Essay
In January of 2019, I began a “listening tour” across North Carolina as editor of Edible North Carolina, work that started in my food studies teaching at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The vision for this book was to create a portrait of North Carolina’s vibrant contemporary food landscape. I chose twenty »
University of North Carolina Press, 2010 Growing up in East Tennessee I hardly knew any Jews, or hardly knew I knew any. Lacking the usual stereotypes, I didn’t know, for example, that the owner of the nicest men’s clothing store had both a name and an occupation that were most likely Jewish. When we spent »
“[Y]ou can’t cheat time; age brings its changes, large and small, and we are no exception.” Faithful readers will remember that we celebrated Southern Cultures’s twentieth birthday last year. It was a banner year, full of exciting programs, special issues, and happy memories. But you can’t cheat time; age brings its changes, large and small, »
Brandeis University Press, 2006 In the introduction to the anthology Jewish Roots in Southern Soil: A New History editors Marcie Cohen Ferris and Mark Greenberg begin defensively: “For more than a century historians have wrestled with the question, why study southern Jewish history?” Such opening gambits are commonplace in studies of southern Jewry. Ferris and Greenberg respond »
Essay
“The South has much to teach about the dangers and opportunities of belonging and exclusion, of being inside and outside the American experience.” In which I out myself as a southern outsider/insider. Raised a Jewish southerner, I am married to an agnostic folklorist from Mississippi with whom I share progressive politics. My household supports small-scale »
Essay
This special issue marks the closing of a year-long celebration of the twenty-fifth year of publication for Southern Cultures. Over that year, we turned to the themes that have animated the study of the South—Backward/Forward, Inside/Outside, Left/Right, and, for this issue, Here/Away—and the talent of four distinguished guest editors and scholars—Charles Reagan Wilson, William Sturkey, »
“Even as southern populations (and landscapes) have evolved, food and place remain indelibly linked in the southern imagination.” My mother-in-law, Shelby Flowers Ferris, has kept a daily journal for over forty years. These are not personal diaries in which she shares her “feelings”—which I imagine seem self-indulgent to such a practical woman—but rather carefully recorded »
“A multi-layered past and present underlies these foods and explains why southerners eat the way they do, and why we think of these foods as deeply southern. Food is history. Food is place. Food is power and disempowerment.” Two “moments” help explain my interest in bringing food to the pages of Southern Cultures. The first »
Essay
“For over six decades, craft has pulled me into a troubled and complicated American South where objects offer hints of meaning and voices of long-ago makers visible in stitches and thumbprints.” In this ruptured time in our nation and around the world, as we witness the rapidly diminishing window of opportunity for climate-related action, the »
Essay
“Be prepared to stop and listen.” I was a high school student in 1970s northeastern Arkansas when my sister Jamie left home for college at Vanderbilt in Nashville. Quickly, we were pulled back into her force field as she sent news of exciting work at the intersection of social justice, health care, and labor by »
“This was an anxious time for American Jews, stung by the anti-Semitic quotas and discrimination of the interwar years and the growing horror regarding the fate of European Jewry as the Holocaust came to light in the 1940s.” My first experience at a southern Jewish summer camp was not easy. I felt out of place. »
Essay
“The phrase ‘abolitionist South’ pulls us back to the region’s traumatic and violent history of slavery and Emancipation but also anchors us in a radical present.” In this issue of Southern Cultures, we examine the abolitionist South. This phrase pulls us back to the region’s traumatic and violent history of slavery and Emancipation—brought to life most »