Literature of the U.S. South

I am an associate professor of English and the chair of the department of Arts & Languages at Fisk University in Nashville, TN. I write, research, and teach 19th-century American literature, literature of the U.S. South, literature of slavery, and literature and economics.

As a way to comment on a person’s style or taste, the word “tacky” has distinctly southern origins, with its roots tracing back to the so-called “tackies” who tacked horses on South Carolina farms prior to the Civil War. The Tacky South presents eighteen fun, insightful essays that examine connections between tackiness and the American South, ranging from nineteenth-century local color fiction and the television series Murder, She Wrote to red velvet cake and the ubiquitous influence of Dolly Parton. Charting the gender, race, and class constructions at work in regional aesthetics, The Tacky South explores what shifting notions of tackiness reveal about US culture as a whole and the role that region plays in addressing national and global issues of culture and identity.

reviews

“A sharp collection of essays about the tangled world of southern aesthetics, race, and class, The Tacky South is as thought-provoking as it is flat-out fun. It’s as much a cabinet of curiosities as a book, investigating the delights of Dolly Parton, Elvis, plastic flamingos, and red velvet cake and the people that love or loathe them.”

-- Margaret Eby, author of South Toward Home: Travels in Southern Literature and Rock and Roll Baby Names

“The Tacky South is a remarkable essay collection, both for the range of cultural history explored, and for the diversity of theoretical approaches taken. Bridging the obscure southern etymological origins of ‘tackiness’ with fascinating readings on everything from red velvet cake to country and western ‘nudie suits,’ from Dolly Parton to the B-52s, the collection will appeal to scholars, pop culture enthusiasts, and anyone interested in the South.”

-- Anthony E. Szczesiul, professor of English at UMass Lowell and author ofThe Southern Hospitality Myth: Ethics, Politics, Race, and American Memory

“The Tacky South offers an important intervention in southern studies, cultural studies, musicology, and literary studies. Burnett and Miller have created a wild and verdant landscape by inviting a wide range of scholars to consider the question of the tacky South. What is created is as rich and messy as it should be, resisting neat answers and instead insisting upon contradictions and tensions that are at the heart of the South and the concept of tackiness. Together, this collection is exciting in its inclusion of so many topics and is important in its consistency and attention to close reading. Whether it is a nudie suit or a creole party, the textual evidence is strong and guides us confidently to the borders of southern culture(s) to wonder more about the idea of tacky.”

-- Meredith McCarroll, director of writing and rhetoric at Bowdoin College, author of Unwhite: Appalachia, Race, and Film, and coeditor of Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy