| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Nation's Region: Southern Modernism, Segregation, and U.S. Nationalism. By Leigh Anne Duck. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006. xii, 340 pp. $39.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-2810-2.)
Leigh Anne Duck defines her study as a contribution to the "new" southern studies. She seems to mean that it brings to bear on literary and historical materials the insights of cultural studies, as well as critical race theory and psychoanalytic theory. Her subject is the South in the twentieth century, especially as represented by several of its major literary artists, including Erskine Caldwell, Zora Neale Hurston, and William Faulkner, with less attention paid to Lillian Smith, Richard Wright, Carson McCullers, and James Agee.	1
Her central argument, made repeatedly, is that the South has been consistently portrayed as a backward, conservative region in a progressive, liberal nation. That image, she contends, has been exploited by those in power in the South to justify racial oppression and violence. Because the region was understood in cultural rather than political terms, segregation was permitted to persist in defiance of an official national ideology of capitalism, democracy, and increasing equality. She points to Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) and the failure of antilynching legislation as examples of successful southern efforts to use the defense of regional traditions as justification for white supremacist attitudes and practices.	. . .

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