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Vol. 25, No. 2: Inside / Outside

  //  summer 2019

“[T]he study of the South is more expansive than at any time in the region’s history,” writes guest editor William Sturkey. “The old walls separating insider and outsider are crumbling, allowing the long suppressed full talents of this region to flourish in new ways.” The second issue of our 25th anniversary series examines the boundaries⁠—real and imagined⁠—that aim to mark us as insiders and outsiders.

Table of Contents
Essay BUY ACCESS

Front Porch: Inside/Outside

by Marcie Cohen Ferris
“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

The Future Belongs to Us

by William Sturkey
“I just want to let you know,” the older white man told me at a late-summer fish fry, “that my family owned slaves, and those slaves were happy.” This was mid-September of 2014, my second year as a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The event was held at »
Photo Essay

To Survive on This Shore

Selections from the South

by Jess T. Dugan, Vanessa Fabbre
Representations of older transgender people are nearly absent from our culture and those that do exist are often one-dimensional. For more than five years, we traveled throughout the United States creating To Survive on This Shore: Photographs and Interviews with Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Older Adults, which culminated in a fine art exhibition and book »
Essay

Policing Immorality in a Virginia Girls’ Reformatory

by Erin N. Bush
“‘Delinquent’ girls like McNamar became the victim, the problem, the cause, and the evidence of other urban dilemmas within the reform rhetoric and agenda.” When sixteen-year-old Marie McNamar escaped the Virginia Home and Industrial School for Girls in May 1913, she intended to go home. She had gotten word that her father in West Virginia »
Photo Essay BUY ACCESS

The Spaces We Inherit

by Oliver Clasper
“These landscapes hold the remnants of five thousand distant voices.” If all photographs are abandonings, as the American critic Henry Allen once wrote, then how might we view photographs of lynching sites? Located for the most part in the geographic margins and the shadows of our collective memory, these landscapes hold the remnants of five »
Music

Going Up and Coming Down

Kris Kristofferson, Authenticity, and Country Music's "New Breed"

by Alex Macaulay
Attendees at the 1970 Country Music Association awards were startled when Roy Clark announced that Kris Kristofferson’s “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down” beat out Merle Haggard’s “Okie From Muskogee” for Song of the Year. Amid applause and some gasps, a dazed, disheveled, long-haired Kristofferson stumbled up the steps of the Ryman Auditorium, looking an awful lot »
Essay BUY ACCESS

The “Baltimore Idea” and the Cities It Built

by Emily Lieb
“Every ‘inside’ has an ‘outside.’ Every boundary has a sentinel. Almost every backyard has a NIMBY.” In 1910, the Baltimore City Council made Jim Crow concrete. It passed an “ordinance for preserving order, securing property values and promoting the great interests and insuring the good government of Baltimore city,” which was intended to make it »
Memoir

The Rarest of Senses

by Monique Truong
We cannot understand the power and the meaning of food until we understand hunger. Hunger at its most basic is the lack of food, and therefore a body’s need and craving for food. If we are very lucky in this world, we feel hunger as a minor physical discomfort that can be readily sated: a »
Photo Essay

Más de una historia

by Joanna Welborn, Melinda Wiggins, Lucia Constantine, Daisy Almonte, translated by Alejandra Okie Hollister
This article appears in the Inside/Outside Issue (vol. 25, no. 2: Summer 2019) and has been condensed. To view the article in its entirety, visit Project Muse (link below). This is more than one story. This is twenty-five years of narratives from farmworkers, mostly in the Carolinas, told in labor camp kitchens, on trailer porch »
Poetry

The Sounds That Wake Me

by Savannah Sipple
I’ll tell you what, Papaw was a drunk, the sweetest man alive.Sober: A good husband; a loving father; he worked hard regardless,but I’ve never heard tell if he was able to keep a jobor if the family moved because of his drinking. On a binge, he beat Granny.He’d come home at 2am and beat her »
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