Southerners Acting Southern

On Celebrities and Their Star Personas in the Imagined South

Tison Pugh, Scott Romine

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2025
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9780807184653
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

What is the difference between a star born in the South and a "southern star"? In Southerners Acting Southern, Tison Pugh answers this intriguing question, pondering the ways in which some performers from the South metamorphose into southern stars by accentuating their geographic and cultural roots as key aspects of their star personas.

Many celebrities, particularly actors, seek to transcend their hometown roots in favor of achieving an "all-American" appeal, but some stars born in the South build their national and international fan base by emphasizing the southern aspects of their biography and by leaning into regional clichés and stereotypes that percolate throughout the U.S. cultural imaginary. In turn, some southern stars trot out the region's hoariest tropes of fading belles, gullible country rubes, and the succors of southern hospitality only to reveal the shallowness of these stereotypes and of their celebrity personas as well. Covering more than one hundred years of cultural history, Southerners Acting Southern allows readers to gauge the South's often-reluctant progress into modernity, including discussions on the intersection of race and celebrity for the region's Black stars and its increasing, if hesitant, embrace of queer ones. Chapters feature a wide-ranging selection of southern celebrities, including Louis Armstrong, Truman Capote, Elvis Presley, Tennessee Williams, Andy Griffith, Tina Turner, Dolly Parton, Tom Petty, Gloria Estefan, Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon, Jenna Bush Hager, Ellen DeGeneres, Tyler Perry, Matthew McConaughey, Aziz Ansari, and Miley Cyrus.

Southerners Acting Southern moves from past to present, from musicians to media personalities, discerning the ways in which southernness contributes to the building of personal celebrity. Altogether, this luminous work of cultural criticism reveals that southern stargazing, as much as it might initially appear a flighty pastime of overzealous fans, divulges deeper truths about the South, and the United States as a whole, that might otherwise pass unnoticed.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• Introduction: Southern Stars and Southern Myths
• 1. Louis Armstrong’s Smile versus New Orleans’s Confederate Monuments
• 2. Truman Capote’s Queer Celebrity and the Decadently Sentimental South
• 3. Elvis Presley, Graceland, and Celebrity Shrines
• 4. Great Actors, Southern Accents, and Tennessee Williams’s Star Factory
• 5. Andy Griffith, The Andy Griffith Show, and the Paradox of Yokel Stereotypes
• 6. Tina Turner: Southern by Birth, Swiss by Choice
• 7. Dolly Parton: The Hillbilly Queen of Crossover Self-Censorship
• 8. Which Floridians Are Southerners? Tom Petty, Gloria Estefan, and the Vagaries of Pop-Star Southernness in the 1980s
• 9. On Southern Women’s Book Clubs: Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon, Jenna Bush Hager, and the Performance of a Literary Star Persona
• 10. Ellen DeGeneres’s Queer Voice of Southern (Un)Kindness
• 11. Tyler Perry: Atlanta’s Entrepreneur and Queer Auteur
• 12. Matthew McConaughey Crowns Himself Texas’s Philosopher King
• 13. Aziz Ansari: Comic Star of the Postsouthern South
• 14. Miley Cyrus’s Queerly Authentic Southern Innocence
• Coda: Southern Stargazing as the Universe Expands
• NOTES
• WORKS CITED
• INDEX