SOUTHERN CULTURES最新文献

Abstract:

This article examines the history and impact of the Voting Rights Act 1965 and the South's current political landscape more than a decade after the devastating 2013 Shelby v. Holder Supreme Court decision, which eviscerated the landmark civil rights legislation. The VRA has been under constant attack in recent years, with efforts to reduce its effectiveness. These attempts have led to the implementation of suppressive voting laws and restrictive election policies by Southern lawmakers. The region has become more racially diverse, but these measures dilute the influence of a diverse electorate. With the 2024 election quickly approaching, debates on voting and elections are at an all-time high across the country. In response to systematic efforts to undermine democracy, grassroots activists have come together to fight these measures and offer new proposals to fully restore the VRA and build a more inclusive and sustainable democracy across the South.

Abstract:

Following ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, Dr. Delia Dixon-Carroll (1872–1934) delivered dozens of speeches across North Carolina ahead of the general election in fall 1920, appealing to white women to register and vote for Democratic candidates. A suffragist, clubwoman, and Raleigh's first woman physician, she embodied the new woman of the early twentieth century while also extolling the traditions represented by the Democratic party, notably the white supremacy campaign of 1898 and Charles Aycock's administration. Stumping alongside the state's most powerful Democrats, she assured those who had opposed suffrage that white women would use their newfound political power to preserve the status quo, telling crowds that "when it comes to a question of white supremacy, the women of North Carolina will be there." A stalwart partisan and spokesperson who was recognized by her contemporaries as a party leader, Dixon-Carroll campaigned for Democrats for the rest of her life.

• Meeting the Moment for Democracy
• Errin Haines (bio)

three days after i turned eighteen, my mom, who was born in Jim Crow Florida, took me to register to vote at the same precinct where I grew up watching her vote. The experience taught me at an early age that voting was my birthright, something adults—and Black women in particular—did as good citizens. I loved the idea that on Election Day everyone is equal. It is our unofficial national holiday, our common language, regardless of race, age, gender, political party, ability, or state.

Like my mom, I have rarely missed an election. And like many Black Americans, I have had the experience of waiting hours to cast my ballot—an experience that is at once a privilege other people who look like me don't always have and an indignity no American should have to endure. As a Black woman, a southerner, and an American, I have never been conflicted about my participation in our democracy and my role as a journalist; indeed, I have long believed that a healthy press and a healthy democracy are mutually dependent.

Four years ago, I helped to start a newsroom named for the amendment to the Constitution that enshrined the right to vote for some—but not all—women. The Nineteenth Amendment, passed in 1920, largely benefited the white women who sacrificed their Black sisters to [End Page 2]

Love Rollercoaster (2016 Butler County Line) (1965 John Lewis Accepts Voting Rights Act Signing Pen from LBJ), 2020, by Tomashi Jackson. Acrylic, Pentelic marble, Ohio Underground Railroad site soil, American electoral ephemera, and paper bags on canvas and fabric. 88⅛ × 81 × 8 in. Courtesy the artist and Tilton Gallery, New York. Commissioned by the Wexner Center for the Arts at The Ohio State University.

[End Page 3]

Time and Space (1948 End of Voter Registration Line) (1965 LBJ Signs the Voting Rights Act), 2020. Acrylic, Pentelic marble, Ohio Underground Railroad site soil, American electoral ephemera, and paper bags on canvas and fabric. 89⅜ × 83¾ × 8 in. Courtesy the artist and Tilton Gallery, New York. Commissioned by the Wexner Center for the Arts at The Ohio State University.

[End Page 4] gain access to the ballot. Women and many people of color would have to work twice as hard for their full access to the franchise, which came with the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. More than a half a century later, the Vote stands as both the strongest and the most fragile symbol of our democracy.

This year, our democracy will be tested anew in our first election since former president Don

Abstract:

Recalling a traumatic memory was John Jennings's first foray into what he would later call the ethnogothic. Jennings uses making practices and art to create dark spaces that offer not fear or dread but sanctuary until viewers can truly deal with the monsters that attack their psyches. The monster is a portent of danger, a warning that one has transgressed, and an urging to atone for sins, all key aspects of the gothic. The ethnogothic incorporates these characteristics of the gothic but addresses the specific concerns of the racially oppressed, describing how various modes of violence imprint themselves upon the spirits of Black and Brown people. The ethnogothic offers a space to place trauma, name it, and then let it go so that one can move on to a better future.

