In The Southern Plantation: A Study of Development and Accuracy of a Tradition (1924), Francis Pendleton Gaines describes an image that remains etched into American to this day: The scene represented an old negro who sat on a little eminence and gazed wistfully across a valley. On opposite hill world of actuality merged into a cloud-like vision, semblance of ex-slave's dream: old plantation; a great mansion; exquisitely groomed ladies and courtly gentlemen moving with easy grace upon broad veranda behind stalwart columns; surrounding yard an almost illimitable stretch of white cotton; darkies singing at work in fields; negro quarters, off on one side, around which little pickaninnies tumbled in glad frolic, (qtd. in Wells 33) To Gaines's early-twentieth-century readers, this scene would have been intimately familiar. It presented a site they had often visited in their imagination but had never actually seen, a site that only existed as a simulacrum of a simpler and happier past. Such fictions of plantation had made their entrance into American literature with proslavery romances like John Pendleton Kennedy's Swallow Barn; or, A Sojourn in Old Dominion (1832), and they had been contested by sentimental abolitionist novels like Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Toms Cabin (1851-1852). Yet it was in years after Civil War, when slavery had been abolished, that plantation became emblem of South as mythical space in American culture. (1) By final decades of nineteenth century and early decades of twentieth, portraits of plantation life ... filled pages of nation's periodicals and found their way into dozens of books, achieving ... a form of cultural conquest of their own, as Jeremy Wells argues (2). Think of novels like John DeForests's Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty (1867), but especially of dialect story collections like Thomas Nelson Page's In Ole Virginia; or, Marse Chan and Other Stories (1887) or Charles Chesnutt's African American revision of plantation romance in The Conjure Woman (1899). Think also of Thomas Dixon Jr.'s racist novels about Ku Klux Klan, which inspired D. W. Griffith's monumental Birth of a Nation (1915) as a tribute to an American Republic rebuilt on ideology of white southern supremacy. Or skip forward a few decades to Margaret Mitchell's bestselling novel Gone with Wind (1936) and David Selznick's movie adaptation (1939), which remain among nation's most stories of southern resilience and grandeur. As films like Birth of a Nation and Gone with Wind illustrate, fictions of southern plantation are not confined to pages of American literature. They constitute a transmedia phenomenon that include nostalgic songs like those collected in Stephen Foster's The Old Plantation Melodies (1890), visual culture from postcards to coon illustrations, and food products like Aunt Jemima pancakes. Americans were so inundated with representations of southern plantation that Francis Pendleton Gaines diagnosed the penetration of plantation concept ... into consciousness (qtd. in Wells 33). In fact, as John Lowe notes, fictions of southern plantation were remediated (Jay David Bolter and Richard A. Grusin's term) so many times that they have become America's favorite (qtd. in Wells 38)--a mythology that has produced places as different as Tara in Mitchell's Gone with Wind, Sutperis Hundred in William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom (1936), Sweet Home in Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987), and Candyland in Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained (2012). Examining such places can yield insights into entanglement of racial images, fictional spaces, and their remediation at crucial times in American history, especially if we follow Tara McPherson's imperative to track popular and emotive legacy (18) of plantation South as a productive space in American imagination. …