South,
located in a powerful tradition of black resistance, and in a minor chord of

white transformation. To learn from the successes and failures found along
those paths is to begin to move through reparation toward new Souths
and new futures, structuring a space for remembering what histories and
voices have been erased by endlessly confining southern memory within
the walls of Tara.

N OT E S
D I X I E T H E N A N D N OW
1 This perception is offered by architect Coleman Coker in his ‘‘Regionalism

in a Global Community,’’ in the Southern Reader. Coker argues that the South
embodies an ‘‘authentic regionalism’’ in contrast to which ‘‘the Southern Cali-
fornia environment must be considered non-regional.’’ Although his location
of authenticity only in the South is both nostalgic and limiting, Coker’s charac-
terization of Los Angeles as disconnected from ‘‘real’’ history and as ‘‘devoid of
content beyond built-in obsolescence’’ (7) echoes the picture of L.A. painted
by cultural critics such as Fredric Jameson.
2 David Morley and Kevin Robins, Spaces of Identity: Global Media, Electronic Land-
scapes, and Cultural Boundaries, 41.
3 For a useful ‘‘textbook-style’’ tracing of both the ‘‘colonial South’’ and the pre-
and postindustrial South, see John B. Boles, The South through Time: A History
of an American Region, esp. chaps. 4 and 5.
4 In various ways and for different periods, theorists from Eric Sundquist to
Eric Lott to Stuart Hall to bell hooks to Patricia Yaeger have explored this
‘‘dialectical flickering of racial insult and racial envy’’ (Lott, Love and Theft, 18).
5 John Shelton Reed, One South: An Ethnic Approach to Regional Culture, 5. Reed is
a well-known and very popular Southern sociologist who has spent much of his
career mapping the contours of southernness and southerners. His many books
include The Enduring South: Subcultural Persistence in Mass Society, My Tears Spoiled
My Aim and Other Reflections on Southern Culture, and Southern Folk, Plain and
Fancy. For a good example of Reed’s general antipathy toward critical theory,
see his Kicking Back: Further Dispatches from the South, where he refers to work
like that of Jane Tompkins and Frank Lentricchia as a ‘‘steaming pile of trendy
b.s.’’ (37).
6 Nell Irvin Painter, ‘‘Of Lily, Linda Brent, and Freud: A Non-exceptionalist Ap-
proach to Race, Class, and Gender in the Slave South,’’ 106. Painter’s work,
along with others in what I term an ‘‘emergent’’ strand of southern studies,
represents the best of the field. I also view the work of several scholars not
generally categorized as ‘‘southern studies’’ scholars as providing important
models for what benefits might be derived from bringing together work in
critical/cultural theory and southern studies. These writers include Minnie
Bruce Pratt, bell hooks, Jane Gaines, Robin Kelly, Elsa Barkley Brown, Hous-
ton Baker Jr., and Angela Davis. An interesting recent collection that raises
similar concerns is R. H. King and Helen Taylor, eds., Dixie Debates: Perspectives
on Southern Culture. I remain curious as to why the U.S. South seems to be of
particular interest for British scholars.
7 bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation, 173. hooks is here quoting Re-
nato Rosaldo’s Culture and Truth. The tendency of some southern scholars to
deplore the South’s racist past while valorizing its gentility and graciousness
generally overlooks the slave labor and slave lives that originally provided the
material wealth to enable such manners.
8 My reading of nostalgia draws from the work of Meaghan Morris, who ulti-
mately questions the validity of critical theory’s (and particularly Fredric
Jameson’s) deployment of the terms ‘‘nostalgia’’ and ‘‘appropriation,’’ arguing
that theory dependent on these terms often becomes illustrative of culture
rather than explanatory or critical of it. She notes that in this way, the notion
of nostalgia sometimes ‘‘obscures more than it enlightens’’ (264). See Meaghan
Morris, The Pirate’s Fiancee: Feminism, Reading, Postmodernism, esp. chap. 12,
‘‘Tooth and Claw: Tales of Survival, and Crocodile Dundee,’’ 241–69.
9 Patricia Yaeger, Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women’s Writing, 1930–
1990, 252. The academic disregard for southern studies outside of the South
has been frequently underscored for me, as colleagues in media and American
studies have endlessly questioned the usefulness of studying the region. As one
scholar put it, ‘‘Do we really need more work on Faulkner?’’ Such a view is
as narrow-minded as much of traditional southern studies. Neither attitude
illuminates much about the South or its role in the nation.
10 Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics, 22.
11 For instance, U.S. News and World Report notes that ‘‘gambling is also a tourist
magnet, and Grand Casinos has spent more than $300 million enlarging its
two Mississippi gaming properties.’’ Grand Casinos properties are riverboat
casinos; though many nonsouthern communities have legalized gambling, the
tendency to house such ‘‘tourist magnets’’ in riverboats or plantation-like man-
sions is more prevalent in the South.
12 John D. Kasarda, ‘‘The Implications of Contemporary Distribution Trends for
National Urban Policy,’’ in Social Science Quarterly. As I will illustrate later, this
period of growth was not equally distributed among the South’s citizens; this
New South developed along fairly familiar lines of racial geography. See also
Richard M. Bernard and Bradley R. Rice, eds., Sunbelt Cities: Politics and Growth
since World War II, 1–30.
13 Jack Temple Kirby, Media-Made Dixie, 165, 170.
14 As Barbara Ellen Smith notes, ‘‘Corporations headquartered in Japan, Europe
and elsewhere find in the U.S. South an ideal location: First World amenities
without First World costs’’ (Neither Separate nor Equal, 25). See also ‘‘Dixiana,’’
Southern Magazine.
258 Notes to Introduction

15 Earl Black offers an analysis of the uneven success of biracial political coali-
tions in the South in ‘‘The Newest Southern Politics.’’ For other statistics
cited here, see also David Firestone, ‘‘Lagging in Education, the South Experi-
ments’’; David M. Shribman, ‘‘The South Has Risen, Still Rises’’; Kevin Sack,
‘‘Campaigning in the New, Not-So-Solid South,’’ and ‘‘Don’t Speak English?
No Tax Break, Alabama Official Declares’’; Bruce Butterfield, ‘‘California Not
So Hot’’; Peter Kilborn, ‘‘Memphis Blacks Find Poverty’s Grip Strong’’; Joel
Kotkin, ‘‘Grass Roots Business; Little Asias across Dixie’’; Fox Butterfield,
‘‘Southern Curse’’; and ‘‘1999 Southern Economic Survey: A State-by-State
Snapshot.’’
16 After George Bush assumed the presidency, Jesse Helms and several Senate
colleagues traveled to meet with Vicente Fox and the Mexican legislature, be-
ginning talks about a new period of cooperation between the two countries
(a conversation that was put on hold following the tightening of immigra-
tion policies post-9/11). One topic of discussion was a revision to the U.S.
‘‘guest workers’’ policy, a move that critics suggest would amount to a twenty-
first-century version of the braceros program. From 1942 to 1964, nearly five
million Mexican braceros (literally ‘‘helping hands’’) were imported into the
United States and exploited by American employers. Lawsuits urging repara-
tions are currently in the courts. North Carolina, Helms’s state, is home to
a growing population of migrant farm workers. He is also under pressure to
assume a ‘‘kinder, gentler’’ face given the largely Democratic cast of the state’s
growing urban areas. During the 1990s, Helms was probably best known for
his virulent comments on aids, as well as for whistling ‘‘Dixie’’ while standing
near African American senator Carol Mosely Braun. He also opposed a na-
tional holiday in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and, for many years, sup-
ported apartheid in South Africa. See Ruben Navarrette Jr., ‘‘Unlikely Sena-
tors Lead ‘Guest Workers’ across the Border’’; and Kevin Begos, ‘‘Key Motive
Inspired Helms’ Trip to Mexico.’’
For statistics on the rising Latino population in Georgia, as well as an over-
view of the difficulties they face, see Jeffrey Gettleman, ‘‘Obscure Law Used to
Jail Day Laborers in Georgia.’’ The article powerfully underscores the similari-
ties between Georgia’s reactions to immigration today and those in California
a decade ago.
17 See Suzi Parker, ‘‘In the Land of Grits, A TV Trend Is Born.’’ Kirby tracks
what he seems to see as an unfair demonization of the South during the late
1950s and 1960s, brought on by ‘‘race historians’’ and the South’s prominent
role in Civil Rights struggles. He notes that this image existed side by side
with less harsh representations such as The Andy Griffith Show and notes that
this ‘‘kinder, gentler’’ version of the South gradually takes hold in the 1970s as
good-hearted, if goofy, characters like the Dukes of Hazzard and the Bandit
replace the malevolent hillbillies and good old boys of films like Deliverance and
Easy Rider. Kirby compiles a useful catalog of images of the South (and, in a
later edition, recants his prognosis for the South in the 1980s), but his work is
Notes to Introduction 259

impeded by his unwillingness to situate these shifting signifiers among wider
sociopolitical concerns. An alternative (and more politically astute) reading
of representations of the South in the 1970s can be found in Douglas Kellner
and Michael Ryan’s Camera Politica, in which the authors read 1970s films such
as Gator and Smokey and the Bandit as a populist response to the increasing con-
servatism of that decade (132). Neither Kirby nor Kellner and Ryan take into
account the role of gender in these representations and rarely do they consider
the politics of race.
18 For a description of Atlanta’s continued fascination with Gone with the Wind, see
Charles Rutheiser’s lively Imagineering Atlanta. He notes that many of the city’s
‘‘old South’’ attractions emerged to ‘‘satisfy the growing hordes of tourists,
particularly those from Europe and Japan’’ (45).
19 My position on how the South functions as a symbol for the nation is informed
by Stuart Hall’s discussion of myths and symbols in ‘‘Notes on Deconstructing
the Popular,’’ where he argues that myths within national popular culture ‘‘have
no fixed position which is carried along unchanged.’’ Not only can cultural
myths be ‘‘rearranged . . . and take on new meaning,’’ but ‘‘cultural struggle
arises in its sharpest form just at the point where different, opposed traditions
meet’’ (236). Hall’s understanding of how national myths get articulated to
different positions or agendas sheds light on the various valences myths of the
South have played in national culture, a process that this study will explore at
various sociohistoric and paradigmatic moments.
20 The popular phrase ‘‘the Lost Cause’’ applies to a widely prevalent movement
across the South in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to ‘‘en-
shrine the memory of the Civil War.’’ This included the formation of Confed-
erate memorial associations, the celebration of Confederate Memorial Day,
the development of several pageant days, and the beginnings of the still-active
United Daughters of the Confederacy. For more information on the cultural
manifestations of the Lost Cause ideology, see Gaines M. Foster’s entry in The
Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, 1134–35; and Charles Regan Wilson’s Baptized
in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865–1920. Wilson notes that the Lost
Cause functioned as a southern ‘‘civil religion’’ that really took hold after 1890
(1, 162). For more on the Dunning School, see Grace Hale’s Making Whiteness
(80). My chapter 4 includes details from one southern daughter’s memories of
such events during her lifetime, and many of Margaret Mitchell’s biographers
note similar experiences during her childhood.
21 Eric J. Sundquist, To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Litera-
ture, 273.
22 See also Robyn Wiegman’s excellent American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and
Gender, which provides a trenchant critique of the limits and liabilities inherent
in legislative civil rights initiatives and insightfully categorizes the different
scopic regimes active during these two historic periods (39–42, 216). Davis’s
comments on this issue were made during a public lecture given at Memphis
State University, 7 February 1992.

23 Many scholars have commented (to fairly different effects) on the role of the
southern lady in revisionist histories and popular mythologies following Re-
construction. See Hazel Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood; bell hooks, Ain’t I
a Woman: Black Women and Feminism; Ann Firor Scott, The Southern Lady; and
Nina Baym, ‘‘The Myth of the Myth of Southern Womanhood.’’ The readings
of hooks and Carby are especially important for their attention to the reper-
cussions on both sides of the color line of this mythic figure’s emergence.
Diane Roberts’s The Myth of Aunt Jemima, following from the work of Annette
Kolodny, also notes the equation of the southern landscape with the female
body (204 n. 17).
24 Nina Baym, ‘‘The Myth of the Myth of Southern Womanhood,’’ 193.
25 Useful discussions of this moment in second-wave feminism can be found in
Jane Gaines, ‘‘Introduction: Fabricating the Female Body,’’ in Jane Gaines and
Charlotte Herzog, Fabrications: Costume and the Female Body, 1–27; and in the
final chapter of Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity. Of
course, definitions of feminism are as fluid as definitions of femininity or race;
certainly not all feminists of the 1970s and 1980s subscribed to a view of femi-
ninity and fashion as strictly oppressive.
26 Sandra Bartky offers the following definition: ‘‘femininity is an artifice, an
achievement, ‘a mode of enacting and reenacting received gender norms which
surface as so many styles of the flesh,’ ’’ in Femininity and Domination: Studies in the
Phenomenology of Oppression, 65. The second half of her definition is borrowed
from Judith Butler. I also like Iris Marion Young’s formation of femininity as
‘‘a set of structures and conditions which delimit the typical situation of being
a woman in a particular society, as well as the typical way this situation is lived
by the women themselves,’’ in ‘‘Throwing like a Girl: A Phenomenology of
Feminine Body Comportment, Motility, and Spatiality,’’ 54. I find these two
definitions from the terrain of philosophy particularly useful in their specifi-
cation of femininity via the frame of phenomenology.
27 Mary Ann Doane, ‘‘Masquerade Reconsidered,’’ 43, 47. Doane’s work on mas-
querade, further developed in The Desire to Desire, began in two early essays,
‘‘Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator’’ (1982) and ‘‘Mas-
querade Reconsidered: Further Thoughts on the Female Spectator’’ (1989).
Both are available in Femme Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis, 17–32,
33–43. Joan Riviere’s essay ‘‘Womanliness as Masquerade,’’ first published in
1929, is reprinted in Victor Burgin, James Donald, and Cora Kaplan, Forma-
tions of Fantasy, 35–44. For further elaborations on masquerade and feminist
film theory, see J. Gaines, ‘‘Introduction: Fabricating the Female Body’’; Claire
Johnston, ‘‘Femininity and the Masquerade: Anne of the Indies’’ (1975), reprinted
in E. Ann Kaplan, ed., Psychoanalysis and Cinema, 64–72; Stephen Heath, ‘‘Joan
Riviere and the Masquerade,’’ in Formations of Fantasy; and John Fletcher, ‘‘Ver-
sions of Masquerade.’’ As might be expected given the volume of work on
the topic, little consensus has been reached on the role of masquerade vis-à-
vis spectatorship. As Jane Gaines notes, ‘‘The masquerade metaphor has also

