Reconstructing the World - (Cornell Paperbacks) by Harilaos Stecopoulos (Hardcover)

About the Book

"The unending tragedy of Reconstruction," wrote W. E. B. Du Bois, "is the utter inability of the American mind to grasp its... national and worldwide implications." And yet the long shadow of Reconstruction's failure has loomed large in the...

Book Synopsis

"The unending tragedy of Reconstruction," wrote W. E. B. Du Bois, "is the utter inability of the American mind to grasp its... national and worldwide implications." And yet the long shadow of Reconstruction's failure has loomed large in the American imagination, serving as a parable of race and democracy both at home and abroad. In Reconstructing the World Harilaos Stecopoulos looks at an array of American writers who, over the course of the twentieth century, used the South as a touchstone for thinking about the nation's global ambitions. Focusing on the lives and writings of Charles Chesnutt, Thomas Dixon, James Weldon Johnson, W. E. B. Du Bois, Carson McCullers, William Faulkner, Richard Wright, and Alice Walker, he shows the ways in which these public intellectuals viewed the U.S. South in international terms and questioned the relationship between domestic inequality and a quest for global power.By examining "big stick" diplomacy, World War II, and the Vietnam War in light of regional domestic concerns, Stecopoulos urges a reassessment of the American Century. Providing new interpretations of literary works both well-known (Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, McCullers's The Member of the Wedding) and marginal (Dixon's The Leopard's Spots, Du Bois's Dark Princess), Stecopoulos argues that the South played a crucial role in mediating between the national and imperial concerns of the United States. That intersection of region and empire, he contends, profoundly influenced how Americans understood not only cultural and political geographies but also issues of race and ethnicity.

Review Quotes

This short but rich book explores the ways that southern authors, including Thomas Dixon, Charles Chestnutt, W. E. B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, Carson McCullers, William Faulkner, and Richard Wright grappled with the issues of region, race, gender, and social order that were produced between the 1898 inauguration of American empire and the Cold War. Deftly straddling history and literary criticism, Harilaos Stecopoulos roots his interpretation in well-entrenched cultural studies and in the newer approaches of transnational American studies.... Adopting a 'transnational notion of region' for his case studies, Stecopoulos offers a new exploration of these works' spatial, gendered, and racial implications in response to American empire. Reconstructing the World presents an important connection between southern literature, culture, issues of racial ad regional identities, and related (but often ignored) global systems of ideology, economy, and power.

About the Author

Harilaos Stecopoulos is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Iowa. He is the coeditor, with Michael Uebel, of Race and the Subject of Masculinities.