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

The average rating for Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined South based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-10-11 00:00:00 Noor hisham Sulaiman Although this is an academic book, it is quite intriguing. I picked it up because I'm wanting to understand how the culture of Dixie finds its way into global cultures, which McPherson doesn't exactly touch, but given the ways in which she talks about how it continues to rear its head in the U.S. one can certainly extrapolate a bit from there. I found some of the texts she discussed--especially the visual art work of Kara Walker and the fiction of Randall Kenan--to be quite interesting. Her analysis of the racism inherent in "Gone with the Wind"--and the ways in which it continues to shape an American (and I would add non-Americans too!) sense of race relations (and the erasure of racism) is quite compelling. The book certainly speaks to what's continuing to develop in the south from Mississippi to the Carolinas.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-10-31 00:00:00 Mark Tyers Whip smart analysis of the South through the lens of popular culture--from Gone With the Wind to Designing Women . Her framing device is the concept of the lenticular, a visual logic that refuses to see the interconnections between different racial images in the same historical moment. What surprised me was how much of the book was about public history, from historic sites to documentaries. She doesn't seem to have any knowledge of the public history literature on any of these things, however, which is a minor complaint for an otherwise very well-done book.