SOUTHERN CULTURES最新文献

• Dark CornersThe Appalachian Murder Ballad
• Julyan Davis (bio)

Cold Fall the Drops of Rain, by Julyan Davis, 2016. Oil on canvas, 46 x 38 in.

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I grew up listening to the folk songs of my ancestors along the Scottish Borders. When I left London for America, I discovered the songs again, preserved intact in the Appalachian South. Even as a child, I was drawn to the pathos and melancholy of these old ballads. They are weighted with what the historian David Hackett Fisher described as "nescient fatalism." Such a fatalism—a kind of stoic acceptance existing without specific foreknowledge—is common among societies with a history of violence. So also is the culture of honor that I found similarly transported to parts of America from its traumatic birthplace in the now-gentle Scottish Borders.¹

Finding evidence of such a culture (and such a fatalism) inspired me to set my paintings of these ancient songs in the contemporary South. I was not illustrating the ballad but rather the mood the ballad provoked in me. Many of the paintings are murder ballads, and most of the subjects are women; women trapped in a world where they are a commodity. Even if the women are prized, as several ballads tell, being attributed such power in a culture of honor often proves fatal.

This painting was inspired by the seventeenth-century ballad "The Dowie Dens of Yarrow," in which a young woman loses her suitor when he is ambushed and killed by nine others. Here she waits and watches from an abandoned farmhouse I discovered in Madison County, North Carolina, the same part of the world that keeps the old songs intact and continues to inspire my art. [End Page 77]

julyan davis is a British-American painter and novelist who has made the American South his subject since 1988. His art focuses on documenting both the vanishing landscape and the lost histories and folklore of the region. His traveling museum exhibits include collaborations with poets, musicians, historians, and actors.

notes

1. David Hackett Fisher, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 697.

• Night Walker
• Kimberly Anderson (bio)

Night Service Mirage, by Kimberly Anderson, 2022. Mixed media collage on corrugated cardboard with family photos, archival photography, and gold leaf, 12 x 12 in.

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"Hey, sorry i can't take you further down the road, man, you sure you gon' be alright?"

Tea smiled at his friend. He fully understood the trepidation. The black of night in rural Marion, South Carolina, could be really unnerving if you weren't from the area and familiar with the roads—especially in the dark. The low country roads were mostly deserted, save for the occasional car passing through, and the atmosphere was pitch black. Looking into the night was like staring into the void.

Tea exited the car. "That's a'ight, man, I 'ppreciate the ride this far. 'Sides, I know these roads like the back of my hand." Tea's words were still hanging in the air when his driver peeled out of Ariel Crossroads.

Tea chuckled. He was no newbie and could probably walk the fifteen minutes home blindfolded, but he couldn't blame his friend for being apprehensive. There were a lot of peculiar happenings indeed in the low country after dark. No streetlights either—just pure darkness, except for the occasional light in the window of Ms. Mae's house about a mile down the road. Ariel Crossroads began right at the edge of Tea's family cemetery, a real-life crossroads of life and death. There were many tales of peculiar happenings in the St. James area after dark—hell, during the day too—vacant rural roads and thicket-covered ditch backs provided the perfect backdrop for the clandestine. Tea thought a minute about how his sister Retta always said she wouldn't be caught in St. James after the sun went down.

She spook too easily, ol' spooky scary girl, he chuckled to himself. Still, he drew the bottle of homemade moonshine he always kept in his shirt pocket and took a quick nip of liquid courage for the road.

Tonight, the full moon offered some solace from the typical nighttime obscurity. The dirt and rocks swished and swashed under his feet as he shuffed along the road approaching the family cemetery.