yielded absolutely contradictory conclusions about the position of the female
vis-à-vis the text’’ (24). One definition of masquerade that I do not consider
here is that advanced by Luce Irigaray. For Irigaray, masquerade is a submis-
sion to a dominant (male) economy of desire. Her delineation of mimicry (as
a putting on of femininity in a defensive—and positive—frame) is closer to
the definitions of masquerade that I sketch. See Luce Irigaray, The Sex Which Is
Not One.
28 Doane (in ‘‘Reconsidered’’) does briefly mention that race should be an issue in
Riviere’s analysis (and in critical negotiations of it), though she quickly moves
on to a defense and elaboration of her previous essay on masquerade. The re-
gional context for the dreams is never adequately considered. Other feminist
scholars have begun to rethink masquerade in more nuanced ways. See, for
example, Patrice Petro’s study of Weimar Germany, Joyless Streets: Women and
Melodramatic Representation in Weimar Germany. Petro takes on Doane’s formula-
tion of masquerade to reveal its limits within a specific historical and cultural
moment, arguing that magazines such as Der Dame deployed a ‘‘self-consciously
masculine masquerade’’ to destabilize both male and female iconography. For
other work that moves to place theories of masquerade in more contextual-
ized scenarios, see Kathleen Rowe, The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres
of Laughter; and Kathleen Woodward, ‘‘Youthfulness as a Masquerade,’’ in Dis-
course. For further details on the Atlanta race riot of 1906, see Sullivan and
Williamson.
29 Pamela Robertson, Guilty Pleasures: Feminist Camp from Mae West to Madonna, 76.
30 Hazel Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American
Woman Novelist, 18. I am indebted to Carby’s work for the title of this project
as well.
31 A key, though now almost clichéd, component of this decentering includes
work that investigates the meanings of whiteness. The first wave of this work
included Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagina-
tion; bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation; Ruth Frankenberg, White
Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness; George Lipsitz, The
Possessive Investment in Whiteness; David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race
and the Making of the American Working Class and Towards the Abolition of Whiteness;
and Vron Ware, Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism, and History. This work
spawned a minor academic specialty, work not always sensitive to the relations
of whiteness to other registers of racial difference, as I note in chapter 4.
32 Zillah Eisenstein, Hatreds: Racialized and Sexualized Conflicts in the Twenty-first
Century, 79. In many ways, I could here be accused of wielding the term ‘‘race’’
in a narrow register, rarely expanding ‘‘race’’ to include the other races/
ethnicities that exist in the South. Still, the South’s long history of seeing ‘‘in
black and white’’ suggests that even this slightly expanded definition of race
(i.e., one that includes whiteness) is a profitable one to explore. Particularly
in American culture, the black/white divide retains a primary power in racial
signification. As Eisenstein has noted, ‘‘This black/white divide is particularly

true for western societies with a history of black slavery. Blackness sets the
context for the meanings of otherness rooted in color’’ (37).
33 I borrow the phrase ‘‘economies of visibility’’ from Robyn Wiegman’s develop-
ment of the term in American Anatomies. What I have labeled overt and covert
visual economies correspond to the different economies of visibility Wiegman
sees as typical of the regimes of vision predominant in the pre– and post–Civil
Rights eras, economies that she designates (following Foucault) as specular and
panoptic. She notes that the ‘‘primary characteristic of the modern panoptic
regime [in late-twentieth-century life] is its reliance on a visual production
which exceeds the limited boundaries of the eye. . . . It is for this reason that
the signs of race . . . are today seemingly unleashed in a proliferation of cir-
culating images: integration beckons now the rising primacy of difference as
commodity’’ (41). She links this shift in visual economies to the ascendancy of
‘‘cinema, television and video,’’ which ‘‘serve up bodies as narrative commodi-
ties.’’ While this focus on a proliferation of images of race (which for Wiegman
means an abundance of images of blackness) might seem to run counter to my
observation that Scarlett erases blackness, this simultaneous proliferation and
erasure of blackness is characteristic of the covert or panoptic visual economy
of race today. Thus televisual productions of race today, to take just one ex-
ample, are generally populated by black or white casts, but representations of
‘‘integration with equality’’ (to borrow again from Wiegman, 41) are rare.
Ruth Frankenberg similarly discusses the likenesses and differences be-
tween what she calls ‘‘essentialist racism’’ and ‘‘color-evasive’’ racism, cate-
gories that would also correspond to my ‘‘overt’’ and ‘‘covert’’ designations.
Frankenberg also posits a third category, ‘‘race cognizance,’’ in which the
workings of power vis-à-vis race are made visible. In this way, her work is more
optimistic than Wiegman’s, who remains critical of ‘‘the easy turn in contem-
porary critical theory toward an emancipatory rhetoric that rings increasingly
hollow to many ears’’ (42).
34 Many thanks to Anna McCarthy for alerting me to the correct label for all
these postcards I have been collecting.
35 See Robyn Wiegman, American Anatomies, esp. 189–90.
36 For a discussion of the reverse migration patterns of African Americans vis-à-
vis the South during the past few decades, see Robert D. Bullard, ed., In Search
of the New South: The Black Urban Experience in the 1970s and 1980s. Bullard also
elaborates on the unequal demographic distribution of the ‘‘benefits’’ of the
New South and details the employment patterns of African Americans in the
region, noting their high concentration in service industries such as tourism.
37 It is only fair to note that although I here draw an equivalence between the
goals of the neo-Confederates and the writings of Horwitz and Applebome,
neither the journalists nor the neo-rebels would be happy with that equa-
tion. In fact, both authors have been denounced as Yankee scalawags by the
neo-Confederates, and in an interesting interview, the Pulitzer Prize–winning
Horwitz comments that the neo-Cons’ ‘‘continuing sense of aggrievement and

of being put down is at odds with the reality of Southern life’’ now that the
South ‘‘is the most economically vibrant part of the country’’ (24). Applebome
does briefly note that there has always been ‘‘a different vision of the South . . .
that included the ancient interconnections between blacks and whites’’ (140),
but this vision gets short shrift in Dixie Rising.
38 For instance, in his recent work Against Race, Paul Gilroy details the similar
logics that drive certain modes of black and white separatism. He explores the
desire to ‘‘purify and standardize’’ (233) and asks us ‘‘to entertain the possi-
bility of a profound kinship between [Marcus Garvey’s] unia and the fascist
political movements of the period in which it grew’’ (232).
39 Charles Joyner, Shared Traditions: Southern History and Folk Culture, 25.
40 Gilroy, Against Race, 115.
41 I here draw from Robyn Wiegman’s mapping of the space of the nation in the
fifth chapter of her American Anatomies.
42 William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun, 85.
43 Mississippi also has the largest black population of any American state; white
defenses of the flag in that state highlight the degree to which some whites
perceive (erroneously, if economic realities are examined) whiteness itself to
be threatened. For scholarly analysis of the flag controversies, see John Coski,
‘‘The Confederate Battle Flag in American History and Culture’’; and Kevin
Thornton, ‘‘The Confederate Flag and the Meaning of Southern History.’’ In the
popular press, see Tom Teepen, ‘‘Southern Pride Not Symbolized by Banner’’;
and David Firestone, ‘‘Bastion of Confederacy Finds Its Future May Hinge on
Rejecting the Past.’’
44 Jack Hitt, ‘‘Confederate Chic.’’
C H A P T E R 1 . RO M A N C I N G T H E S O U T H
1 I use the terms ‘‘white lady’’ and ‘‘black woman’’ here as a way of highlighting
the historical practice of denying the designation ‘‘lady’’ to African American
women. For more on African American women’s struggles with mainstream
discourses of femininity, see Carby’s Reconstructing Womanhood and bell hooks’s
Ain’t I a Woman? In these first few pages, I also vacillate between the terms
‘‘lady’’ and ‘‘belle.’’ Generally, the belle is defined as a ‘‘privileged white girl at
the . . . exciting period between being a daughter and becoming a wife,’’ and
the ‘‘lady’’ is what she becomes after marriage and ‘‘remain[s] until she dies.’’
See Anne Goodwyn Jones, ‘‘Belles and Ladies,’’ in The Encyclopedia of Southern
Culture, 1527–30.
2 Diane Roberts, The Myth of Aunt Jemima: Representations of Race and Region, 67.
3 ‘‘Tour’’ quotes are taken from brochures for Grayline Sightseeing Tours of
New Orleans and from a brochure advertising the parishes along Louisiana’s
River Road. For information on the increase in southern ‘‘heritage’’ tourism,
see articles in Travel Agent magazine, including Laura L. Myers, ‘‘Southern Pil-
grimages’’; and Travel Weekly’s 30 April 1998 issue. Information on increas-
264 Notes to Chapter 1

ing tourism budgets of southern states is widely available; see, for instance,
David Cogswell’s ‘‘Selling South Carolina,’’ in Travel Agent. The Athenaeum
Rectory maintains a Web site at http://www.athenaeumrectory.com. The
shift in Dolly Parton’s Dixie Stampede’s themes was noted on the company
Web site, http://www.dixiestampede.com (spring 2001).
4 The pilgrimage is so ranked by, first, the American Bus Association, a tourist
transportation organization, and, second (‘‘top 20’’), the Southeast Tourism
Society. The spring 1990 Pilgrimage brochure was produced by Natchez Pil-
grimage Tours, the group that organizes the event. The Confederate Pageant
is cosponsored by the Natchez Garden Club, the organization that selects the
Pilgrimage Court (structured along the lines of a debutante group). The spring
1990 event ran from 10 March to 8 April, with the pageant held every Mon-
day, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday evening at the cost of eight dollars. The
tours themselves range in price from twelve to sixteen dollars and depart twice
daily. The brochure is twenty pages long and in full color. The tours in Natchez
began in 1931, and the tradition spread to other southern towns.
For a more detailed discussion of the role of tourism in the economy of the
New South, see the following chapter, where I point out that the South is now
the nation’s busiest tourist region and discuss Civil War tourism.
5 Charles Rutheiser, Imagineering Atlanta: The Politics of Place in the City of Dreams,
13.
6 This comparison and the information on slaveholders preceding it are from
Boles’s history text The South through Time, 185. Boles provides a variety of
statistics on plantation owners in the South, noting that a minority of whites
owned slaves (less than a quarter by 1860), and that only 12 percent of slave-
holders qualified as planters (owning twenty or more slaves). Of these, ‘‘sub-
stantially less than one percent’’ made up the planter aristocracy. Boles’s statis-
tics are corroborated by other sources, including The Encyclopedia of Southern
Culture. See especially the entry ‘‘The Plantation,’’ 26–28.
7 Catherine Bishir, ‘‘Landmarks of Power: Building a Southern Past, 1855–1915,’’
29.
8 Quoted in Bishir, ‘‘Landmarks of Power,’’ 30. The nostalgic southerner making
these observations was one Robert H. Winston.
9 David Crane first alerted me to Pennsylvania’s Tara. The quotes are from the
inn’s Web site, http://www.tara-inn.com.
10 Throughout this chapter, all page references to the novel are from the Mac-
millan edition, first published in 1936. Although I will not discuss the film
in detail, it is important to remember that the cultural phenomenon we call
Gone with the Wind is based on, and dependent on, the myriad ways—literary,
filmic, commercial, et cetera—that it circulates through culture.
11 Darden Pyron, Southern Daughter: The Life of Margaret Mitchell, 6.
12 I am indebted in this analysis to Stewart Tolnay and E. M. Beck’s Festival of Vio-
lence, a statistical history analyzing patterns of lynching across the south from
1882 to 1930. They note the ‘‘bloody nineties’’ as marking the period of the
Notes to Chapter 1 265

worst violence but also single out 1908 and 1915 as particularly brutal years.
They also underscore that lynching continued throughout the 1940s, 1950s,
and 1960s, and that the decline in numbers doesn’t reflect lynchings that were
attempted but thwarted. While Festival of Violence provides important analyses,
it does, in its drive to the scientific, downplay the relationship of the economic
to the cultural. In underplaying these links, the authors neglect the power-
ful ideological work popular culture did in the service of this reign of terror.
For studies that explore these links with more nuance, see chapter 5 of Grace
Hale’s Making Whiteness, and Fitzhugh Brundage’s Lynching in the New South:
Georgia and Virginia, 1880–1930.
13 Mitchell’s remark on her mother’s career as a suffragette and a brief recount-
ing of May Belle’s work are reported in Darden Pyron’s Southern Daughter: The
Life of Margaret Mitchell, 43. Pyron largely neglects the racist populism of the
southern suffrage campaign, but this history has been well documented.
14 Fitzhugh Brundage, ‘‘Politics of Historical Memory,’’ 120. See also Drew Gilpin
Faust’s Mothers of Invention.
15 James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son, 87. Baldwin
refers here, of course, to the historical campaign of terror known as lynching
that was waged against both male and female bodies. For discussions of the
racial and sexual politics of lynching, see work by Angela Davis, Grace Hale,
Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Nell Painter, Joel Williamson,
and Robyn Wiegman.
16 Leslie Fiedler also notes the link between Scarlett and Mammy in The Inadver-
tent Epic, though his analysis veers in a decidedly different direction.
17 Several feminist critics have incisively detailed the stakes and the terrain of the
mammy image, including bell hooks, Patricia Morton, Hazel Carby, K. Sue
Jewell, and, in the context of Gone with the Wind, Helen Taylor, Diane Roberts,
Elizabeth Young, and others. Hazel Carby and Thomas Cripps also comment
on Hattie McDaniel’s performance as Mammy in the film version, pointing
out the ways in which McDaniel briefly transcends the script’s imaging of race,
calling its construction of racial stereotypes into question, particularly for the
African American viewer. Thus the film is able to reveal (particularly for its
black audiences) the performative nature of black femininity in a way that the
novel is not, a point to which I will return.
18 Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark, 68.
19 The novel’s insistent attempts to ‘‘whiten’’ Scarlett and to assert the racialized
purity of its heroine tread slippery ground. As Elizabeth Young, Joel William-
son, and Linda Williams have variously noted, the excesses of the narrative
continually threaten to darken the white characters. Williams and Grace Hale
also highlight the degree to which Scarlett appropriates black suffering, with
Williams productively reading this process through a long American tradition
of racial melodrama.
20 Elizabeth Young similarly comments on Scarlett’s performances, noting that
Scarlett ‘‘epitomizes a denaturalized femininity’’ (250).

21 Anne G. Jones, ‘‘Gone with the Wind and Others: Popular Fiction, 1920–1950,’’
372; Anne Egenriether, ‘‘Scarlett O’Hara: A Paradox in Pantalettes,’’ 125; and
Harriet Hawkins, ‘‘The Sins of Scarlett,’’ 492. See also Amy Levin, ‘‘Matters of
Canon: Reappraising Gone with the Wind.’’
22 Cora Kaplan, ‘‘The Thorn Birds: Fiction, Fantasy, Femininity,’’ 164.
23 I am indebted to Judith Jackson Fossett for the notion of the sidewalk as a
racial and social interface. Other discussions of the sidewalk as a site of black
resistance during the eras of Reconstruction and Jim Crow occur in Glenda
Gilmore’s ‘‘But She Can’t Find Her [V.O.] Key’’ (131–33, 141) and her Gen-
der and Jim Crow (31), as well as in Tera Hunter’s To ’Joy My Freedom (2, 122).
Charles Rutheiser discusses Atlanta’s urban planning (144), and Festival of Vio-
lence recounts tales of lynching prompted by minor violations of the social
code (21, 77).
24 For excellent descriptions of the discursive and material forms of resistance
deployed by African American women, see Hazel Carby, Reconstructing Woman-
hood; bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman; and Angela Davis, Women, Race, and Class. In
Between Men, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick offers a reading of Mammy that supports
the interpretation I delineate here. She notes that Mammy is ‘‘totally in thrall
to the ideal of the ‘lady,’ but in a relation that excludes herself entirely. . . .
her personal femaleness loses any meaning whatever that is not in relation to
Scarlett’s role’’ (9). This corresponds to what I call a ‘‘lack of interiority’’ in
the character.
25 For a discussion of the use of slave women as wet nurses, see bell hooks, Ain’t
I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism; and Deborah White, Ar’n’t I a Woman?
Additionally, female slave narratives discuss the impact of the historical use
of wet nurses by wealthy slave-owning families, and Julie Dash’s moving film
Daughters of the Dust also provides illuminating commentary.
26 Thomas Cripps, ‘‘Winds of Change: Gone with the Wind and Racism as a National
Issue,’’ 140.
27 Nell Irvin Painter insightfully comments on a ‘‘psychological’’ interrelatedness
among black and white southern daughters in her examination of the psycho-
social role dynamics of southern families (208–10). Eric Lott also notes the
affective consequences of racial proximity in his Love and Theft.
28 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature, 132.
29 This is not to suggest that African American women might not also desire
unity. Indeed, it is in the work of African American novelists such as Margaret
Walker and Sherley Anne Williams that the possibilities for such a unity get
most powerfully explored. As feminist theorist Michelle Wallace notes, the
power of work like that of Williams resides in its definition of ‘‘friendship as
the collective struggle that ultimately transcends the stumbling blocks of race
and class’’ (Invisibility Blues, 145).
Other African American women have also reconstructed the image of
the mammy. The work of artist Bettye Saar refigures the mammy and her
twentieth-century counterpart, Aunt Jemima, via tropes of militancy, and

Cheryl Dunye’s film Watermelon Woman seeks to reinscribe the agency of the
mammy. This film also suggests the complex ways in which black women (as
the slaves who ‘‘played’’ the mammy and as the actresses who later portrayed
her on screen) performed black femininity as a survival strategy.
30 Minrose Gwin, Black and White Women of the Old South: The Peculiar Sisterhood
in American Literature, 17.
31 The epigraph is taken from Fox-Genovese’s ‘‘The Anxiety of History: The
Southern Confrontation with Modernism,’’ 78. Her essay is an interesting ex-
ploration of southern attitudes toward modernity, though I believe she gives
Margaret Mitchell too much credit when she reads Gone with the Wind as calling
for an ‘‘urban, New South individualism.’’ In the end, Mitchell is also nostal-
gic for a rural plantation South, even as her novel explores the benefits of city
living for women, and she powerfully welds old to new.
32 Richard Dyer, ‘‘Into the Light: The Whiteness of the South in The Birth of a
Nation,’’ 169.
33 Mitchell’s novel clearly defends the Klan night rides as a necessary defense
of white women, though her politics outside the novel seem quite contradic-
tory. She at once claims to love the novels of Dixon while also supporting and
championing the revisionary history of W. J. Cash.
34 See Patricia Sullivan, Days of Hope, 20–22.
35 See Charles Rutheiser, Imagineering Atlanta, 34–36. Charles Newman notes
that the city’s growing tourist business hosted numerous ‘‘Klanvocations’’ and
‘‘Klanventions.’’
36 Sullivan, Days of Hope, 24–32.
37 James C. Cobb, The Selling of the South, 128.
38 Pyron, Southern Daughter, 382.
39 Kenneth O’Brien, ‘‘Race, Romance, and the Southern Literary Tradition,’’ 163.
40 As I worked on revisions of this manuscript, what I term an emergent strand
of southern studies has taken on the racial implications of Mitchell’s epic quite
directly. Of the work on the novel already discussed, Hale, Young, Williams,
Kaplan, Cripps, Roberts, and Taylor do consider issues of race to varying de-
grees. In addition, Eve Sedgwick, Hazel Carby, Joel Williamson, Toni Morri-
son, and Alice Walker all offer critical analyses in the context of larger works
on other topics.
41 In White Women, Race Matters, anthropologist Ruth Frankenberg characterizes
such ‘‘color-blindness’’ as ‘‘color-evasive,’’ noting that such strategies actually
evade an acknowledgment of the privileges of whiteness by arguing against
racial difference.
42 Writing on the erasure of the consideration of race from literary criticism,
Toni Morrison suggests that ‘‘what is fascinating . . . is how [literary scholars’]
lavish exploration of literature manages not to see meaning in the thunder-
ous, theatrical presence of black surrogacy . . . in the literature they do study’’
(Playing in the Dark, 13). For critics who have recently begun to explore the
racial dimensions of Mitchell’s novel, see note 40.

43 For an interesting look at the miniseries’ statistics and self-promotion, see the
advertisement for the sequel in The Hollywood Reporter, 29 November 1994, 6.
TV Guide published many articles on the series, as well. Another odd bit of
Gone with the Wind trivia is the huge success in Japan of a musical based on
Scarlett O’Hara. See the introduction to Pyron’s Recasting.
44 Sarah Booth Conroy, ‘‘Riding the Wind: Scarlett Revisited; Alexandra Ripley,
in the Manner of Margaret Mitchell,’’ B1.
45 For a powerful examination of the spatialities of southern race relations, see
David Delaney, Race, Place, and the Law, 1836–1948. Delaney illustrates the de-
gree to which the law constructed and constrained possibilities for spatiality
and mobility in the antebellum and postbellum South.
46 See Cobb, Selling the South, 188–93; Tony Bartelme, ‘‘Foreign Investors Flock
to State’’ and ‘‘Charleston’s Volume Continues to Increase.’’
47 A copy of J. W. Clapp’s speech is housed in the archives at the University of
Mississippi, Oxford, Mississippi. It was first published by the Public Ledger
Printing Establishment in Memphis in the spring of 1873. Clapp also urges the
young women to honor the Confederate dead and to retain their influences
within the domestic sphere.
48 Carol Stack provides details on the poorest counties in North and South Caro-
lina in Call to Home. She notes that these counties are also the areas to which
large numbers of African Americans have been returning since the 1970s.
49 For a detailed account of the racial violence, much of it Klan linked, that
plagued North Carolina during the 1980s, see Mab Segrest’s Memoirs of a Race
Traitor.
50 In conducting this research, I scanned the indexes to the daily papers in New
Orleans and Shreveport, Louisiana, and in Jackson, Mississippi, looking for
certain keywords (such as ‘‘belle, ‘‘lady,’’ ‘‘Southern women,’’ ‘‘beauty,’’ ‘‘man-
ners,’’ etc.) that might relate to articles on southern women and mythologies of
femininity. I then cross-checked my findings by comparing the entries I found
via the index to a daily scan of several months of each paper.
51 I would include in this category of southern feminist historians such scholars
as Anne Firor Scott, Julia Cherry Spruill, Joanne Hawks, Jacqueline Jones,
and others. The awareness in these works of the role of both race and discur-
sive constructions varies widely. I single out the work of Catherine Clinton
because, more than the others, it consistently seems locked in an intractable
lenticular logic. Both her work and Scott’s are often hailed as ‘‘cornerstones’’
in southern feminist history, and the early work of both tends to honor the
plantation mistress for the difficult life she led. Both women are still central
figures in southern feminist scholarship, as well.
Scott, for example, maintains in The Southern Lady that slavery ‘‘influenced
the lives of [white] southern women . . . in the kinds of work it created’’ (36),
suggesting that the labor of the slave was shared by the white woman, and
also naturalizing the category ‘‘white southern woman’’ as simply ‘‘southern
woman.’’ Scott speaks of ‘‘recalcitrant, defiant and slovenly slaves’’ as an added

hardship for the plantation mistress (37), illustrating that she was little inter-
ested in the subjectivity of slaves themselves. She also refers to the kkk as
a ‘‘caper’’ that placed a great ‘‘burden on [white] women’’ because the men
were often absent from the home for Klan activities (98). At no point does she
suggest that the Klan’s ‘‘capers’’ were a greater ‘‘burden’’ for the victims of its
violence. I will return to the work of Anne Firor Scott in chapter 3, where I
consider her portrait of early southern feminists and also note the increased
attention to race evident in her scholarship in the 1990s.
52 These comments occur as the editors introduce an essay by Glenda Gilmore,
an essay very much invested in understanding how race and gender are inter-
woven in daily life in the South (9). While other essays in the anthology also
tackle the intersections of race and gender, the volume’s title, Taking Off the
White Gloves, reinscribes a focus on a particular version of white southern femi-
ninity.
53 See Clinton, ‘‘Contents under Pressure: White Woman/Black History.’’ The
essay is included in the collection Skin Deep: Black and White Women Write
about Race.
54 Walker’s work has been the subject of great controversy within the black com-
munity, debates that led to the withdrawal of her pieces from a show at the
Detroit Institute of the Arts, as well as to a Harvard symposium focused on
the uproar. Like Octavia Butler, Walker is also the recipient of a MacArthur
‘‘genius’’ grant. For more information on Walker’s career, see the Parkett folio
on her work.
55 In an interview with James Hannaham, Walker relates: ‘‘At some point in
Atlanta, I was with my then boyfriend, John, in the park, thinking we were
alone, but when we got back to the car there was a flyer from the Ku Klux
Klan, spelling out for him all the evils of black women, describing what sort of
peril he was in, and identifying stereotypes of disease and moral degradation.
That was an awakening for naive me. So I guess I needed a way to question
how these types of issues have been represented in art previously.’’ Walker re-
ceived her b.a. from Atlanta’s College of Art and then pursued an m.f.a. at
the Rhode Island School of Design. She cites works like Robert Colescott’s
George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware as important influences.
56 Eric Lott, Love and Theft, 37.
57 See ‘‘Pea, Ball, Bounce,’’ interview by James Hannaham. For an interesting
discussion of Walker’s self-portrait Cut, see Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw’s ‘‘Final
Cut’’ in the Parkett folio.
58 In her essay ‘‘Power and Repetition,’’ Christine Levecq provocatively reads
Kindred as engaging with the tropes of classical slave narratives. In his discus-
sion of the tv miniseries Roots (1977), Herman Gray both acknowledges the
series’ limits (particularly its figuring of black progress as sort of logical exten-
sion of the American Dream) and points out its key cultural work in creating
a ‘‘temporary but no less powerful transitional space within which to refigure
and reconstruct’’ representations of blackness (79). Published two years after

the series and three years after Haley’s book, Butler’s novel maneuvers within
this space, wrenching her representations of slaves away from an ideology of
the American Dream.
59 Delaney, Race, Place, and the Law, 34–36.
60 The absence of the specter of miscegenation in Scarlett is intentional, as the
Mitchell Trust expressly forbid Ripley to include any hint of interracial mixing
in her epic. In her work, Butler addresses the complexities of accommodation.
In interviews and in the novel, Butler troubles a 1960s Black Power view of ‘‘ac-
commodating’’ blacks as cowardly, asking us to think about the difficulties of
black life in other temporal and geographic zones. The novel notes that Sarah
was ‘‘the kind of woman who would be held in contempt during the militant
nineteen sixties’’ and calls into question a comfortable ‘‘moral superiority’’ in
relation to figures such as the ‘‘handkerchief head’’ and the ‘‘Uncle Tom’’ (145).
In an interview with Charles Rowell, she writes that during college she had
‘‘heard some remarks from a young man who was the same age I was but who
had apparently never made the connection with what his parents did to keep
him alive. He was still blaming them for their humility and their acceptance
of disgusting behavior on the part of employers and other people. He said, ‘I’d
like to kill all these old people who have been holding us back for so long. But I
can’t because I’d have to start with my own parents.’ When he said us he meant
black people, and when he said old people he meant older black people. That
was actually the germ of the idea for Kindred (1979). I’ve carried that comment
with me for thirty years. He felt so strongly ashamed of what the older gen-
eration had to do, without really putting it into the context of being necessary
for not only their lives but his as well.’’
61 Carol Stack powerfully chronicles the complexities of this return migration
in her book Call to Home.
62 Stephen Michael Best, ‘‘Game Theory: Racial Embodiment and Media Crisis,’’
234.
63 Blackness was hypervisible in both ‘‘Old’’ and ‘‘New’’ Souths, in both the overt
and covert visual logics of the pre– and post–Civil Rights eras. However, these
more recent modalities of representation evacuate the connections between
black and white on which novels like Gone with the Wind depended, a new
strategy for differently racist times.
C H A P T E R 2 . ‘‘ B OT H K I N D S O F A R M S ’’
1 See http://www.ngeorgia.com/tenn/bcm.html.
2 Here it seems appropriate to note Jameson’s now famous line in The Political
Unconscious that ‘‘history is what hurts’’ (102).
3 The first quotes are from a 1980s brochure advertising Confederama, then
located at 3742 Tennessee Avenue, in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Later quotes are
from the museum’s Web site at www.battlesforchattanooga.com. The tourist
site first opened in Tiftonia, Georgia, but after a few years moved to the

Chattanooga side of Lookout Mountain. After new owners changed the name
and redesigned the building in the early 1990s, they again moved the location.
For those not interested in Civil War history, the ‘‘convenient location’’ also
includes dioramas depicting Hernando de Soto meeting the Indians in 1540
and ‘‘the Last Battle of the American Revolution.’’ The space packs in quite a
bit of historic territory.
4 Meaghan Morris elaborates on the necessity of taking tourism seriously in her
essays ‘‘On the Beach’’ and ‘‘At Henry Parks Motel.’’ The tourism statistics were
reported in U.S. News and World Report, 7 August 1995, 42.
5 Yates tours the Vicksburg battlefield memorial in one section of her book Mis-
sissippi Mind: A Personal Cultural History of an American State. For some of the
limitations of such a personal history, see my discussion of her work and the
politics of home in chapter 4. Another interestingly gendered take on touring
Civil War history is provided by Bobbie Ann Mason’s ‘‘Shiloh,’’ in Shiloh and
Other Stories. In this short story, a trip to the battlefield reveals how monu-
mental history leaves ‘‘out the insides of history’’ (17). Mason continues to put
the insides back in history in her novel In Country, which provides a gendered
(and southern) perspective on the Vietnam War. In a scholarly vein, Eliza-
beth Young’s Disarming the Nation compellingly illustrates the war’s gendered
dimensions, particularly as they have played out in a literary terrain.
6 ‘‘Picture It: The Civil War’’ was published by the Mississippi Department of
Economic and Community Development, Division of Tourism Development,
P.O. Box 22825, Jackson, MS 39205, in 1991. The brochure is a thirty-page,
full-color description of ‘‘carefully preserved battle sites [that] testify to the
tragedy of a nation torn apart’’ (3). The pamphlet includes several pictures
and descriptions of serene, oak-bordered plantation homes, but more infor-
mation about these ‘‘time-capsule[s] of antebellum memories’’ (20) is available
in other Department brochures, including the one (entitled ‘‘Picture It: Mis-
sissippi Travel Planner’’) discussed in the previous chapter.
7 The epigraph is a comment made by Alice Yaeger Kaplan in her ‘‘Theweleit and
Spiegelman: Of Men and Mice,’’ in Remaking History, ed. Barbara Kruger and
Phil Mariani. Kaplan is discussing contemporary representations and memo-
ries of World War II, another ‘‘conflict’’ that gets endlessly refigured around
constructions of gender.
8 These phrases come from the Battles for Chattanooga Museum. I use the term
‘‘History’’ here to refer to that succession of matter through time that is acces-
sible to us only through the mediation of representation and consciousness.
The various histories (or, as some would say, historiographies) of the Civil War
constructed by W. J. Cash or Mississippi’s Division of Tourism are partial figur-
ings of History, and these enter into the symbolic field of culture. For a reading
of culture that derives from similar concepts, see Virginia Carmichael’s Fram-
ing History: The Rosenberg Story and the Cold War. She notes that ‘‘historiography
is a part of culture; culture is a part of history. . . . But culture is not reducible
to a result or secondary product of history; it also has an undelimitable power

