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On Contentious Ground
essay by Vann Thomas Powell
Our Past
Browse past issues and articles from the last 30 years
“There’s Your Vicksburg”
Failed Stories about My Hometown
by Donald Kizza-BrownThe only time I remember reading about my hometown of Vicksburg, Mississippi, in my K–12 education was during my senior year Advanced Placement English class. We read The Unvanquished by William Faulkner. In the opening scene, Loosh, a man enslaved by the Sartoris family, destroys a map of Vicksburg that the Sartoris child, Bayard, had made, using »
Photo Essay
On Contentious Ground
by Vann Thomas PowellBorn and raised in the American South by a white Northern family, I have felt my experiences and identity straddle a line between the two, even while identifying with both. Growing up, my father took the initiative to teach and cultivate a deep appreciation of history and culture, taking the family to the many historical »
Year in Review (2024)
by Southern CulturesAs we look toward the New Year, here’s a look back at some pieces we’ve loved this year—our baker’s dozen. We might need a new story. We’re staying strong. We’re looking for something beautiful out of the darkness. And looking for lessons in a fig library. We’re putting on a pop, err, country song. We’re »
Art
It’s My House and I Lived Here
by Kevin Brisco Jr.On the cover and throughout the issue, we’re pleased to present selections from Kevin Brisco Jr.’s series It’s My House and I Lived Here, which premiered at albertz benda gallery in Los Angeles, October 4–November 23, 2024. THE HOME EPITOMIZES our most basic ideas of security and comfort. It is a container for life’s most intimate moments »
Back Porch
Seeking Home
by Regina N. Bradley“Central to constructs of home and region is memory. Southern memories . . . are the backbone of the region’s identity.” I’M A MILITARY BRAT. Both parents in the Navy, to be exact. I’ve lived a little bit of here and a little bit of there: I was born in Hawaii, then moved to Beaufort, »
Photo Essay
I See Myself in You
by Lynsey Weatherspoon“What does a liberated life mean for queer southerners and for the folks around us? When will home accept us?” AS A CHILD IN BIRMINGHAM, I saw girls visit my masculine-presenting neighbor at night. They talked through the screen at her bedroom window. I wondered why I’d never see them enter the house, and it »
Memoir
Miguel, Mississippi
by Eric Solomon“For me, Miguel, you were always a part of the‘we’that I think of when I think of home.” THIS IS THE LAND that brought us together. I have been driving for seven hours. I am tired. I stop my car in the shoulder on the Highway 82 Mississippi River Bridge to watch the sun set »
Photo Essay
Confronting the Afterlife of Jim Crow
by Brian Palmer“The older I got, the more I realized that our acceptance was . . . fragile, conditional. The signs were small but telling.” FRUSTRATION WITH MY COUNTRY came first. One evening in the early 1970s, my mom and dad debated whether to allow me and my sister to watch a tv news special about the 1963 »
Interview
Home as Sacrament
Blackness and Belonging in Modern America
by Maurice O. Wallace, Karla FC Holloway“Home may include the earth, may include the space around it, but it is far more expansive thanthat.” ON JULY 4, TWO LONGTIME FRIENDS and former colleagues in the department of English at Duke University sat down to dialogue about visions of home in African American cultural life and imagination. Prompted by guest editors Blair LM »
Music
“I Saw Things I Imagined”
Poetic and Geographic Audacity in Solange Knowles's When I Get Home
by Daelena Tinnin-Gadson“A more expansive understanding of the journey home invites an imagination of a Black worldwhere Blackness exists in both quotidian and spectacular ways.” IN AN ABANDONED GARAGE in downtown Houston, Solange Knowles steps in front of a vintage Cadillac with her arms outstretched, dressed in a diamond-encrusted fringe bikini, white cowboy boots, and a perfectly laid »
Photo Essay
Slangless
by RaMell Ross“To be southern like the South’s time, part ghost, part momentum.” TO BE AN IMAGE that regards the historic South’s impression. To be an index, a document, a testament, a moment, a facsimile, a reference, a distillation, a memory … of that physical and nonphysical region. To feel of the South, and southern, like an accent can. To »
Finding Thelma’s Garden
by James Manigault-Bryant“There was nothing my grandmother wanted . . . she had everything she needed—a beautiful home, a loving and devoted family, a new grandchild.” THIS IS WHAT MY MOTHER has told me: on the afternoon of Tuesday, October 16, 1973, my grandmother, Thelma Vivian Gordon, died of a massive coronary episode while tending to the garden »
