Essay
“The migration practices of my family (which mirrored that of other compatriots) between Mexico, Texas, and Georgia in the 1990s illustrate the entanglement of labor and familial migrations with a regional expansion of ethnic migrant economies.” Houston, Texas, was my parents’ first home in the US South. My father was born in the Mexican state of »
Essay
In her 1943 essay for The American Mercury, “The ‘Pet Negro’ System,” writer and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston transforms the literary genre of the journal article, discomfiting its traditionally genteel form with the exuberant and colorful rhetorical punches of the Black political pulpit. Staging a community callout embedded in southern specificity in a northern publication, »
Essay
“Black southern literature is one of the few places where one can find resistance and survival articulated on Black southerners’ own terms.” William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936) tells a history of the Deep South through the lens of an enslaver named Thomas Sutpen. Faulkner’s fictional protagonist grew up in the early 1800s as a dirt-poor »
Essay
In the United States, why is wealth—especially financial wealth—held by white households so disproportionately and, in particular, by the most affluent ones? Racial wealth inequality is no accident of history. Rather, it is the intended result of the southern Democrats in Congress who controlled federal tax policy throughout most of the twentieth century. Beginning in »
Essay
“At every turn, those of us withstanding the storm were expected to act as though what we were up against was scarcity while the evidence of our abundance was plain to see.” I have a scrap of paper I’ve kept, perhaps perversely, for over a year now. It’s an inventory of all the water I »
Essay
“America is Mississippi,” Malcolm X asserted in 1964, as he appeared in Harlem alongside Fannie Lou Hamer. “There’s no such thing as the South—it’s America.” Over the summer and fall of 2022, as this issue of Southern Cultures took shape, Mississippi produced an extraordinary archive of moral manifestos that echoed this conflation of the state »
Essay
The water in our creek and marsh on Virginia’s Eastern Shore grows colder by the day as a fading year slips away and the hopefulness of a new one approaches. Frost clings to browning marsh grasses, the tide runs winter clear, passing seabirds huddle on shoals and bars. Low tide. I wade out through the »
Essay
What follows are the essays that our readers turned to the most in 2022—or in the case of the Sonic South Issue from last winter, what they spun on repeat. Regina N. Bradley, that issue’s guest editor (and a co-editor of the journal), brought together a collection of essays that “showcase[d] the sonic South as »
Poetry
You grew from your granddaddy’s dirt and evergreen spaces. There are gorgeous collard colored-greens, ripeyellows turning to golden reds, hangingfrom brown and moss-smothered trunks, standing tallall over the land he left. A Black man, last name Jackson, quietly purchasedland from a white man and sold acres of unworkable plotsto your great-granddaddy. Your granddaddy, Silas, filled »
Essay
“My civil engineer grandfather and father dealt with the ill-fated consequences of government programs to control and contain the Mississippi River in their lifetimes.” This issue takes me to the cultural inheritance from my own family and visceral memories of the extensive cropland, impenetrable forests, mysterious swamps, bayous, and waterways of northeastern Arkansas, where I »
Essay
“Today’s settlers are not planting a flag; they are buying up buildings and using media to construct Detroit as a vacant space needing ‘civilizing’ settlement.” I spent two years in Atlanta, Georgia, during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Atlanta is a city with a diverse population, but it is known within Black communities as a mecca »
Art
In early 2022, we visited each other’s studios in Baltimore and Chestertown, Maryland, to discuss the influences of historical memory, ancestry, and artists’ roles navigating time and place within white supremacy. Our first collaboration, in 2020, was the exhibition Rights and Wrongs: Citizenship, Belonging, and the Vote, hosted by the Peale Museum at the Carroll »