Special Issue: Music and Protest

Call for Papers

Guest Editor: Brendan Greaves

Southern Cultures encourages submissions from scholars, writers, musicians, and visual artists for our Music and Protest Issue to be published Fall 2018. We will be accepting submissions here for this special issue through December 1, 2017.

This call aims to gather work that documents and understands southern music’s relationships to protest and resistance, both historically and in its present moment, and in the voices of musicians, scholars, critics, audiences, visual artists, and activists, broadly defined. We understand southern music to exist across many genres, communities, and collaborations and seek to expand the conversation beyond the sometimes-limiting lenses of “traditional music” and “protest songs.” To that end, we are less interested in stereotypes, revisiting past debates, or fetishized music culture than we are in the interaction of peoples and cultures with the broader forces of political, social, historical, and economic change at work in the South.

Submissions can explore any topic or theme related to southern music and protest, with a special interest in pieces that seek new understandings of the region and its musics, identify current communities and concerns, and address its ongoing struggles for justice and expression. We welcome explorations of the region in the forms Southern Cultures publishes: scholarly articles, memoir, interviews, surveys, photo essays, and shorter feature essays.

Possible topics and questions to explore might include (but are certainly not limited to):

As we also publish digital content, we are able to feature select essays with video, audio, and interactive visual content. We encourage creativity in coordinating print and digital materials in submissions and ask that authors submit any potential digital materials with their essay or introduction/artist’s statement.

We encourage authors to gain familiarity with the tone, scope, and style of our journal before submitting. Those whose institutions subscribe to Project Muse can read past issues for free. To read our current issue, access our submission guidelines, or browse our content, please browse our website.

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