to make history happen in certain ways’’ (224). I am interested less in defining
and debating this terminology than in tracing specific ways in which culture
is now making Civil War history happen in ‘‘certain ways,’’ and in exploring
how popular notions of history and of the historical circulate.
9 These quotes are taken from the editorial statement in the tenth-anniversary
issue of Blue and Gray magazine, whose slogan is ‘‘For Those Who Still Hear
the Guns.’’ David E. Roth, ‘‘Anniversary Message,’’ Blue and Gray, October
1992, 6. Though many of us may be unaware of the existence of such maga-
zines, they have entered into other avenues of popular culture through the
space of the Letterman show. One night, during his monologue, Letterman
held up a copy of Blue and Gray, read its slogan, and commented, ‘‘They must
be jumpy people.’’
10 The image of the rhizome that creeps about my text stems from the work of
Deleuze and Guattari, particularly in A Thousand Plateaus. Deleuze and Guat-
tari distinguish rhizomatic thinking from arborescent thinking (which is, more
or less, phallogocentric thinking; as I use it here, souvenir thinking resists the
rhizomatic). ‘‘The rhizome is alliance, uniquely alliance. . . . the fabric of the
rhizome is the conjunction, ‘and . . . and . . . and.’ . . . [It] know[s] how to
practice pragmatics’’ (25). For further descriptions of the rhizome, see ‘‘Intro-
duction: Rhizome,’’ 3–25 and the ‘‘R: Rhizome’’ 505–6. Though Deleuze and
Guattari rarely incorporate an explicit reading of gender into their own rhi-
zomes, I believe that rhizomatic thinking offers great potential within femi-
nist analysis and southern studies, for it allows one to think a multiplicity
of Souths rather than reifying the South into a fixed place via a lenticular or
nostalgic logic.
11 Michel Foucault, ‘‘Film and Popular Memory,’’ 102.
12 Roseanne Allucquére Stone, The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the
Mechanical Age, 39.
13 Both proponents and critics of on-line community and culture have noted the
Internet’s ability to free us from physical spaces, propelling us into, alternately,
freer virtual spaces or bottomless abysses of placelessness, but the construc-
tions of the cyber-rebels illustrate the ways in which virtual life serves instead
to forge new (and reactionary) relations to precise geophysical spaces. There’s
much to be gained by shifting our theories of cyberspace away from tropes of
‘‘play,’’ ‘‘multiplicity,’’ and ‘‘theater’’ toward explorations of ‘‘citizens,’’ ‘‘poli-
tics,’’ and ‘‘publics.’’ I further explore the limits of cyber-theory’s focus on dis-
embodiment in my ‘‘I’ll Take My Stand in Dixie-Net: White Guys, the South,
and Cyberspace,’’ from which this section is largely drawn.
14 Michael Hill has been a vocal defender of southern nationalism and has been
profiled in academic publications such as The Chronicle of Higher Education. He
describes the politics of the group as ‘‘paleoconservative’’ and claims that the
organization’s membership is ‘‘well over four figures’’ (Shea, A9).
15 Charles Reagan Wilson tracks the role of race in Lost Cause mythologies in
chapter 5 of his Baptized in Blood. He, however, reads the Lost Cause as provid-

ing ‘‘a foundation for Southern Identity that was related to, but separate from,
race’’ (118). He identifies the two pillars of southern identity as religion and
regional history, but to separate these pillars neatly from the racial systems
they upheld itself replays a kind of lenticular thinking. The contemporary in-
sistence of the neo-Cons that they only want to preserve ‘‘southern heritage’’
also replays this logic, neatly separating out some sense of the southern past
from its deeply racial histories. The stakes of this ‘‘southern heritage’’ are all
too clearly revealed when groups like the Southern League champion slogans
such as ‘‘No King but Jesus’’ at a rally on the eve of an event commemorating
Alabama’s Civil Rights marches.
16 Many of my academic peers grimace when I described this research project,
noting their distaste for ‘‘rednecks.’’ This reaction does suggest that the neo-
Confederate perceptions of ‘‘antisouthern’’ attitudes are not entirely imag-
ined. To view white southerners as inherently, equally, and intractably racist
is about as insightful as arguing that the Civil War had nothing to do with race.
17 George Lipsitz deploys this phrase in his work of the same title; he also struc-
tures a new sense of how regions travel by provocatively teasing out links
between Mississippi and California.
18 As I noted in the introduction, neither the journalists nor the neo-rebels would
likely see themselves as in the ‘‘same camp.’’
19 As much as we might learn from the neo-Confederate Web sites, it seems un-
likely that many of these sites could accommodate this wider view of the South
as racially diverse. Overt references to blackness would destabilize the care-
fully naturalized (i.e., white) universality of ‘‘southern heritage’’ that the sites
construct. What I am suggesting is that there are many ways to define south-
ern heritage, and that we need sites that narrate these other origin stories.
One might, for instance, begin with sites like those of the Southern Poverty
Law Center or the Griffith in context project currently under way at Geor-
gia Tech.
20 Over the last several years, the series has continued to garner much praise and
many awards. For a detailed account of the film’s critical and popular recep-
tion, see the gushing account in Teleliteracy: Taking Television Seriously, which
upholds the documentary as the best of tv. Interestingly enough, the series is
talked about as television; when it is discussed in that context, it is often to
uphold it as an example of all that television can be.
21 For an interesting reading of the cultural politics of Civil War reenactments,
see Elizabeth Young, Disarming the Nation.
22 In writing on place, Doreen Massey notes that ‘‘the politics [of place] lies not
just in the particular characteristics assigned to places . . . but to the very
way in which the image of place is constructed’’ (‘‘Double Articulation,’’ 114).
Commentators on the documentary have taken it to task for being both pro-
South and pro-North. The series doesn’t simply have a pro-South bias; rather,
it constructs a South to serve the nation. The narrative trajectory of the series
derives its force from a sense of tragedy and loss only ascribable to a nos-

talgia for a lost past, a South frozen in time as a key element of the nation.
Additionally, the ‘‘South’’ of the series is almost exclusively the white South,
particularly in the frequent commentary of popular historian Shelby Foote,
whose descriptions of the horror of southerners at the loss of the war surely
does not apply to black southerners.
23 Aine O’Brien, ‘‘Derelict Histories: A Politics of Scale Revised,’’ 135. O’Brien’s
discussion examines the way a popular Irish tourist site, Kilmainham Gaol
Museum, positions photography in the service of a particular nationalist nar-
rative. Importantly, O’Brien notes that documentary or historical photogra-
phy can also be seen to ‘‘reveal itself as unreal’’ (136), though she maintains
that this is more difficult when such photographs are used as ‘‘conveyors of a
total history.’’ The Civil War also frames its photographic ‘‘evidence’’ in order
to reinforce a specific and limited narrative of the nation.
24 Bill Farrell, ‘‘All in the Family,’’ 170.
25 Richard Dyer, ‘‘Into the Light: The Whiteness of the South in The Birth of a Na-
tion,’’ in Debating Dixie. For further critical responses to the documentary, see
the collection of essays entitled Ken Burns’s ‘‘The Civil War’’: Historians Respond.
The volume, as the title suggests, collects essays from prominent historians
(including C. Vann Woodward, Catherine Clinton, and Eric Foner) who de-
bate the impact and success of Burns’s work, as well as essays by the series
writer, Geoffrey Ward, and Burns himself. Most of the essays as gently critical,
though those by Foner, Clinton, and Leon Litwack take the series more firmly
to task. Both Foner and Litwack offer trenchant insights into the series’ treat-
ment of race. Additionally, Foner’s contribution, ‘‘Ken Burns and the Romance
of Reunion,’’ offers a critique of the series not unlike the one I am making here.
He writes: ‘‘Nor is it ever suggested [by Burns] that the abandonment of the
nation’s post-war commitment to equal rights for the former slaves was the
basis on which former (white) antagonists could unite in the romance of re-
union’’ (105). Foner emphasizes that the series devotes less than two minutes
to the era of Reconstruction even though ‘‘Reconstruction remains a touch-
stone and, hence, a continuing force in our lives’’ (109). Importantly, Foner
critiques an additive logic of history, arguing that ‘‘the issue here is not, pri-
marily, one of ‘coverage’ but of interpretation. Ignoring the actual history of
postwar America (which necessarily distorts understanding of the war itself )
arises from a vision of the Civil War as a family quarrel among whites’’ (112).
26 This quote comes from Barbara Ehrenreich’s foreword to Theweleit’s Male
Fantasies, xii. Although I do not undertake it here, a reading of Civil War sol-
diers’ letters and diaries along the lines of Theweleit’s work would undoubt-
edly prove quite fruitful, though I think important differences would exist
concerning figurations of the feminine between these texts and those of the
Weimar period. An attempt at such an analysis would certainly have profited
Burns’s documentary. For a further discussion of the term ‘‘homosocial,’’ see
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Between Men.
27 For a brief discussion of the problems of relying on Chesnutt’s diaries as the

voice of wartime womanhood, see George C. Rable, Civil Wars: Women and the
Crisis of Southern Nationalism, 2–3. Catherine Clinton’s contribution to the pre-
viously mentioned Ken Burns’s ‘‘The Civil War’’ (see note 25) points out many of
the spots in which Burns’s work overlooks women. Yet despite her critique,
her recent work, Tara Revisited, deploys a logic strikingly similar to that of The
Civil War.
28 For a critique of representations of southern women as loyal workers in the
service of the war, see Drew Gilpin Faust’s ‘‘Altars of Sacrifice: Confederate
Women and the Narratives of War.’’
29 For another reading (from the land of film theory) about the relationship be-
tween women and wartime, see Mary Ann Doane’s The Desire to Desire, 28–33.
She notes that during World War II, ‘‘femininity was intimately articulated
with a patriotic nationalism’’ (29).
30 See Chapman and Hendler’s Sentimental Men for an interesting challenge to the
notion that nineteenth-century sentimentality was strictly a feminine occupa-
tion. They present sentimentality as a nineteenth-century structure of feeling
with far-reaching implications for masculinity. Clearly, thinking through affect
for late-twentieth-century manhood is equally important.
31 My reading of the affective structures of The Civil War is informed by an ex-
panding body of scholarly literature on the emotions. Particularly valuable
was Barbara Koziak’s Retrieving Political Emotion.
32 Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis, 68.
33 Caren Kaplan, Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement, 33.
34 Burns’s position as television’s premier documentary filmmaker continues
with his successful multipart explorations of baseball and jazz, pastimes that
he also frames as American obsessions, structuring the three films as part of
a trilogy. Although neither of the latter two series achieved the broad popu-
larity of The Civil War, each did well for pbs broadcasts. These two documen-
taries more centrally feature race as an organizing principle, replicating our
national concession/obsession with locating blackness within the realms of
entertainment and sports. Both also deploy a model of history quite similar
to that structured by The Civil War, turning on carefully selected still images
and portraits of individual heroes, fixing the past firmly in times gone by via a
celebration of America’s uniqueness. For instance, Jazz devotes precious little
time to the art form after 1961 and ends in 1975, refusing to draw meaningful
connections between past and present, this rupture forming the ground for
the series’ own brand of a lenticular logic. Had the documentary not short-
circuited in the 1970s, Burns might have examined the global repercussions of
jazz today. The series’ relentless focus on jazz as an American form thus seems
to turn on Burns’s unwillingness to see the global structures and force of music
in the present. While Jazz nostalgically celebrates the improvisation inherent
in jazz as mode of musical expression, it fails to consider how this spirit lives
on today in forms like hip-hop. Fixing jazz as a mid-twentieth-century Ameri-
can form embalms its meaning much as The Civil War embalms the meaning of

national union forged in wartime. Nonetheless both Jazz and Baseball suggest
that Burns and his audience continue to struggle with blackness as an emo-
tive frame for defining the meaning of the nation. This is an intriguing and
important cultural turn, but sadly one that never comes fully to terms with
the relationship of black to white or past to present.
35 bell hooks, Yearning, 147. hooks articulates a concept of a political remember-
ing (as against a nostalgic longing).
36 As well as challenging both cinema verité and pbs approaches to history,
McElwee also implicitly calls Hollywood versions into question. Throughout
the film, McElwee (or various women) pursue the Hollywood embodiment
of southern manhood, Burt Reynolds. One scene pointedly contrasts Holly-
wood’s version of filmmaking to independent production when McElwee gets
unceremoniously tossed off of Reynolds’s movie set. The hype, stardom, and
security guards of Hollywood are pointedly contrasted to McElwee’s tactics.
When McElwee is describing being dumped by his girlfriend, he is pacing
around the empty loft of a friend in New York. Shot in black and white from
a low camera angle, the scene calls to mind the likes of Wavelength and other
1960s and 1970s avant-garde films. Sherman’s March implicitly critiques the self-
absorbed, whining, and often ahistorical nature of many of these films. For a
nice discussion of McElwee’s debt to cinema verité, see ‘‘When the Personal
Becomes Political: An Interview with Ross McElwee’’ in Cineaste.
37 For a discussion of the role of place and of home in notions of southernness,
see chapter 4.
38 In this paragraph, I link up Stuart Hall’s (and Laclau’s) notion of articulation
with the less obviously political notion of rhizomatic assemblage developed by
Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus. Although many (including Hall)
might be uncomfortable with this joining, Hall’s idea that articulation allows
us ‘‘to think the contingent, the non-necessary, connection between different
practices [and, I would add, places]’’ (53) nicely articulates with Deleuze and
Guattari’s notion of rhizomatic assemblages, which is also based on contin-
gency and multiplicity.
39 W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South, 54.
40 Scott MacDonald, ‘‘Southern Exposure: An Interview with Ross McElwee,’’
22.
41 James Clifford and George E. Marcus, Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of
Ethnography, 9.
42 For more on the difficult role of indigenous ethnography and its troubled re-
lation to identity politics, see chapter 4.
43 Glenda Gilmore notes that ‘‘W. J. Cash contributed disastrously to this legend’’
of southern masculinity, a tradition she tracks through more recent work like
Bertram Wyatt-Brown’s and Ted Ownby’s, scholarship, which while impor-
tant, defines ‘‘southern manhood by its extremes’’ (137–38). See Gilmore, ‘‘But
She Can’t Find Her [V.O.] Key.’’
44 MacDonald, ‘‘Southern Exposure,’’ 21. There has also been some speculation

in reviews of the film that McElwee reproduces problematic versions of the
male gaze in his almost obsessive tracking of the women. For instance, in two
scenes, the camera follows Pat’s swimsuited body as it glides through the water
in a manner not unlike a Hollywood film. This, however, is not a Hollywood
film, and I think the structures of identification operate differently. The appli-
cability of theories of visual pleasure to nonillusionary documentaries seems
to demand more attention.
45 Ellen Draper, ‘‘Sherman’s March,’’ 43.
46 Mary Layoun, ‘‘Telling Spaces,’’ 411.
47 Here I am thinking particularly of the work of Tania Modleski, Leslie Rabine,
and Janice Radway. Studies by feminist scholars such as Laura Mumford Stem-
pel and Patricia Mellencamp have argued that romance should be viewed more
cautiously. Mellencamp, for instance, insists that ‘‘sometimes this fairy tale
[of romance] becomes a horror story’’ (24). Laurie Langbauer writes in Women
and Romance that ‘‘not only are women exiled to romance, but even the pos-
sibility, when not derided, is appropriated by patriarchy. . . . Women and
romance [finally] collapse back into the male order, repeating and confirming
it.’’ (90–92). All of these scholars would recognize that the valences of ro-
mance as a popular discourse are variable and often contradictory. In the land
of cotton, the liberatory possibilities of romance may be even more tightly
circumscribed.
48 The film also provides an interesting document of feminism in the South, as
McElwee shoots a large rally in support of the era while he visits Karen. Popu-
lar representations of southern women do not usually include ten thousand
angry women protesters.
49 Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark, 66.
50 Although published by a small author-owned press as well as the larger Epic
Comics, Captain Confederacy follows a fairly ‘‘traditional’’ comic book form,
creating an alternative universe but not really deploying an ‘‘alternative comic’’
style to any large extent.
C H A P T E R 3 . S T E E L M A G N O L I A S , FATA L F L O W E R S , A N D D E S I G N I N G W O M E N
1 Segrest and Allison are lesbian feminist activists in the South, and both have
written about the degree to which their experiences as southern lesbians have
informed their suspicions about femininity’s role in the South. The quotes ref-
erenced can be found in Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina, 109, and in Segrest’s
My Mama’s Dead Squirrel: Lesbian Essays on Southern Culture, 63. Also see Allison’s
collections Trash and Skin, and Segrest’s Memoir of a Race Traitor.
2 Patricia Yaeger, ‘‘Edible Labor,’’ 152. For a reading that shares many insights
with Yaeger’s, see Diane Roberts’s piece on Southern Living magazine in Richard
King and Helen Taylor, eds., Dixie Debates: Perspectives on Southern Cultures.
3 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, 466.
4 This quote can be found on p. 211 of Smith’s insightful commentary on

