Imagining the South: the function of “Dixie” in the United States from 1960-2017

This project takes an interdisciplinary approach and explores how the United States used the “South” to protect and project imagined white innocence from 1960-2017. The dissertation intersects with other Southern-focused monographs, such as Scott Romine’s Real South (2008), Leigh Anne Duck’s The Nation’s Region (2006), Trudier Harris’s The Scary Mason-Dixon Line (2009), and Zachary Lechner’s The South of the Mind (2018). I build on their foundation and explore how the United States employs ever-evolving strategies to preserve notions of its own goodness. My work also participates in larger discussions on critical race theory, postmodernism, and metamodernism – engaging books such as Carol Anderson’s White Rage (2016), Grace Elizabeth Hale’s Nation of Outsiders (2010), and Jeffrey Nealon’s Post-postmodernism (2012). The chapters, together, illustrate how the nation arrives in the twenty-first century at a crossroads, where it can either, once again, turn to narratives affirming white innocence or can try embracing a new kind of community – one that is built around accounting for the past and acknowledging still-present injustices.