The story went that Uncle Zack purchased the land for the cemetery back in 1919 for one hundred dollars. One hundred years later, the land was the revered resting place for legions of ancestors, and as expected from an area so long inhabited, the energy was charged. Coming up the road, Tea heard what sounded like clapping, singing, and praising over at the church house. He paused. He couldn't remember any mention of a service or program scheduled for that night, but he felt the energetic draw of rejoi

• Contributors

kimberly anderson is a lens-based visual artist, employing photography, collage, and mixed media as a framework for her explorations of the nuances of memory. She encourages viewers to engage with the multifaceted tapestry of Blackness and the balance between the value and fragility ingrained in these narratives. Anderson is currently based in Brooklyn.

rebecca bengal is a writer of fiction and nonfiction who grew up in western North Carolina and is currently based in Brooklyn. Her stories, interviews, essays, reported pieces, and collaborations with artists have been published in Aperture, the New York Times, the New Yorker, and the Paris Review. Her first book of essays, Strange Hours: Photography, Memory, and the Lives of Artists, was published in 2023 as part of the Aperture Ideas series.

kinitra d. brooks is the Audrey and John Leslie Endowed Chair in Literary Studies in the Department of English at Michigan State University. Dr. Brooks specializes in the study of Black women, genre fiction, and popular culture. She has coedited The Lemonade Reader, and her two other books are Searching for Sycorax: Black Women's Hauntings of Contemporary Horror and Sycorax's Daughters.

julyan davis is a British-American painter and novelist who has made the American South his subject since 1988. His art focuses on documenting both the vanishing landscape and the lost histories and folklore of the region. His traveling museum exhibits include collaborations with poets, musicians, historians, and actors.

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.

k. ibura is the author of two speculative fiction collections, Ancient, Ancient (winner of the James Tiptree Award) and When the World Wounds, and a novel for children, When the World Turns Upside Down. She is the coeditor of the Infinite Constellations anthology and author of an ebook series about writing. Learn more at kiburabooks.com and kibura.com. [End Page 98]

john jennings is a professor of media and cultural studies at the University of California at Riverside. Jenning

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.

• Haints, Hollers, and Hoodoo
• Kinitra D. Brooks (bio)

"A dark spirit lives on your porch," the medium told me. Excuse me? Prickles of dread and fear blossomed in my chest. What the hell am I supposed to do about that? I was only beginning my journey in ancestor veneration—working through my fears of the dead in general and dark spirits in particular with the help of a powerful medium whom I trust implicitly. I am the world's scariest horror scholar—I watch scary movies with my fingers in my ears, for gosh sakes! And now something fearsome was just outside my front door.

"Oh, don't worry," the medium laughed. "Every time it tries to come in, your grandmother comes out the hallway and stares it down, daring it to come into my grandmother's baby's domain."

I smiled, fear and dread now replaced with pride and confidence in her protection of my home. Sixteen years after her death, my grandmother was still my defender.

the south is haunted I often refer to my hometown of New Orleans as the "Land of the Dead," for so much blood has been spilled in and over my city that death seems to permeate the air. It can be both suffocating and invigorating. Mistakenly thought of as a place time forgot, New Orleans is a town that accepts the presence of the dead and their influence on quotidian life. Echoing this feeling, author Phyllis Alesia Perry speaks of her love for "a certain place in Alabama . . . where stories seem to bubble up from the ground."¹ [End Page 2]

Companion, 2020. Acrylic, charcoal, relief printing, decorative papers, hand-stitching, 75 x 51.5 in. All artwork by Delita Martin.

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This issue is dedicated to unpacking the storied Gothic South. Its key concepts center haunting: the presence of ghosts that bring discomfort to the living; the waves of terror and trauma manifesting as deep melancholia, seen, for example, in the classic works of William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor; the emphasis on the old, the decrepit, and the remnants of a past that often never was—such as the still-living lie that enslavers and the enslaved lived in harmony. This melancholia emerged after a devastating loss in a war against fellow Americans that left both the land and the (white) southern sense of self in ruins.

The subject of southern ghosts offers many more ways to consider the haunted nature of the South, however. Two of the most prominent approaches within this issue deal with haunting and the overlapping sense of time. We see explicit haunting in K. Ibura's "A Girl, a Man, a Storm, a City," as we revel with ghosts in the aftermath of Katrina.

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.