southern culture, Killers of the Dream. Like Katherine Du Pre Lumpkin,
whose writing will be analyzed in the following chapter, Smith was an early-
twentieth-century white critic of the South’s apartheid-like society. Both
women recognized that the maintenance of southern racial oppression de-
pended on particular configurations of southern femininity, and both were
ahead of their culture’s time in linking gender and racial oppression (though
African American women such as Ida B. Wells had already made similar obser-
vations). Their work differs in that Lumpkin embraces Marxist theory, soci-
ology, and class analysis to a much greater degree than Smith, who tends to
psychologize the South.
5 Quoted in Abbott’s Womenfolks, 83.
6 This and several other accounts of southern women’s perceptions of regional
grace and hospitality can be found in Anastatia Sims’s work on southern club-
women in North Carolina.
7 In A Fine Romance, Patricia Mellencamp has convincingly described the per-
vasive nature of romance in twentieth-century life. Her understanding of ro-
mance figures it as both a genre (as in romance novels and women’s films)
and a wider cultural paradigm, one that is very widespread (108). My own
understanding of romance shares this emphasis; more specifically, I am less
interested in romance as a genre than in the way in which romance operates as
a basic structure of feeling that, in the South, is tied to discourses of both place
and femininity. Thus the romance of Gone with the Wind is at least as much about
Scarlett and Tara as it is about Scarlett and Rhett. In the South, the discourse
of romance is often played out on and around women’s bodies, particularly
those bodies still confined within latter-day versions of the mythic plantation
household.
8 See Mahnaz Kousha, ‘‘Race, Class, and Intimacy in Southern Households’’ and
Susan Tucker, Telling Memories.
9 The article on babies briefly discusses Mississippi’s troubling infant mortality
rates, if only to assure the reader that the problem is being addressed, but the
text is overshadowed by large, soft-focus portraits of cooing southern babies,
pictured in the arms of the doctors who delivered them. The whiteness of the
babies does little to illustrate the overwhelming degree to which Mississippi’s
infant mortality rates are tied to issues of race and poverty.
On another note, one of the weddings highlighted in the feature section is
that of actress Delta Burke to Gerald McRaney, even though this wedding took
place in Los Angeles. Burke’s delineation as ‘‘southern’’ figures in the coverage
of Designing Women throughout the popular press.
10 Maria LaPlace, ‘‘Producing and Consuming the Woman’s Film,’’ 159.
11 Linda Williams, ‘‘Something Else Besides a Mother,’’ 308.
12 Christine Gledhill, Home Is Where the Heart Is, 29.
13 Daniell’s poem is reprinted in her collection Fort Bragg and Other Points South,
11–14. In 1999, her memoir Fatal Flowers received the first Palimpsest Prize
(an award from Hill Street Press for favorite out-of-print books) and was re-

printed with a new afterword by the author. Praise for the book comes from
such diverse authors as Erica Jong, Pat Conroy, Dorothy Allison, Alice Walker,
and Pearl Cleage.
14 In her second memoir, Sleeping with Soldiers: In Search of the Macho Man, Daniell
writes that ‘‘in the Deep South, . . . certain crazily overdeveloped defenses—
manipulativeness and almost caricatured femininity—seem perfectly reason-
able and necessary to the women who have been brought up with them’’ (201).
15 See Sleeping with Soldiers, 201. See also Yaeger, Dirt and Desire, xiii.
16 Early in the memoir, Daniell highlights the occasion of her fortieth birthday
as the moment that prompted her reflections, recognizing it as near the age
‘‘of Mother’s first breakdown, the time after which it would be impossible to
remain the girl-woman I had been brought up to become’’ (5). Both Patricia
Mellencamp and Kathleen Woodward have examined the impact of aging in
women’s lives; for instance, in an essay in Discourse, Woodward notes the im-
portance of exploring work in which ‘‘aging bodies are no longer figured in
terms of youthfulness as a masquerade’’ (137). Daniell’s memoir suggests that
these insights have particular relevance for southern women, whose transi-
tions from youthful to matronly femininity often appear especially troubled.
17 I am arguing that the series’ creators, Linda Bloodworth-Thomason and her
husband, Harry Thomason, consciously refigure the South along these lines.
The two are southerners, and they have often commented on the need to rep-
resent the ‘‘new’’ New South, that is, the more ‘‘progressive’’ South of their pals
Bill and Hillary Clinton. Most of the efforts of their company, Mozark Produc-
tions, are set in the South. The pair also masterminded Clinton’s showpiece
film, A Man from Hope, at the 1992 Democratic Convention. This docudrama
presented a more old-fashioned South than does Designing Women, focusing on
Clinton’s ‘‘traditional’’ values.
In an article detailing the limited ‘‘southernness’’ of the Sugarbaker house
in the series, Ethel Goodstein takes the producers to task for promoting the
‘‘assimilation of the South into a larger North American culture’’ (183). I would
refrain from seeing such a process as necessarily bad (and would go so far as
to insist that a ‘‘pure,’’ ‘‘unassimilated’’ South has never existed). Still, as my
argument here will suggest, the series’ reconstructing of the South is unable
to account for the South’s diversity. Further, its happy focus on a growing
South does little to suggest that in reality, growth in Atlanta and the South
has taken place along specific demographic registers. For a discussion of these
uneven developments, see Bullard’s In Search of the New South and Rutheiser’s
Imagineering Atlanta.
18 See, for example, John Allen, Doreen Massey, and Allan Cochrane’s Rethinking
the Region.
19 My copy of the ad appeared in Southern Magazine in September 1987.
20 If contemporary representations of the South veer between old-fashioned and
newfangled, illustrating a certain mobility to regional markers, neither is the
‘‘meaning’’ of Cobb County fixed. While the county came to prominence for

its conservative politics (electing Newt Gingrich, enacting antigay statutes),
it is not uniformly affluent and suburban. Marietta fits those labels, but towns
like Smyrna were more working-class and rural. The post-1970s history of the
county might be read as a history of tensions between these two cities and
between the different aims of urban, suburban, and rural areas. Many of Cobb
County’s more controversial policies were motivated by white flight and de-
sires to build a buffer between the city of Atlanta and areas like Marietta, a
history that underscores that the definitions of the urban and suburban, as well
as of the region, are in tension and flux, best described as processes rather than
as steady states. Many thanks to Henry Jenkins for discussing his memories of
living in Cobb County with me.
21 See Charlotte Brunsdon, ‘‘Pedagogies of the Feminine: Feminist Teaching and
Women’s Genres,’’ in Screen. By the close of Designing Women’s final season, re-
runs of the series had been sold to two hundred different television stations in
the United States, which, at that time, was the widest syndication distribution
in history.
22 From its inception, Designing Women has largely been pitched to a female audi-
ence—early news reports referred to it as a ‘‘gyne-com’’ that used the bawdy
humor of the locker room from women’s perspectives—and its audience has
been loyal. During its first season, cbs decided to cancel the show, but in a
move well calculated by Bloodworth-Thomason, viewers were alerted to the
cancellation in a round of appearances by the stars and producers on another
tv space aimed at women: the daytime talk show circuit. Viewers for Quality
Television generated 50,000 letters of support for the series (49,000 more than
it got for Cagney and Lacey), and the show was renewed. It stayed in or near
the top ten until its final season.
For those unfamiliar with the format and characters on the show, the origi-
nal Designing Women consisted of four women and one man who run an interior
design firm, Sugarbaker’s, in Atlanta, Georgia. The principal characters were
the two sisters, Julia (Dixie Carter) and Suzanne Sugarbaker (Delta Burke),
Mary Jo Shively (Annie Potts), Charlene (Jean Smart), and Anthony (Mesach
Taylor). Smart and Burke left the show after the 1990–1991 season and were re-
placed by Allison Sugarbaker (Julia Duffy), who is Julia’s cousin, and Karlene
(Jan Hooks), who is Charlene’s younger sister.
23 For a detailed analysis of the popular press surrounding the series, see my ‘‘Dis-
regarding Romance and Refashioning Femininity’’ in Camera Obscura, which
details the degree to which this extratextual discourse labors to reinscribe
romance as the guiding principle of the sitcom. That article and this chapter
share many overlaps, though when I first drafted the former piece in 1991, I
was more optimistic about the series’ refiguration of southern femininity than
I am now.
24 A Channels article, ‘‘Designing Territorial Television,’’ comments that the
Mozark strategy was to market its sitcom by region. And it worked: in urban
southern areas, the show has a notably higher rating average than in similar

northern markets. It is also rerun more frequently in southern markets, where,
in some areas, it is possible to catch these women several times a day.
25 Several episodes open the way to reading the relationship of Mary Jo and Julia
as more than ‘‘just friends,’’ particularly when they dance together made up as
Joan Crawford and Bette Davis (in their Baby Jane roles). Certainly, the rela-
tionships between the women are tinged by a homosocial element that gets
noticed by many viewers.
Alex Doty makes an interesting argument about the ‘‘lesbian tenor’’ of sit-
coms like Laverne and Shirley, The Golden Girls, and Designing Women, arguing
that their ‘‘queerness’’ is more than just a subtextual thread. I am sympathetic
to Doty’s project, especially as it moves to make queerness something more
than just a reception practice. Still, there is a certain slippage throughout his
book as he moves between terms such as ‘‘lesbian,’’ ‘‘queer,’’ and ‘‘gay’’ that
sometimes makes it difficult to discern the specific gains to be made by calling
‘‘these sitcoms’ basic structuring principle . . . lesbian’’ while also acknowledg-
ing that they ‘‘deny culturally and erotically specific forms of lesbianism’’ (45).
See Doty, Making Things Perfectly Queer: Interpreting Mass Culture, esp. chap. 3.
26 In her 2002 Golden Globes acceptance speech, post 9/11, Sex in the City star
Sarah Jessica Parker referred to New York as the ‘‘fifth lady’’ in the sitcom,
signaling the importance of Manhattan as a symbolic force in that series’ rep-
resentations of women’s sexuality and friendships. You might also say that De-
signing Women deploys the new New South as a kind of character in the series,
creating the background on which the four central characters’ exploits take
shape and meaning. The series tries to sketch a different South than does Steel
Magnolias.
27 The feminist literature on femininity is wide-ranging, and I here refer less to
psychoanalytic theorizations of femininity than to accounts that focus on the
sociological or ideological constructions of femininity. One interesting excep-
tion to the work that reads femininity as tied almost exclusively to attracting
male desire is the work of Dorothy Smith. Although sometimes prone to see-
ing all the practices of femininity as somehow subversive, she does offer, all
in all, a nuanced reading of the multiple levels of agency that femininity can
provide.
28 Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World, 32, 66. Although Lefebvre
is not particularly attentive to gender in his reading of everyday life, he does
note that ‘‘[social] conditioning . . . succeeds mainly on the level of woman
or ‘femininity.’ Yet femininity also suggests feminism, rebellion and assertive-
ness . . . desires happen to figure among the irreducibles [or contradictions of
consumer culture], and the consumer, especially the female of the species, does not
submit [entirely] . . . to the programming of everyday life’’ (67). Thus Lefebvre
suggests that the way out of the programmed limits of everyday life may be
suggested by women’s desires vis-à-vis the everyday. The notion of the popu-
lar as a site of contradiction and repression also links up interestingly with
psychoanalytic notions of the function of the unconscious. I find his linkage of

feminism and femininity productive. See Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the
Modern World.
29 I will return to these southern feminist political strategies shortly. Hazel
Carby’s Reconstructing Womanhood offers an excellent analysis of the role of race
in the politics and discursive strategies of southern femininity.
30 The Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective, Sexual Difference: A Theory of Social-
Symbolic Practice, 84. The idea developed by the collective of a social-symbolic
space of practices among women seems to resonate with the women’s spaces
of Sugarbaker’s.
31 For a more detailed discussion of how the series reconfigures lines of power
and authority, see my ‘‘Disregarding Romance and Refashioning Femininity.’’
32 Patricia Mellencamp, ‘‘Situation Comedy, Feminism, and Freud: Discourses
of Gracie and Lucy,’’ 90.
33 Julia is initially thrilled to include the house on the tour of homes, but she
later critiques the tour as the plan of ‘‘a lot of bored housewives to turn the
South into a theme-park.’’ One suspects she would be more comfortable with
tours of Civil War sites than with the ‘‘tackier’’ tourism of Confederama.
34 For excellent discussions of the ties in the South between racial violence and
the idealization of white southern womanhood, see Angela Davis, Women, Race,
and Class, and Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, The Revolt against Chivalry.
35 This reading borrows from Trinh T. Minh-ha’s conception of insider/outsider
dynamics in her essay ‘‘Not like You/like You: Post-colonial Women and Inter-
locking Questions of Identity and Difference.’’
36 Norma Alarcón, ‘‘The Theoretical Subject(s) of This Bridge Called My Back and
Anglo-American Feminism,’’ 364. Alarcón’s essay contains a pointed and im-
portant critique of the move of many Anglo-feminists to insist on ‘‘unity
through gender,’’ noting that ‘‘one is interested in having more than an account
of gender; there are other relations to be accounted for.’’
37 Lauren Rabinovitz provides an interesting analysis of this episode in her article
‘‘Ms.-Representation: The Politics of Feminist Sitcoms.’’
38 Lillian Smith, Killers of the Dream, 121.
39 See Imagineering Atlanta, 62–63.
40 Minrose Gwin, Black and White Women of the Old South: The Peculiar Sisterhood
in American Literature, 4.
41 Two final presentations of women of color suggest the possibilities and limits
of Designing Women’s structuring community vis-à-vis reconstructed feminin-
ity. First, a fall 1992 episode championed Anita Hill, clearly taking her side
in the Clarence Thomas hearings. The episode incorporated footage from the
hearings, ending with a freeze-frame, close-up image of Hill. However, Hill
was ‘‘included’’ in the group only as a topical issue, not as a participant, and her
class status also made her ‘‘inclusion’’ easier, given the homogenizing middle-
classness of the series. Importantly, Hill’s case was seen as being primarily
about gender and not about race, replicating a move within much of white
feminism to appropriate Hill for white middle-class feminism. For a discussion

