| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Tara McPherson. Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined South. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. 2003. Pp. xii, 318. $21.95.
This book is a lively and thought-provoking investigation of the role of the South in the modern "national imaginary." Tara McPherson devotes particular attention to investigating "paradigmatic moments in which the South serves as a point of condensation for various regional and national narratives of place, race, and gender" (p. 5). To be specific, she offers extended analyses of Ken Burns's Civil War (1990) documentary, Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind (1936), poet Rosemary Daniell's autobiography, Minnie Bruce Pratt's writings, the film Steel Magnolias (1989), the television series Designing Women, as well as more obscure expressions of popular culture, such as a late 1980s comic book Captain Confederacy, and portrayals of southern wedding traditions in Mississippi magazine. Indeed, only popular music seems to have escaped the author's capacious perspective.	1
McPherson deftly employs the metaphor of 3-D postcards to introduce her major analytical conceit, which she calls "lenticular logic." Although a 3-D postcard may contain two images, a viewer can only see a single image at a time. McPherson contends that a similar "lenticular logic" prevails in modern representations of the South, so that "histories or images that are actually copresent get represented so that only one of the images is visible at a time." This logic functions "covertly, repressing connections," separating whiteness and blackness so as to render the South's complex history and image simple (p. 249). By revealing the workings of this "logic," McPherson promises to "trouble the strategies of visibility" (p. 92) and to "shake representations of the South free" from traditional and repressive configurations (p. 11).	. . .

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