July 14, 2021

A Symbolic Project

by Southern Cultures

This introductory essay frames the theme of the Built/Unbuilt Issue of Southern Cultures by bringing attention to the incomplete and unrealized aspects of seemingly ordinary landscapes of the New South. Confronting the unusual form of Dorton Arena in Raleigh, North Carolina, the essay defamiliarizes this popular site through an exploration of its broader social, economic, and artistic aims. Built in the aftermath of the Great Depression and World War II, state-owned Dorton and the fairgrounds were one of the pioneering manifestations of a new regional development paradigm that sought to battle social and economic fragmentation and the rise of fascism in industrial societies. The essay traces the ambivalent reception of these technologies of development that resulted in their incomplete implementation and misuse, as in the case of cars and racialized suburban sprawl. Indicative of many of the projects examined in the issue, these incomplete sites have now become ordinary parts of the American South.
Feature article A Symbolic Project
July 8, 2021

A Burning

by Southern Cultures

Tiana Nobile is a Korean American adoptee, Kundiman fellow, and recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award. A finalist for the National Poetry Series and Kundiman Poetry Prize, her writing has appeared in Poetry Northwest, the New Republic, Guernica, and the Texas Review, among others. Her full-length poetry debut, Cleave, is forthcoming in spring 2021 from Hub City Press. She lives in New Orleans, Louisiana. Nobile's poem "Megafauna" was featured in the Imaginary South Issue (vol. 26, no. 4: Winter 2020).
Web Only A Burning
July 1, 2021

Sowing an Agricultural Jewish Identity

by Southern Cultures

The Jewish Farmer Network held its inaugural conference, Cultivating Cultures: A Gathering of Jewish Farmers, in early February 2020. There, participants traded thoughts on permaculture and perennials over Shabbat dinner. "There is nothing revolutionary about the combination of Judaism and agriculture," writes Maragret Norman. "After all, the Jewish calendar doesn’t turn over in the dead of winter but at the end of the summer, at the turn of the seasons. The Torah even contains rules for agricultural practice. But there is something both new and radical at the intersection of these cultures." Norman spoke to organizers SJ Seldin and Shani Mink about their work.
Web Only Sowing an Agricultural Jewish Identity
June 22, 2021

Living, Being, and Doing

by Southern Cultures

Over the course of eight years while living in North Carolina, photographer Lisa McCarty visited Lake Eden, former home of the renowned experimental art school Black Mountain College. McCarty writes, "My motivation was never to repeat what the original students made, and I never expected to see exactly what they saw. However, I did want to feel something of what they felt, to be a part of natureculture. When I go to Lake Eden with my camera, I can, and I do. I become sensitive to everything." Between 1933 and 1957, Black Mountain's roster included Josef Albers, Anni Albers, Ruth Asawa, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Buckminster Fuller, Elaine de Kooning, Willem de Kooning, Gwendolyn Lawrence, Jacob Lawrence, Barbara Morgan, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, Susan Weil, and Marion Post Wolcott. Many of these artists are now part of the canon of American art and literature, and it is often the knowledge that many of them lived and worked together in the same place that sparks curiosity about the school. But despite the visceral effect of this specific place on a wide range of students, faculty, and even the subsequent admirers of the school that tour Lake Eden today, the importance of environmental stewardship and reverence at the College are often footnotes in its history.
Web Only Living, Being, and Doing
June 3, 2021

Mazel Tov

by Southern Cultures

Poetry by Jessica Jacobs, who is also featured in the upcoming "Built/Unbuilt" issue (vol. 27, no. 2: Summer 2021).
Web Only Mazel Tov
May 26, 2021

Soul Clap

by Southern Cultures

The question is: How do I render sound visible? For me, the answer is ethnopoetics, a mode of presenting performance, ritual, and cultural expression through the tools of poetry. In its possibilities for mirroring moments, and reflecting the spaciousness and impact of tone and silence and sound, the form seeks freedom from the strictures of prose. This is an ethnopoetic journey that invites rhythmic reading—listening with the eyes.
Feature article Soul Clap
May 6, 2021

In Search of Maudell Sleet’s Garden

by Southern Cultures

Art offers an archive that documents the environmental past. As cities grew quickly in the New South at the start of the twentieth century, women established urban gardens that provided self-sufficiency and meager profits for their households. Urban planners and zoning eliminated most of these opportunities by the late 1930s. The artist Romare Bearden, born in Charlotte, North Carolina, in 1911, recalled in his art the beauty of urban gardens among African American homes. This article considers those gardening practices through two Bearden collages centered on the unknown gardener Maudell Sleet and chronicles how cities changed with the demise of urban gardening.
Feature article In Search of Maudell Sleet’s Garden
April 28, 2021

Take Me to the River

by Southern Cultures

A new installment of our Shutter series on photography to accompany Southern Cultures’s special “Human/ Nature” Issue. Grace Hale discusses the work of artist Dave Woody and his photographs of the James River around Richmond, Virginia.
Feature article Take Me to the River
April 22, 2021

No Ark

by Southern Cultures

Poem for the Human/Nature issue by Nikole Brown.

Me and Papa and Aldo Leopold

by Southern Cultures

Anna Zeide grew up as the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants in the woods of southern Arkansas. Her father Boris was an eccentric professor of forestry, whose research touched on Aldo Leopold, a leading thinker in the history of ecology and wilderness conservation. When Anna’s academic path unexpectedly led her to graduate study in the history of science and the environment at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, she rediscovered Leopold, who had been a professor there in the 1930s and ’40s. Tragically, Boris died in the middle of Anna’s time in graduate school, which led her to return to his past work on Leopold in an effort to recover her and her father’s intellectual connections amid her grief. As she unearthed the controversial reactions to his work, which was critical of Leopold’s ideas of ecosystem thinking, she came to reckon with ideas of authorial identity, family history, and environmental thought.
Feature article Me and Papa and Aldo Leopold