of this dynamic, see the essays by Kimberle Crenshaw and others in Race-ing
Justice, En-gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construc-
tion of Social Reality, ed. Toni Morrison.
Perhaps Designing Women’s difficulty in dealing with difference without ho-
mogenizing it is even better symbolized by the unseen, oft-ridiculed figure
of Consuela, Suzanne’s maid. Consuela was never actually represented in the
show, only referred to by others. In fact, the closest we get to an image of
her is Anthony in drag, pretending to be Consuela at her immigration hear-
ings. Here Anthony’s coding as gay man and Consuela’s figuring as domestic
help are collapsed into troubling and racist comedy. A recognition (or even a
representation) of her cultural differences and disparities proved impossible
within the show’s trajectory.
42 Robyn Wiegman has commented on this formulation in her American Anato-
mies. She also reminds us that there is no guarantee that ‘‘adding in’’ African
American women to the equation ‘‘women and blacks’’ will ‘‘retrieve the black
woman from her historical erasure’’ (76)—a point I reinforce in chapter 1.
43 This debate about the politics of performing femininity in many ways crystal-
lized around feminist theorizations of Madonna’s chameleonlike reinventions
of femininity and around deployments of Judith Butler’s theories of gender
trouble. A useful and brief recapitulation of this dispute can be found in femi-
nist philosopher Susan Bordo’s ‘‘ ‘Material Girl’: The Effacements of Postmod-
ern Culture,’’ an argument she extends in her book Unbearable Weight. For a
range of positions on these debates, also see the collection Fabrications: Costume
and the Female Body and the work of Hilary Radner. bell hooks has taken white
feminist adoration of Madonna to task in her book Black Looks, where she also
criticizes the politics of the film Paris Is Burning. Coco Fusco’s English Is Bro-
ken Here includes a defense of hooks’s argument about the film against Butler’s
own reading.
44 Drew Gilpin Faust, Mothers of Invention, 253.
45 See, for example, Davis’s Women, Race, and Class, where she illustrates the de-
gree to which suffragettes (both North and South) abandoned commitments
to racial equality in an attempt to garner southern support. When I teach
this book, my students are often horrified at the women’s actions and words.
They are much more resistant to recognizing similar strategies at work today,
preferring to assign the racism of feminism to an earlier era.
46 In her account of the white antilynching activist Jessie Daniel Ames, Hall
points out that Ames’s decision to manipulate ‘‘rather than directly challenge
the symbolism of white southern womanhood’’ was a regional strategy (249).
She goes on to imply that this tactic led the Association of Southern Women
to Prevent Lynching to a place of stasis, as ‘‘a force for social order but not for
fundamental social change’’ (253). Hall struggles throughout her study to rec-
ognize the good work of Ames and women like her while also recognizing the
limits of the choices they made. Hall’s project, published shortly after Scott’s
The Southern Lady and several years before Clinton’s The Plantation Mistress, dis-

plays a much more complex understanding of the interlocking trajectories of
race and gender. Scott’s more recent work, including Natural Allies, more fully
comes to terms with the racial dynamics of women’s organizations, illustrating
that feminism, like the South, is not fixed or unchangeable.
A more removed but pertinent example of the limits of playing up ‘‘south-
ernness’’ is found in David Roediger’s illuminating work Towards the Abolition
of Whiteness. In chapter 10, his study of labor unions in Louisiana, Roediger
chronicles one activist’s strategic use of ‘‘southern nationalism’’ and mascu-
linity in attempts to unite black and white workers, emphasizing the limits
of this strategy. Finally, this tactic ‘‘deepened his inability to see the situation
of Black workers in the South as different from that of white workers’’ (154).
Extending his analysis to gender, Roediger observes that ‘‘questions are raised
about how far a simple invocation of common [southern] manhood could go
in transcending race’’ (131).
47 Cotten’s ‘‘Reminiscences 1914’’ are housed with the Cotten family papers in the
Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina, Chapel
Hill. For a consideration of the public career of Cotten, see Anastatia Sims,
The Power of Femininity in the New South. In tracing the work of clubwomen in
North Carolina from 1880 to 1930, Sims notes that efforts to deploy femininity
in the service of public policy met with mixed results. While playing the lady
‘‘made powerful men more receptive’’ to women’s messages, ‘‘the power of
femininity was no match for the entrenched economic and political forces’’ in
the state (4–5).
48 For discussions of the era, see Mary Frances Berry’s Why ERA Failed: Politics,
Women’s Rights, and the Amending Process of the Constitution. Also see Margaret
Ripley Wolfe’s ‘‘The View from Atlanta: Southern Women and the Future.’’
49 Wolfe, ‘‘The View from Atlanta,’’ 144.
50 For example, the Primer celebrates the Junior League as ‘‘an incredible training
ground for a business career’’ and often comments on southern ladies who have
turned their training in femininity into sound entrepreneurial skills. In fact,
one section features a real ‘‘designing woman’’ from Atlanta: Ann Platz has ‘‘her
own design firm in Atlanta,’’ and though she is ‘‘still a southern belle,’’ she is also
‘‘considered savvy and successful’’ (133). bell hooks and others have stressed
that a feminism (academic or popular) that focuses on ‘‘liberal individualism’’
undermines the radical potential of feminist struggle. See her Feminist Theory:
From Margin to Center.
51 Charlotte Brundson, ‘‘Pedagogies of the Feminine: Feminist Teaching and
Women’s Genres,’’ 364–81. Cora Kaplan, ‘‘Wild Nights: Pleasure/Sexuality/
Feminism,’’ 160–84.
52 Of course, Cobb County is not monolithically conservative even as it remains
a hotbed of Republican support; some county residents protested the resolu-
tion (and faced death threats for their actions). For more on the demographics
and politics of Cobb County, including its historical importance to the kkk,
see Charles Rutheiser, 98–101.

53 José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications, 12.
54 This letter and other afla materials referenced here are housed in the Rare
Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library at Duke University. AFLA
sold its house in 1994, passing the archive on to Duke. An article by Al Cotton
honoring the ‘‘passing’’ of afla, and noting the tensions and connections be-
tween gay and lesbian communities in Atlanta, can be found in Southern Voice.
55 See Donna Minkowitz, ‘‘Mississippi Is Burning’’; Phyllis Chesler, ‘‘Sister, Fear
Has No Place Here’’; and Brenda Henson and Wanda Henson, ‘‘How the
Spirit Moves.’’
56 For an elaboration of Trinh’s concept of the inappropriate other, see her ‘‘Not
like You/like You,’’ in Anzaldúa’s Making Face, Making Soul. Also see other essays
in that collection, as well as Mohanty et al., Third World Women and the Poli-
tics of Feminism; Chela Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed; and Caren Kaplan
et al., Between Woman and Nation: Nationalisms, Transnational Feminisms, and the
State. Models developed across these works are not identical, but they each
strive to think through what Alarcón calls ‘‘identity-in-difference.’’
CHAPTER 4. FEELING SOUTHERN
1 Any Day Now features former Designing Women star Annie Potts as M. E. and
Lorraine Toussaint as Rene. One of the series’ cocreators, Nancy Miller, has
frequently commented on her own southern girlhood, first in Louisiana and
then in Oklahoma, as a motivation for the series. The writing staff for the
show has grown more diverse since the first year, and on the Web site message
boards, black and white writers talk about their conflicts over certain story
lines while encouraging dialogue. In the ‘‘Talk to the Writers’’ chat board,
writer Valerie Woods responds to one fan, ‘‘We, too, feel that it is important
for people to discuss, argue, disagree (and agree!) and still be respectful of
each other. Thanks again and keep watching.’’
2 For an insightful reading of the class dynamics of many present-day televisual
re-creations of the Civil Rights era, see Herman Gray’s ‘‘Remembering Civil
Rights: Television, Memory, and the 1960s.’’
3 This study, conducted by Bernard Cohen of the University of Pittsburgh, was
reported in the Shreveport Times in July 1991.
4 This dual sense of ‘‘going home’’ is true of both white and black southern-
ers, although black southerners’ ambivalence about the South as a region (or
of experiences of terror there) is understandably more pronounced, rarely
tinged by the nostalgic overtones prevalent in many white memoirs. Richard
Wright, Houston Baker Jr., Angela Davis, Carol Stack, and bell hooks, among
others, have all written about the varied registers of black ambivalence re-
garding southern homes. This chapter explores how white southern feelings
about home sometimes limit possibilities for social change and alliance across
races by wedding ambivalence to guilt.

5 For a consideration of white southern women’s autobiographies, see Peggy
Prenshaw, ‘‘The True Happenings of My Life: Reading Southern Women’s
Autobiographies.’’
6 Of course, a nostalgia for home frequently characterizes autobiographical
writings and popular discourses that are not southern, but the South as a region
appears particularly susceptible to such longings. A certain ‘‘down-homeness’’
is continually reasserted as an essential aspect of southern identity by both
southerners and nonsoutherners. This equation is as prevalent in criticism and
theory as it is in literature and popular culture, as is witnessed by the growing
number of collections with titles like Home Ground: Southern Autobiography.
7 My reading of the autobiographical selves constructed in these memoirs draws
from Sidonie Smith’s work on women’s autobiography. See, for instance, Sub-
jectivity, Identity, and the Body, 19.
8 When I write ‘‘Margaret and the narrator,’’ I do so to differentiate ‘‘Mar-
garet,’’ the character described in the passage, from the narrator constructed
by the memoir. For other perspectives on the mistress-servant dyad, see Anne
Moody’s Coming of Age in Mississippi, a memoir that paints a significantly differ-
ent view of the black domestic’s relationship to white women. This relation-
ship has been portrayed frequently and critically in African American women’s
fiction, as well. The excellent oral history collection edited by Susan Tucker,
Telling Memories among Southern Women, offers first-person accounts of this re-
lationship from both sides of the color line, as does Tera Hunter’s To ’Joy My
Freedom. It should be noted that Bolsterli’s depiction of this relationship is not
uncommon, even in our times. Popular films like Passion Fish, Something to Talk
About, and A Long Walk Home all refigure this image for contemporary viewers,
echoing earlier images of the mammy.
9 bell hooks also queries the limits of certain modes of feeling in her collection
Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black, observing that ‘‘it is possible to
name one’s experience without committing oneself to transforming or chang-
ing that experience’’ (108). Similar insights are offered by Ruth Frankenberg in
White Women, Race Matters when she notes that for white women ‘‘there was an
ever-present possibility of introspection becoming an end in itself or turning
into . . . individualism’’ (168). One of her study’s participants details that this
process often entails white women ‘‘confessing’’ an experience in which they
felt racist in order to be able to hear ‘‘You’re cleansed of certain sins, and now
you can go home.’’ Going home is not so easy for white southerners committed
to antiracist work.
10 A wide-ranging body of literature in the philosophy and psychology of the
emotions parses the varied attributes of concepts such as guilt, shame, and
remorse. As would be expected, there is much debate over the phenomeno-
logical, cultural, and moral implications of these emotions. For various takes
on these debates, see Gabriele Taylor, Jack Katz, Richard Wollheim, and Aaron
Ben-Ze’ev.

11 Klein distinguishes between persecutory and reparative guilt in Envy and Grati-
tude, as well as in several of her lectures, including ‘‘Our Adult World and Its
Roots in Infancy.’’
12 For useful analyses of Pratt’s essay, see Biddy Martin, ‘‘Lesbian Identity’’; and
Martin and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, ‘‘Feminist Politics.’’
13 Pratt begins ‘‘Rebellion’’ (and Rebellion) by recounting her love of the myths
of the South as a child, but she quickly moves on to rethink these, a process
that shares much with the Lumpkin memoir I will discuss hereafter. She also
takes on Gone with the Wind, noting that ‘‘when I was a child, Scarlett O’Hara
was a heroine as a woman within the myth of my land; today she is to me a
person ready to take what is offered to her as a woman who is white, a lady of
culture, with no caring about where the land came from or who has worked
it, willing to leave all others behind except her immediate family, in order to
seize a narrow place of safety that she foolishly thinks is secure: the place of
equality with white men’’ (72). Pratt has recently taken up the cultural roles
of femininity in illuminating ways in her poetry collection S/HE. Here Pratt
suggests that within certain cultures (like the transgendered community she
and her lover Leslie Feinberg embrace), playing at femininity has its rewards.
Within traditional southern culture, this is a difficult game for feminism, a
point that Rebellion and my own chapter 3 underscore. In the earlier text, she
also highlights an access to ‘‘heterosexual privilege’’ that a feminine lesbian
can gain by ‘‘passing’’ (143).
14 Pratt’s poem ‘‘The Segregated Heart’’ provides another revisioning of this
familiar scene of white and black southerners meeting, in language that under-
scores the limits of Bosterli’s take on Victoria, her black caretaker. Across
three sections titled ‘‘First Home,’’ ‘‘Second Home,’’ and ‘‘Third Home,’’ Pratt
rethinks her childhood relations with her black caretaker, Laura, noting the
walls that divide Laura from her and from her mother. The poem powerfully
illustrates the difficulty of going home, beginning with the line ‘‘Nowadays I
call no one place home.’’ Functioning as a lyrical condensation of the themes
of Rebellion, the poem looks to heal the segregated heart and to acknowledge
and reconcile distance and difference. As the poem moves through three sym-
bolic homes, the narrator longs for connection but also realizes she cannot
return to old homesteads; she learns to refuse certain inscribed patterns of
home, learns that homes are connected to larger systems of power, and also
learns ‘‘the anger of walls,’’ ‘‘the infinite loneliness of light’’ and of knowledge.
The trajectory of the poem moves through fragmentation toward connection,
but this is a connection forged of hard work and ‘‘the courage to speak across
distances.’’
15 For a useful reading of the many valences of ambivalence, see Hamid Naficy’s
The Making of Exile Cultures. There he notes that as a sign, ambivalence can ‘‘re-
veal the unconscious and inadvertent defense mechanisms at work; as strate-
gies they bespeak conscious and deliberate defensive tactics’’ (188).
16 The back cover of Walking Back Up Depot Street quotes Lillian Smith’s ‘‘The

Role of the Poet in a World of Demagogues.’’ Smith writes, ‘‘Your poet and
demagogue—and mine—inhabit the same terrain; poet transforming, bring-
ing new forms out of chaos, demagogue destroying. Each day, one or the other
wins a small battle inside us.’’ In her poetry and in her life, Pratt continues
this battle against the modern-day demagogues of the South.
17 Fred Hobson also notes the similarities between Lillian Smith and Katharine
Lumpkin in But Now I See.
18 Painter documents the atmosphere of violence and fear that permeated the
early twentieth century in her essay ‘‘ ‘Social Equality,’ Miscegenation, Labor,
and Power.’’ She points out that the worst of this particular wave of racial vio-
lence lasted until the late 1920s, with lynchings reported regularly through
1940 (64). For more on the cultural milieu of the early-twentieth-century
South, see chapter 1 of this book.
19 Lumpkin’s papers are archived at the University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill and include many of the contemporary reviews of The Making of a South-
erner from the popular press. The reviews were largely laudatory. The Saturday
Review of Literature deemed the memoir ‘‘a landmark in social literature’’ (13),
and Charles Lawrence wrote in the Cleveland Plain Dealer that ‘‘I, for one, feel
I know for the first time what slavery was like. And I also know how close we
still are to it.’’ Still, most of the reviewers are happy to confine the ‘‘race prob-
lem’’ to the borders of the South, missing Lumpkin’s larger insistence on the
South’s similarity to the rest of the nation. Lillian Smith’s review for the New
York Herald Tribune does place the problems of white supremacy in ‘‘Detroit or
India’’ as well as in Georgia, but Smith goes on to chastise Lumpkin for not
devoting more of her memoir to sex and sin in the South. Intent on her own
themes, Smith largely misses Lumpkin’s astute class critique, an issue that was
never much of a concern to Smith, at any rate. The archives also include letters
to Lumpkin from readers, some lambasting her as a ‘‘degenerate’’ or as ‘‘white
trash,’’ others praising her courage. A brief letter from W. E. B. Du Bois to
George Coleman notes, ‘‘I have read the book . . . and enjoyed it very much. I
hope it will be read widely.’’ My page references to Lumpkin’s book are from
the 1981 edition published by the University of Georgia Press. The book was
out of print for many years but has recently been reissued.
20 Lumpkin’s book proposal to Knopf is housed with her papers at unc and de-
tails the extensive research she undertook for the project. For a discussion
of the relationship between individual and community in southern women’s
writing, see Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, ‘‘Between Individual and Community:
Autobiographies of Southern Women.’’
21 Here I depart from Hobson’s reading of Lumpkin’s autobiography in But Now
I See. He expresses uncertainty as to whether Lumpkin’s tone is ironic, a view
dependent on his larger argument that she cannot come to critique her father.
But Lumpkin is writing a tale that exceeds the boundaries of the familial; the
father here is also part and parcel of the system of white supremacy she calls
into question, and thus the critique of the father is implicit. This implicitness

