Overview

This book traces the origin and development of several propositions, tropes, types, clichés, and ideas commonly associated with the U.S. South—for example, that it has been shaped by a warm climate; that its people are hospitable and enjoy a slower pace of life; that it is characterized by localist tendencies and possesses a distinctive sense of place. Approaching these propositions as memes—that is, group-forming replicators—Scott Romine argues that many of them developed in defense of slavery and evolved in its aftermath to continue to form a southern group whose ""way of life"" naturalized an emergent regime of segregation. Following the civil rights era, another set of mutations allowed the ostensible inclusion of groups heretofore excluded from the category ""southerner,"" mostly through the conceptualization of a ""culture"" projected backward into time. By attending closely to the historical formation and mutation of the things southerners have most often said that they are, we can better understand the dynamic and dialogic process of group formation in the U.S. South.

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9780820367767

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"Trying to convince self-identified 'southerners' in and out of academia that the South is a bad idea is like trying to convince a home-schooled freshman that evolution really does explain the eyeball. But if anyone can, it's the dean of southern studies, Scott Romine, who is once again fighting the good fight in our apocalyptic times with smarts, humor, humility, patience, and meticulously documented scholarship.--Jon Smith ""author of Finding Purple America: The South and the Future of American Cultural Studies"""

Author Information

Scott Romine is professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He is the author of The Narrative Forms of Southern Community and The Real South: Southern Narrative in the Age of Cultural Reproduction, and coeditor of Keywords for Southern Studies (Georgia). He lives in Greensboro, North Carolina.

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