In “The Zombie Memes of Dixie,” Scott Romine traces the origin and development of propositions, tropes, types, cliches and ideas commonly associated with Southern culture. Among the perceptions that he explores are the impact of the warm climate, Southern hospitality, a slower pace of life and the culture’s distinctive sense of place.
Through an analysis of these propositions as memes, Romine argues that many of them developed in defense of slavery. The concept then evolved to continue to form a southern group whose “way of life” naturalized an emergent regime of segregation.
After the civil rights era, another set of mutations allowed the professed inclusion of groups that were previously excluded from the “Southern” category. With close investigations of the historical formation of the things that Southerners said that they are, readers can better understand the dynamic process of group formation in the U.S. South.