is part of a larger strategy of mimetic autobiography, a point to which I will
return.
22 For a brief discussion of the efforts of the ywca in the South during the period
of Lumpkin’s involvement, see Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Revolt against Chivalry.
She discusses the regional tactics used by the organization and its eventual call,
by 1933, for ‘‘basic changes in our economic and educational institutions, our
legal systems, our religious organizations, and in our social customs’’ (104).
Hall also briefly details Lumpkin’s role as student secretary for the Southern
Division of the National Student Council (103). Many southern activists—
both black and white—began their activism under the aegis of the church.
For a discussion of the rhetorical power of the notion of ‘‘social equality’’
during the period, see Nell Irvin Painter, ‘‘ ‘Social Equality,’ Miscegenation,
Labor, and Power.’’ Painter defines social equality in the essay and illus-
trates its use by both black and white men of different classes in the early-
twentieth-century South. She does, however, suggest that the struggle over
social equality was ‘‘an affair of men’’ (60). Lumpkin’s memoir highlights the
young women who were also engaged in these debates.
23 In her brilliant essay ‘‘Open Secrets,’’ Jacquelyn Dowd Hall describes Lump-
kin’s style as both elliptical and plain, noting that ‘‘plainness . . . has its advan-
tages’’ (117).
24 Lumpkin, in fact, comments in her memoir on her reaction to The Birth of a
Nation, which she saw on its release in 1915 during the early years of her work
with the ywca. She notes that the film produced a strong affective response
of nostalgia within her even as she was consciously critical of the myths it
perpetuated. Such a reaction suggests that it is equally as important to study
texts like Gone with the Wind as it is to study revisionary histories in order to
unpack the appeal of the South’s romantic fantasies and to examine their ar-
ticulation with conservative narrative scenarios. Studying these two types of
texts together can thus inform our understanding of both.
Lumpkin’s awareness of the strong hold of the myths of southern woman-
hood is further illustrated by her own research. Her 1919 master’s thesis from
Columbia University was entitled ‘‘Social Interests of the Southern Woman,’’
a project that looks at ‘‘the woman and women’s ‘sphere’ ’’ in order to ex-
amine the ‘‘ ‘traditional attitude’ toward her as it existed in the South’’ (38).
She examines the rhetorical flourishes of Thomas Nelson Page and others in
praise of southern womanhood and notes the popular southern reaction of
horror ‘‘at hearing of women in the North being employed for useful purposes’’
(38). Finally, she expresses hope that a new southern woman is emerging, one
less bound by the strong arm of tradition. In an oral history conducted with
Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Lumpkin attributes her early research and turn to activ-
ism at least partially to ‘‘the energies and activism that came out of the woman’s
suffrage movement’’ (74).
25 Earlier in the memoir, Lumpkin has already illustrated her understanding of
southern etiquette. She writes, ‘‘Few Negro sins were more reprehensible in

our southern eyes than ‘impudence.’ Small child though I was, I knew this fact.
I knew ‘impudence’ was intolerable’’ (132). This observation is sparked after
the young Lumpkin sees her father beating their black cook. It is worth com-
paring Lumpkin’s treatment of this event with Bolsterli’s depiction of a similar
father-daughter moment. See Born in the Delta, 74.
In Black Boy, Richard Wright describes his understanding of ‘‘knowing one’s
place’’: ‘‘The white South said I had a ‘place’ in life. Well, . . . my deepest
instincts made me reject the ‘place’ assigned me’’ (380).
26 See, for instance, works by Glenda Gilmore, Claudia Tate, Hazel Carby, Eliza-
beth Young, and others. Other scholars, including Kevin Gaines and Tera
Hunter, also note the limits of such a class- and race-based politics of appro-
priate femininity.
27 For instance, during her oral history with Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Lumpkin
notes that ‘‘I felt raw’’ learning the revisionist history of the South. In Killers
of the Dream, Smith writes that southerners felt exposed when the ‘‘old south-
ern mold . . . cracked wide open’’; southerners thus would resist this ‘‘stark
knowledge’’ like ‘‘a touch on a raw nerve’’ (228). Their acknowledgment of the
pain inherent in crafting new modes of southern whiteness is an important
aspect of moving from a persecutory guilt toward a reparative one. Thus their
memoirs function as powerful scenes of instruction.
28 These letters are housed with Lumpkin’s papers in the unc archives. See
series 1, folders 1 and 2.
29 My thoughts here draw from both Paul Gilroy’s Against Race and Chela Sando-
val’s Methodology of the Oppressed. For an example of Lumpkin’s work on labor
issues, see Child Workers in America, jointly authored with Dorothy Douglas.
This book argues for a national policy on child labor reform and displays a nar-
rative strategy not dissimilar to that of The Making of a Southerner. The study
begins with emotional portraits of exploited child laborers, both U.S.-born
and immigrant, ‘‘rationally’’ critiques various arguments against reform, and
builds up to a powerful and scathing critique of the ‘‘leisureliness’’ of middle-
class reform efforts (268). They insist we must learn from the working-class
efforts in reform and move forward with haste.
30 My talk looked at Elvis’s appropriations of blackness as well as at his fasci-
nation with black culture. Two useful examinations of Elvis and race may be
found in Erika Doss, Elvis Culture: Fans, Faith, and Image; and Pete Daniel, Lost
Revolutions: The South in the 1950s.
31 See, for example, Gael Sweeney’s take on Elvis. While her account of Elvis’s
‘‘white trashness’’ is lively and fun to read, it tends to gloss over the often racist
realities of white trash culture in favor of a reading of the transgressive na-
ture of destabilizing class boundaries. I wonder if many of those ‘‘embodying’’
the white trash culture that the cultural critic willingly celebrates would even
identify themselves as white trash. Certainly, I spent much of my childhood
worrying that someone might apply the label to me or to my relatives, several
of whom lived in trailer parks. There’s a tendency in Sweeney and other crit-

ics to romanticize or celebrate ‘‘white trash’’ culture as subversive. Certainly,
before we condemn it, we should think about how much our reactions are
conditioned by the demands of ‘‘good taste.’’ But white trash culture is not all
good, and particularly in the South, it is closely tied to a racial history that is
troublesome and reactionary (as is much of middlebrow or highbrow culture).
32 See, for instance, Helen Taylor’s recent book, Circling Dixie.
33 Daniel avoids the term ‘‘white trash’’ culture, instead focusing on ‘‘lowdown
culture,’’ and presents a more evenhanded portrait of this group than the crit-
ics of white trash studies mentioned earlier. Nonetheless, in the second section
of his book, he also has a tendency to celebrate the ‘‘lowdown’’ for its inher-
ent transgressiveness that sometimes impedes his ability to see the unequal
distributions of power shaping the moments of racial connection he tracks.
34 Houston A. Baker Jr., Turning South Again: Re-thinking Modernism/Re-reading
Booker T., 98.

