Book Review

Thirty-four years ago, Robert Wiebe reshaped our understanding of the period once known as the Progressive Era by transferring attention from reformers to communities, which he saw as islands of localism shaken by the force of modernization. Progressivism, argued Wiebe, was the ideological and political expression of a middle class engaged in a "search for order." Grace Elizabeth Hale has identified a southern version of that quest, arguing that "making whiteness" through the construction of a "culture of segregation" enabled white southerners simultaneously to identify their place in a modernizing nation and to fix the place of increasingly disorderly African Americans within the region.	1
Making whiteness was to a considerable degree "the cultural work of othering southern African Americans." That othering was made necessary by two forces: the agency of black southerners insisting on their place in southern politics and society, and the inroads of modern consumerism, which opened larger spaces for that agency while destabilizing other traditional verities of southern culture. Hale's reading of texts, visual images, and popular culture (including lynching) permits a confident explication of the construction of an ideology of whiteness largely by white southerners with access to media.	2
The story divides roughly into three parts. The first explains how the demise of the Old South as a reality required its rise as a representation, and how that representation confronted white elites with the challenge of building a new cultural basis for social order. The second probes the "cultural work" involved in generating the discourses of whiteness and blackness that provided a language for that new order. And the third explores both the implications and the contradictions of that discursive hegemony.	3
Three threats to social order threatened the mastery that white elites considered essential to accommodate hordes of emancipated slaves prematurely graduated from the civilizing school of the plantation. First, emancipation unleashed energies within the black South that generated an unprecedented level of diversity and therefore laid bare the fiction of a "unitary blackness." Although scholars of antebellum African American history might question whether that diversity was as unprecedented as Hale suggests, what really matters is that the "diversity of freedom erased the old unity" in the minds of white southerners. That diversity included the growth of the black middle class, an aspect of the second threat to order in its tangible demonstration of the possibility of black mobility into the ranks of landowners, small businessmen, and even political leaders. Finally, perhaps most important, was the challenge of modernization, which forced southerners out of their localized worlds and into a national consumer culture.	4
Although each of those strands involved important shifts in social relations, Hale does not pretend to be a social historian. She grounds the perceptions that are essential to her narrative in realities that social historians have explored, with special attention to the emergence of African American agency in using the "space" created by emancipation. That is familiar terrain, as is Hale's explication of southern white fears of black success. Historians of the black South have failed to mark this landscape in the language of cultural studies and seldom have matched Hale's theoretical borrowings from literary theory, but they probably deserve a bit more credit, most notably Howard Rabinowitz, whose final chapter in Race Relations in the Urban South (1978) long ago suggested the impact of black activism and "disorderly" behavior on the origins of Jim Crow.	. . .