Felicia Bevel

This project traces the transnational movement of nostalgia for the American South (and resistance to it) between 1900 and 1960. Drawing on newspapers, playbills, and other archival material, it examines American cultural exports—like the 1936 film Show Boat—that romanticized the southern past and traveled to Canada and Australia. This project argues that the imagined South represented not only the US but also a larger network of white settler societies, nations within which the racial logic of the Old South became a useful optics through which white Canadians and Australians read Asian and Indigenous individuals as not belonging.