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INDEX
Abbot, Shirley, 47, 149, 150, 192 Battles for Chattanooga Museum,
Alarcón, Norma, 202, 282 n.36 95–101, 110, 116, 127
Allen, James, 2–3 Baym, Nina, 19
Allison, Dorothy, 150 Best, Stephen Michael, 93
Amazon.com, 81, 124 Bhabha, Homi, 243
Ambivalence, 93, 172–74, 216, 227, The Birth of a Nation, 61, 119, 125, 164,
231, 245, 253, 286 n.4 240, 290 n.24
American Music Show, 194 Bishir, Catherine, 44–45
Antiracist activism and identities, 7, Black activism and agency, 31, 34, 56,
232–33 57, 60, 87, 89, 145, 154, 186, 222,
Any Day Now, 17, 209–15, 245, 248; and 238, 242, 245, 255, 267–68 n.29
cross-racial contact, 213–14; and Blackness: as American obsession,
feeling southern, 214–16, 229; and 25; displaced, 27, 28–29, 70–73,
femininity, 210–11; and historical 78, 81, 100, 110, 114–15, 126, 164–
memory, 211–12; opening sequence, 65, 190; as emotional texturing, 6,
210 57–60, 66, 120, 138–39, 144–45,
Anzaldúa, Gloria, 202 185–86, 217, 221–23, 229, 239, 251;
Applebome, Peter, 28–29, 106, 114 and hypervisibility, 92–93, 118, 250,
Athenaeum Rectory, 40 271 n.63; as mise-en-scène, 45, 51,
Atlanta (Ga.), 48, 61–62, 83, 175–76, 154, 221
186, 193–95 Blaze, 16
Atlanta Feminist Lesbian Alliance The Blue and the Gray, 72
(afla), 197–98 Bolsterli, Margaret Jones, 220–25,
Atlanta race riots of 1906, 48 227–29, 235
Aunt Jemima, 267–68 n.29 Born in the Delta. See Bolsterli, Mar-
Autobiographical subject, 220, 221, garet Jones
224, 230, 234, 240 Bourdieu, Pierre, 150–51, 157, 172
Autobiography, 217–52 Boutiquing the South, 9, 37. See also
Tourism
Baker, Houston, Jr., 255 Bowers, Betty, 193, 195–96
Baldwin, James, 51 Brasell, Bruce, 10
Bastard Out of Carolina (Allison), 150 Brown, Elsa Barkley, 10, 82
Brownmiller, Susan, 20, 24, 153, 180 Clinton, William Jefferson, 112,
Brundson, Charlotte, 176, 192 280 n.17
Burns, Ken, and The Civil War, 27, 30, Cobb County (Ga.), 176, 186, 195,
114, 115–27, 128, 137, 142, 144– 280–81 n.20, 285 n.52
46, 173, 188, 209, 245; emotional Cole, Lewis, 121
registers in, 117–18, 123–27, 212, Commission on Interracial Coopera-
250; praise for, 115–16, 121; repre- tion, 62
sentational strategies in, 117–18; Confederama. See Battles for Chatta-
and representations of violence, nooga Museum
121–23; and slavery, 115–16; and Confederate Embassy, 105, 109, 146
tourism, 116–17; and white man- Confederate flag, 33–37, 42, 107, 112–
hood, 123–24; and white national 13, 246; Georgia’s new design, 34
union, 119–21 Confederate Network, 107
Butler, Octavia, 86–94, 118, 145–46, Cotton, Sallie Southall, 191
187, 251, 252, 254 Counterpublics, 111–12, 202–3
Byrd, James, 74 Crimes of the Heart, 16
Cripps, Thomas, 58
Camp Sister Spirit, 198–203, 219, 243, Cross-racial contact, 6–7, 11, 29–31,
245, 251 40, 113–15, 138–39, 145–46, 154,
Captain Confederacy (Shetterly), 141–46, 158, 166, 184–87, 208, 213–14, 222–
243, 245, 251 23, 228, 232–33, 239, 245, 249–50,
Carby, Hazel, 24, 60, 64, 77, 189, 261 252–53, 255; in Gone with the Wind,
n.23 58–60; in Kara Walker’s art, 83; in
Cash, W. J., 11, 115, 130, 136 Kindred, 88–92
Center for the Study of Southern Cut, 86
Culture, 9
Charleston (S.C.), 68–69 Daniel, Pete, 254
Chestnut, Mary Boykin, 122 Daniell, Rosemary, 168–74, 196, 227,
Christian Right, 196 232, 243, 251
Cinema verité, 128 Davis, Angela, 17, 64, 136, 191
Civil War, 17, 51, 107; during Civil Decade of hope, 62, 254
Rights era, 97; and historical Deliverance (Dickey), 201, 259 n.17
memory, 99–101, 117–18; maga- Designing Women, 16, 30, 174–89, 191,
zines, 102–3; romance of, 95, 103; 209, 215, 229, 243, 251; and con-
and white national union, 97–98, structed femininity, 178–82; and
100, 119–21, 123–26, 139–40; and female friendships, 178, 181; and
women, 100, 122–23, 134, 137 liberal feminism, 181–82, 186–87;
The Civil War. See Burns, Ken and race, 182–87, 251; and role of
Clapp, J. W., 72 Anthony, 182–85, 191; and romance,
Class: as emotional texturing, 165 176–78
Clinton, Catherine, 76–81, 95, 100, De Sousa, Ronald, 214
101, 183, 190, 219 Dixieland Ring, 107
Clinton, Hillary, 181, 280 n.17 Dixie-Net, 107–8, 146
312 Index
Doane, Mary Ann, 21 Faulkner, William, 11, 31, 39, 205, 217
Dollywood, 40 Faust, Drew Gilpin, 19, 81, 82, 190
Drag queens, 193–96, 201–3 Femininity: definitions and examples,
Draper, Ellen, 134 21, 163, 169–71, 180, 226–27, 243,
Driving Miss Daisy, 16, 158 261 n.26, 282 n.27; and feminism,
Duke, Daisy, 159 5, 20–24, 53, 75, 156–58, 174,
Dukes of Hazzard, 174, 259 n.17 176, 178–82, 186–87, 187–93, 197–
Dunning School, 17 98, 241–43, 251; masquerade and
Dunye, Cheryl, 268 n.29 performance, 21–24, 53–55, 64,
Dupree, Marcus, 219 152–53, 157, 169–72, 178–82, 188,
Dyer, Richard, 61, 112, 114, 119 240–43
Dyke Tour of Homes, 198 Festival of Violence (Tolnay and Beck),
Dyson, Michael Eric, 27 265–66 n.12
Fields, Barbara, 120–21
Easy Rider, 259 n.17 Focus on the Family, 195–96
Egenriether, Ann, 53 Foote, Shelby, 123
Eisenstein, Zillah, 25 Foreman, Clark, 62
Election, 2000 Presidential, 100, 247, Fossett, Judith Jackson, 10, 267 n.23
255 Foucault, Michel, 104
Elshtain, Jean Bethke, 115, 122–23 Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth, 61
Emancipation Proclamation, 2000, 82, Frankenberg, Ruth, 263 n.33, 268 n.41,
84–85 287 n.9
Emotions: as orientation to world, 32, Frank’s Place, 17
215; as paradigm scenarios/scenes Fraser, Nancy, 111
of instruction, 214–16, 219, 228, Freemississippi.org, 105, 113
246, 253; and southern feel- Freikorps soldiers, 121
ings/feeling southern, 5, 30, 32–33, Fried Green Tomatoes, 16
112–15, 120, 124–27, 144, 158, 167–
68, 202–4, 208–9, 214–16, 224–25, Gillespie, Michele, 80
228–32, 235, 245–47, 252–53; and Gilmore, Glenda, 10, 82
structures of feeling, 59–60, 245 Gilroy, Paul, 30
Equal Rights Amendment, 75, 181, Gingrich, Newt, 28, 112, 114, 174, 176,
192–93, 197–98 195
Etiquette, 149–58, 170–72, 226– Gledhill, Christine, 163
27, 229–30, 235, 241–43, 252–53, Globalization, 2, 12, 18, 75, 98, 158,
290 n.25 247, 254
Evans, Sherman, 35–37 Golden Girls, 16
Evening Shade, 16, 132 Gone with the Wind (Mitchell), 16, 25,
Everybody’s All-American, 16 26, 44, 47–65, 76, 80, 86, 87, 89,
93, 112, 138, 163–64, 216, 221–23,
Farrell, Bill, 119 232–34, 245; and cross-racial con-
Fatal Flowers (Daniell), 168–74, 178, tact, 58–60; film v. novel, 47, 50,
180, 187–88, 218 63; Klan raid section, 62–63, 268
Index 313
Gone with the Wind (continued) ‘‘Identity: Skin Blood Heart.’’ See
n.33; race and criticism, 63–65; Pratt, Minnie Bruce
and representations of slavery, 51– Identity politics. See Politics of identity
52, 60; and structures of feeling, I’ll Fly Away, 17
59–60; and themes of modernity, Imitation of Life, 39
48, 58 Indigenous ethnography, 131, 138
Gray, Herman, 213, 270 n.58 Innovation within tradition, 30,
Griffith in context, 274 n.19 244–47
Guilt, 6, 33, 142, 207–8, 214–16, 217, Ireland and Irishness, 70–72
223–24, 247, 250–51; and account-
ability, 144, 208, 224–25, 228–29, Jones, Anne Goodwyn, 53, 64
245–47, 251–53; as anger, 6, 33, Joyner, Charles, 29
113–14, 207–8, 224, 246–47, 250; as
melancholia, 33, 120, 124–26, 251 Kaplan, Alice Yaeger, 101
Gwin, Minrose, 60, 187 Kaplan, Caren, 125, 242
Kaplan, Cora, 54, 192–93
Hale, Grace, 10 Kelley, Robin D. G., 82
Hall, Jacquelyn Dowd, 136, 191, 243– Kenan, Randall, 205–8, 247, 248, 250,
44, 284 n.46 252
Hall, Stuart, 260 n.19, 277 n.38 Kindred (Butler), 86–93, 118, 145–46,
Harling, Robert, 159 187, 245, 251
Hawkins, Harriet, 53 Kirby, Jack Temple, 14, 72, 74
Heart of Dixie, 16 Kirby, Lynn, 121
Helms, Jesse, 16, 254, 255, 259 n.16 Klein, Melanie, 225
Henson, Brenda and Wanda, 198–203, Ku Klux Klan, 112, 151, 255, 270 n.51;
243 and Gone with the Wind, 62; and
Heritage Preservation Association, Neo-Confederates, 111
107, 111
Heritage violations, 107, 111 La Grange (Ga.), 14
Hill, Anita, 283–84 n.41 LaPlace, Maria, 161
Hill, Michael, 107 Laplanche, Jean, and Jean-Betrand
History: academic v. popular, 33, 76, Pontalis, 54
79–80, 82, 130, 140, 212; and au- Layoun, Mary, 136
thenticity, 101–3, 118, 129, 250; as Lee, Robert E., 98, 118–19, 133
rhizomatic, 104, 129, 244; and the Lefebvre, Henri, 180
souvenir, 103–4 Lenticular logics of visibility, 7, 25–
Hobson, Fred, 214, 217, 224, 240, 27, 93, 151, 190, 203, 249–53; and
289–90 n.21 additive mode, 26, 78, 80, 82, 118,
Homeplace. See Southern homes 120, 124–26, 186, 188, 219, 251; and
hooks, bell, 9, 129, 261 n.23, 287 n.9 overt/covert strategies, 7, 25, 63,
Horwitz, Tony, 28, 106, 114 65, 70, 73, 86, 110, 115, 126, 207,
House of Blues (Los Angeles), 1–2, 12 212, 220, 223, 247, 250; and sepa-
Hunter, Tera, 10, 82 ratist mode, 27, 28–29, 70–73, 78,
314 Index
81, 100, 110, 114, 115, 126, 164–65, 30, 127–40, 251; and blackness,
188, 190, 214, 250–51; as stasis, 28, 138–40; and The Civil War, 128–29,
30–31, 93, 249–50 130, 139–40; and femininity, 134–
Lenticular postcards, 26, 39, 83, 100, 38, 171; and historical memory,
250 127–29; and indigenous ethnog-
Let the Dead Bury Their Dead. See Kenan, raphy, 131, 138; and masculinity,
Randall 131–33; and southern romance,
Lipsitz, George, 112, 255 136–37
Lost Cause, 17, 44–45, 49, 54, McGill, Ralph, 32–33
151 Mellencamp, Patricia, 169, 182,
Lott, Eric, 83 279 n.7
Lumpkin, Katharine Du Pre, 233–47, Mise-en-scène of southernness, 12, 42–
252, 254, 255; and black femininity, 45, 150–51, 252; and fantasy, 54, 279
241–43; and Margaret Mitchell, n.7
233–34; and models of alliance, Miss Firecracker Contest, 16
245–47; her research, 242–43, 290 Mississippi Burning, 146
n.24, 291 n.29; her sexuality, 243– Mississippi (Magazine), 156, 158
44; and strategic southernness, Mississippi Mind. See Yates, Gayle
237, 240–43, 251; and ywca, 237, Graham
241–42, 246 Mitchell, Margaret, 48, 61–63, 233–34,
Lutz, Catherine, 214 255. See also Gone with the Wind
Lynching, 48, 56 Mitchell, May Belle, 48
Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, 202
Madonna, 53, 188, 249 Morley, David, 2, 12
Making of a Southerner. See Lumpkin, Morris, Meaghan, 258 n.8
Katharine Du Pre Morris, Willie, 217, 219
Mammy, in Gone with the Wind, 51, Morrison, Toni, 24, 26, 52, 73, 112,
52–57, 57–60, 138, 144; and the 139, 222
production of white femininity, Muñoz, José, 196
55–57
Mammy, in Scarlett, 66, 68 Naficy, Hamid, 288 n.15
Mammy, the: and domestic labor, 47, Natchez Pilgrimage, 40–42, 74
154–56, 222, 287 n.8 Natchitoches (La.), 164
Manners. See Etiquette Neo-Confederates, 28, 106–14, 116,
Marley, Bob, 30 126, 142, 144, 146, 158, 196, 203,
Masculinity, white, 110–14, 123–24; 209, 224, 228, 246, 250, 255; and
homosocial, 121–22; and masquer- doubled address, 110–11; and eth-
ade, 131–33 nicity, 111–12; guilt and anger of,
Mason, Bobbie Ann, 272 n.5 113–14, 246
Masquerade. See Femininity New media, theories of, 105–6, 107
Matlock, 16 Nineteenth Amendment, 192–93
McDaniel, Hattie, 266 n.17 Nostalgia, 6, 9–10, 218–20, 231, 246,
McElwee, Ross, and Sherman’s March, 250; imperialist, 9, 125; and melan-
Index 315
Nostalgia (continued) Racial economies of visibility. See
choly, 98, 124–26, 139–40, 250; and Lenticular logics of visibility
mourning, 173–74 Reed, John Shelton, 9
NuSouth, 35–37 Reynolds, Burt, 131–32, 259 n.17, 277
n.36
Oak Alley Plantation, 43, 88 Ripley, Alexandra, 65, 92
O’Brien, Aine, 118 River Road Plantations, 40, 42, 92,
O’Brien, Kenneth, 64 158
O’Connor, Flannery, 11, 104 Riviere, Joan, 21–22, 53, 157
Odum’s Trailer Park, 194–96, 202, 251 Roberts, Diane, 39
O’Hara, Scarlett, 112, 157, 163, 240; as Robins, Kevin, 2, 12
collectible, 3; and femininity and Roediger, David, 17, 70, 285 n.46
masquerade, 49, 53–55, 64; in Gone Roots (Haley), 87, 270 n.58
with the Wind, 49; in Scarlett, 66–74; Rosaldo, Renato, 9, 125
and/as Tara, 50–51, 216. See also RuPaul, 194, 203
Gone with the Wind Rutheiser, Charles, 175–76, 193
Oprah, 199–201, 203, 254
Orr, Laura, 151 Saar, Bettye, 267–68 n.29
Ovett, Mississippi, 198–201 St. Cecelia Society, 150
Savannah, 12, 16, 27, 75
Page, Thomas Nelson, 151 Scarlett, 16, 25, 65–75, 82, 126, 146,
Painter, Nell Irvin, 9, 82, 233, 267 n.27 165, 188, 203, 209, 214, 243, 250;
Paris Is Burning, 188 and Charleston, 68–69; and the era-
Peek, DeAundra, 194–96, 202, 243, sure of blackness, 68; and ethnicity,
251 70–73; as miniseries, 16, 65; and
Petro, Patrice, 262 n.28 tourism, 66
Plantation. See Southern homes; Tara Schwartz, Maryln, 65, 149, 152, 156
The Plantation Mistress (Clinton), 76–78, Schwarzkopf, Norman, 123
183, 190 Scott, Anne Firor, 189–92, 269–70 n.51
Politics of alliance, 30–31, 233, 239, Segrest, Mab, 150, 217
245–47, 252–53, 255; and mobility Sex, Lies, and Videotape, 16, 158
v. stasis, 31 Shag, 16
Politics of identity: sameness v. differ- Shared traditions. See Cross-racial
ence, 27, 29, 31, 37, 93, 189, 202–3, contact
213, 246–47, 251–52; and separat- Sherman, William Tecumseh, 127, 128,
ism, 107, 114–15, 132, 201–3, 214, 132–33
232, 250 Sherman’s March. See McElwee, Ross
Pratt, Minnie Bruce, 225–33, 237–39, Shetterly, Will, 141, 145. See also
243, 244–47, 251–52, 254, 255 Captain Confederacy
Presley, Elvis, 247–49 Sidewalks: as social interfaces, 55–57
Pyron, Darden, 48 Slattery, Emmie, 57
Slavery!, Slavery!, 82
Quintero, Angel, 35–37 Smith, Lillian, 151, 153, 157, 185, 205,
316 Index
214, 217, 226, 232, 240, 246, 288 Stack, Carol, 269 n.48, 217 n.61
n.16 Steel magnolia. See Southern lady: as
Smith, Sidonie, 234, 287 n.7 steel magnolia
South: and economic growth, 13–14, Steel Magnolias, 16, 158–68, 172–73,
61–62, 69; and imagined authen- 177, 180, 187–89, 201, 214, 229, 243,
ticity, 1–2, 12–13, 18, 30, 98, 167, 250; and female friendships, 162;
245, 248, 253–54; imagined role in feminism and femininity, 163–64;
nation, 2, 3, 16–17, 201, 253–54; and melodrama, 159, 161–63, 167
mobility v. stasis, 31, 35, 104, 156, Stewart, Susan, 103–4
175, 194–95, 201, 206, 226, 230– Stone, Sandy, 107
31, 245–47, 253–54; as monolith, Stone Mountain (Ga.), 98
9, 18, 238, 253; in 1980s and 1990s Structures of feeling. See Emotions
media, 16–17, 198–201, 259 n.17; Sullivan, Patricia, 254
and recent demographics, 15, 108,
164, 186, 264 n.43; and violence, 15 Tara Revisited, 78–79, 95, 100, 101, 219
A Southern Belle Primer (Schwartz), Tara, Country Inn, 46
149–57, 158, 192 Tara: in Gone with the Wind, 44, 50–51,
Southern feelings/feeling southern. See 57–58, 255, 279 n.7
Emotions ‘‘Tell Me, Tell Me’’ (Kenan), 205–8,
Southern gentleman, 5, 32, 96, 100, 247, 248, 250. See also Kenan,
106, 109–11, 119, 123–24, 131–33; Randall
the homosocial, 121 Theweleit, Klaus, 121–22
Southern homes, 164, 166–67, 207, The Thorn Birds, 54
216, 218–20, 225–28, 253, 287 n.6; Thurmond, Strom, 73
as plantation, 5, 39–47, 82, 88–91, Tourism, 9, 13, 32, 76, 175, 210; and
103, 151, 158, 279 n.7 casinos, 12; Civil War, 96–101; and
Southern hospitality. See Etiquette Confederate flag, 34–35; and his-
Southern lady (belle), 3, 19–24, 32, 39, torical memory, 99–101; Old South
47, 52–57, 70–73, 79, 81, 93, 100, and plantation, 40–45, 54, 73
109, 135–38, 151, 158, 171–72, 189– Trinh T. Minh-ha, 202, 283 n.35
93, 202, 210, 227, 232; as asymp- Truth, Sojourner, 64
totes, 152; and the land/plantation,
39–40, 43–45, 49, 89; in popular Walker, Alice, 174
press, 74–76, 153–56; and romance Walker, Kara, 82–86, 92–94, 145, 187,
and weddings, 154, 156, 160–61, 252
169; and southern manners, 150– Wallace, Michelle, 267 n.29
58, 240–43; as steel magnolia, 75, Wells, Ida B., 48, 136
152–53 Welty, Eudora, 11
The Southern Lady (Scott), 189–92 White, Deborah Gray, 60
Southern League, 107 Whiteness: and ethnicity, 70–73, 111–
Southern studies, 8–11, 249, 12, 203, 250; and identity, 112–15,
257–58 n.6 245–47, 255
Southern suffragettes, 48–49, 189–92 Whiteness studies, 250, 262 n.31
Index 317
White privilege, 228, 239, 252, 255 Wojcik, Pamela Robertson, 23
White trashness, 109, 156, 173, 194– Wolfe, Margaret Ripley, 192
95, 203, 250, 291–92 n.31; in Gone Woodward, C. Vann, 11
with the Wind, 57
Wiegman, Robyn, 26, 80, 263 n.33 Yaeger, Patricia, 10, 126, 150, 171, 249
Williams, Linda, 162 Yates, Gayle Graham, 218–20, 223–24
Williams, Raymond, 59 Young, Elizabeth, 10, 272 n.5
318 Index
Tara McPherson is Associate Professor within the Division of Critical
Studies at the School of Cinema-Television, University of Southern
California. She is coeditor (with Henry Jenkins and Jane Shattuc) of
Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasure of Popular Culture (Duke University
Press 2002) and a founding organizer of the ‘‘Race in Digital Space’’
conference series.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

McPherson, Tara.
Reconstructing Dixie : race, gender, and nostalgia in the
imagined South / Tara McPherson.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 0–8223–3029–6 (alk. paper) —
isbn 0–8223–3040–7 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Southern States—Civilization. 2. Popular culture—
Southern States. 3. Southern States—Race relations.
4. Sex role—Southern States. 5. Southern States—
Social conditions. 6. Nostalgia—Southern States.
7. Romanticism—Southern States. 8. United States—
History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Influence. I. Title.
f209 .m37 2003
975—dc21 2002014232

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Reconstructing

Durham and London

Pansy Wallace Carpenter

Kay Carpenter McPherson

Four generations of southern women

with much to teach me

Dixie Then and Now: An Introduction, 1

1. Romancing the South: A Tour of the

2. ‘‘Both Kinds of Arms’’:

3. Steel Magnolias, Fatal Flowers, and

4. Feeling Southern: Home, Guilt, and the

Portions of chapter 1 were published as ‘‘Seeing in Black and White: Race

xii Reconstructing Dixie

Dixie Then and Now 3

Dixie Then and Now 5

Dixie Then and Now 7

Dixie Then and Now 9

Dixie Then and Now 11

I do not want to oﬀer a prolonged reading of Savannah here, but I do

Dixie Then and Now 13

Dixie Then and Now 15

Dixie Then and Now 17

Dixie Then and Now 19

Dixie Then and Now 21

Dixie Then and Now 23

g CRITICAL BLINDNESS AND LENTICULAR LOGICS

Dixie Then and Now 25

Dixie Then and Now 27

Dixie Then and Now 29

Dixie Then and Now 31

Dixie Then and Now 33

iconography. In January 2000, more than forty thousand primarily black

Dixie Then and Now 35

Dixie Then and Now 37

A Tour of the Lady’s

The lenticular postcard described in the introduction juxtaposes the

Romancing the South 41

Romancing the South 43

Romancing the South 45

tourist discourses to the ‘‘grandeur’’ of plantation life underscores the

Romancing the South 47

Romancing the South 49

Romancing the South 51

Romancing the South 53

Romancing the South 55

Margaret Mitchell grew up in a South where the comforts of white do-

Romancing the South 57

Romancing the South 59

Romancing the South 61

Romancing the South 63

Romancing the South 65

Romancing the South 69

Romancing the South 71

Romancing the South 73

Romancing the South 75

Romancing the South 77

Romancing the South 79

Romancing the South 81

Romancing the South 83