• Blood Harmony
• Rebecca Bengal (bio) and Kristine Potter (bio)

When charlie sings, her sister Audra's voice follows, the voice of a grown woman inside a little-girl body, high and lonesome and worried at first, till it wraps itself around hers to become pure and whole, and then forks off on its own. They were raised first on shape notes at church and the radio and Who's gonna shoe your pretty little feet, who's gonna glove your hand? but what they like to sing best are the old, old ballads. Audra's favorite is "Down from Dover" the way Dolly does it, and Charlie likes to sing the Everly Brothers, the lady "old and gray" pleading with the warden to get her baby out of jail, and they intertwine the closest when they chorus the Louvin Brothers, "go down, go down you Knoxville Girl." Charlie's voice is the current, low and silty and running over the trace fossils and the smoothed-over ancient stones and Audra's is the steam rising off the water, eerie and sure, slipping off into sky and ether. They sing the songs their mother can hardly stand to hear now, the songs their daddy taught them.

The father isn't the kind of television dad with a big white smile and a punchline or a picture-book daddy grilling hot dogs and pitching baseballs. He is the kind of father with handsome craters in his cheeks and the rocket end of a cigarette in his lips, the kind who comes home from somewhere you know better than to ask about with a hollow look in his eye like the black holes where stars get swallowed up. He is the kind of father liable to set to pacing the house as soon as the mother has driven off to work third shift and the exhaust from her old black Ranger has settled into the dirt, the kind to wake up the house in the blue hour when darkness is just coming on and drag Charlie and her sister out of their first dreaming, tell them to bring along the things they love 'cause they might not never see them ever again. [End Page 64]

Knoxville Girl, Kristine Potter, 2016. All images from Kristine Potter: Dark Waters (Aperture 2023). © Kristine Potter.

[End Page 65]

The last time it was their mama driving on the third or fourth day of him gone off somewhere and Charlie must have been carried out to the car in her sleep. She woke in the middle of the night to car doors slamming and lights from the parking lot streaming through the gap in the curtain on her mama and sister's sleep-faces beside her, in a king-size bed with sheets washed hard and stiff as boards. The television was on home shopping, silent, and when Charlie stood up she stepped barefoot on a dried curl of an ancient fingernail stuck in the motel carpet from who

• A Girl, a Man, a Storm, a City
• K. Ibura (bio)

Galactic, K. Ibura, © 2022. Paper Collage.

[End Page 60]

The trees stood silent, lining the street in stately rows. Survival was in their lineage. When the whipping winds, surging foodwaters, and battering rain had come, they had tightened their roots, clung to the dirt, and withstood their breaking stoically. They had been gravely dishonored—their majestic heights and impressive widths diminished, their boughs battered, their signs of growth erased. Now nature was parading some of its oddities before them.

A double-file line of children—heads capped with globed skull masks and bodies surrounded by swirling winds—stumbled past, following a thin man in a skeleton suit. The bedraggled trees tensed their roots, but there were no atmospheric disturbances to cause further alarm. The absence of tornado, hurricane, or windstorm confirmed, the trees rustled what leaves they had left and turned their attention skyward.

Oblivious to the awareness of trees, the children ogled the empty houses and sagging porches, fascinated by the veil of abandonment that smothered everything around them. The tallest of the children scooted close to the Bone Man.

"How come they still got houses over here?" she asked. Her voice was indignant.

"Water wasn't as bad here."

"So it ain't the whole city that collapsed?"

"Nope," the Bone Man said.

"What's that nasty line on all the houses?"

"That's the water line—how high it got."

"And that?"

The girl lifted her mask and pointed at a spray-painted circle violently scrawled across the front of a house. An "X" separated each circle into quarters. "That's how they counted us. How many they found alive, how many was dead."

Watching the hard fortress of the girl's face, the Bone Man's heart hurt. Children shouldn't have to make themselves a little more dead to survive.

"Let's have some fun," he said, suddenly veering off the sidewalk and bounding up the cracked walkway of a pale pink house.

"What are you doing?" the girl asked, rushing up behind him.

"I'm doing what the Bone Man do. Waking everybody up on Mardi Gras morning."

The girl stared at the Bone Man as he flung aside a splintered screen door and banged on it.

"Ain't nobody in there."

The Bone Man cupped his hands around his mouth. "It's Mardi Gras morning," he yelled. "You been good? If you ain't, I'm coming for you!"

