SOUTHERN CULTURES最新文献

• & 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.

Abstract:

Photographer Jared Ragland uses a Southern Gothic sensibility to visually contend with Alabama's centuries-long past, its present-day issues, and the perpetuated use of segregation and sequestration in service of the white supremacist myths of American exceptionalism. While the black-and-white photographs demonstrate similarities in style and content to the works of journalistic, literary, and artistic predecessors in the Southern Gothic tradition, they also engage and reframe fraught narrative relationships between historical trauma and contemporary sociopolitical issues in the American South. In so doing, "What Has Been Will Be Again" both meets, then disrupts, audience expectations for the Southern Gothic in its representation of past and present problems of place.

Abstract:

Black folk have a dubious relationship with landscapes of the American South, where the living dead—Indigenous, enslaved, Confederate, and everyone in between—saturate the natural world with unresolved trauma. Kara Walker has long explored the complexity of race relations during the rise and fall of the plantation economy, and in Night Conjure (2001), she inverts the iconography of Black fright against a white cotton field to envision other ways in which the South begat terror and for whom. Walker picks up the seemingly contradictory relationship between women of African descent and geographic sites of oppression and unbearable cultural memory.

Abstract:

The author challenges the notion of southern ghost stories as inherently subversive. Beginning with the stories in late nineteenth-century plantation fiction, this essay explores how wealthy white southerners used the genre to redeem and remake the region's past and present. White authors' claims of fraternity with largely nameless and faceless Black contacts are central to the story and reveal how these ghost stories helped to suppress reality, in favor of mythic tales. A comparison of the planation ghost stories and ghost stories accurately attributed to Black southerners shows that rather than faithfully recording the stories or making room for the oppressed to speak, white writers of planation ghost stories made a mockery of their Black neighbors and denied their post-emancipation agency. The roots of today's southern ghost stories are vastly more diverse, and significantly less empowering, than the celebrated Southern Gothic tales.

Abstract:

Originally from the Gulf Coast community of DeLisle, Mississippi, Jesmyn Ward is unapologetically steeped in a southern Black literary tradition that amplifies the complicated realities of being Black in the South. Ward is a MacArthur Fellow and two-time National Book Award winner for her novels Salvage the Bones (2011) and Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017). She writes across a variety of genres, including fiction, essays, and a memoir, Men We Reaped (2013). In an interview with Regina N. Bradley ahead of the release of her novel Let Us Descend (2023), Ward discussed the importance of the Gothic in writing about the Black South, how grief is central to her writing, and why writing helps her confront and understand Mississippi's racially turbulent history.