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, its 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 * In The Zombie Memes of Dixie, Scott Romine persuasively shows that American brains have been infected for over two hundred years by viral, self-replicating ideas of 'the South'; these 'memes of Dixie' have little basis in reality, but are instead deeply rooted in the cultures of slavery, segregation, and white supremacy. Combining a uniquely contemporary theoretical lens with meticulous research and rangy historical knowledge, the result is a fresh, provocative, often contrarian take on an evolving, notional 'South' as it exists in the American imagination. Judging from the compelling evidence he has gathered, one imagines these zombie memes of Dixie will likely be with us until the real zombie apocalypse finally arrives. -- Anthony Szczesiul * author of The Southern Hospitality Myth: Ethics, Politics, Race and American Memory *