When there was no reply, he slammed his hand on the door. Both he and the girl jumped as [End Page 61] the door swung open. The rank scent of mold rushed out of the house and explod

• The Uncanny Keep On Talkin'
• Regina N. Bradley

When i was a kid, Wednesday nights were reserved for Unsolved Mysteries. A man's disembodied voice warned viewers that we were about to watch something that "was not a news broadcast," followed by a crescendo of synthesizers and Robert Stack's gravelly voice and direct stare into the camera.

"You always get scared by just the introduction," Nana fussed while standing directly in front of the television. "Watch something else before you have to go to bed."

She wasn't wrong.

"But this is my show," I protested. Robert Stack scowled from the screen in agreement. Nana shook her head and went about her business. I was scary, but I couldn't turn away. I watched Unsolved Mysteries in the country, where there were no streetlights, the darkness swallowed me whole, and nobody could hear me screaming if a serial killer made his way to the house or Bigfoot scratched at the bars of my bedroom window. Unsolved Mysteries was the portal to my imagination running wild, and fear was the pilot.

Robert Stack never narrated, but I had unsolved mysteries of my own: why did Paw Paw turn down the radio and whisper whenever we passed a cemetery? Who was really dumb enough to try and steal a Bible from the haunted church on the dirt road by our house that only appeared [End Page 92] under a full moon? How could an oak tree with moss look so damn sinister? What was really the deal with the Broom Man, someone Nana said lived in her neighborhood when she was a girl and could make a broom dance because he sold his soul to the Devil?

Dollbaby standing in the orchard at midday, by Allison Janae Hamilton, 2015. Archival pigment print, 40 × 60 in. © Allison Janae Hamilton,

courtesy of the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery.

I didn't know the term for my personal mysteries of living in the South was Southern Gothic.

southern gothic is a catchall for the region's peculiarities and how it exists. The South is not easily translatable, and the Gothic offers insight into how to make sense of the indecipherable. Themes of decay and rot, haunting, and deep-rooted secrets of family and self-betrayal are pathways for understanding the Southern Gothic as it is celebrated in literary and cultural studies. But like so many touchstones for understanding the region, the Southern Gothic heavily leans towards white experiences, including making sense of the half-life of the South's most prominent [End Page 93] obsession: the Confederacy. This mourning for the Old South is captured in stories of the rotting

Abstract:

When an out-of-town merchandiser goes missing in 1930s rural Southern Appalachia, whiskey and foul play are suspected. The small town of Woodbury, Tennessee, soon forgets and moves on, until the man's skeletal remains are uncovered three years later by two boys digging for mayapple root. Two men are immediately charged with the murder, though only one would be convicted. The trial would attract newspapers from across the state and beyond through the end of the decade. The story was lost to time and largely unknown to the descendants of those involved. The tale might have stayed buried in the past if not for a pulp fiction magazine that made its way back to the family some seventy years later.

• & When They Come For Me (Reprise)
• Golden (bio)

Magnolia mothers, owl eyed girls,fellow forget-me-nots, let's gather our God-gowns

down the golden gallows. We made it to the foreverfantasy where I can't remember what war we were

weaponing to win: For some secretary sex? Some back-handedbrother? Some sons & uncles & Grandfatherswho forget we have a heart-dream? An ox-blood song? A maiden name

Call this Heaven,if all you ever wanted to be was freshwind-air. Sisters, call this Hell, rest,

if you never joy-stick'd summer with a honeyfluttering in the wind, with the fish [End Page 96] frying in the heat. Let's return to the blue inverted ocean,saying I was raised from Bethlehem & Bethel, as Bitch & Brimstone

wings. I hope I become Fat-hipped women, childedlike my cousins in some decade. Here if not

before. Asking What violence brought ushere?Back to another beginning?

Red is a grave I'm not waiting to see the otherside of,not willing to weapon my peace lilies for.

Only thing I remember, now, wasonce I was a heat, a song, a sis who laughed,

a shoreline from niggas with sunin their mane. There aren't enough wet shoulders

in the galaxy to explain how much I lovedevery day I tried to be possible, & was.

Glory, Glory! Have you ever said home & stayedthere for centuries? Have you ever said peace

& know a country isn't coming with it? [End Page 97]

golden (they/them) is a Black gender-non-conforming trans photographer, poet, and community organizer. They are the author of A Dead Name That Learned How to Live and the photographic series On Learning How to Live, documenting Black trans life at the intersections of surviving and living in the United States. Their hybrid poetry and photography book, reprise, will be released in 2025.