Articles Archive - Page 7 of 127

July 14, 2021

The Great Unbuilding

by Southern Cultures

Examining the Hard Rock Hotel collapse of October 2019 in New Orleans and the Indura Resort in coastal Honduras through a transnational and comparative lens reveals two landscapes of redevelopment in the US South. These places are linked by narratives of cultural extractivism, disaster capitalism, and labor exploitation. Due to increasing privatization, they have also undergone a loss of public oversight and workers' rights. Deregulation driven by economic development stretches beyond New Orleans to Honduras, where residents have been displaced due to similar forms of corporate privatization that seize land for an ever-hungry tourism industry. These landscapes of development reveal the historical and transnational characteristics of the Hard Rock Hotel site by situating the US South within the circum-Caribbean and linking it to Honduras via extractive, globalized models of privatization.

Something That Must Be Faced

by Southern Cultures

Giving fresh attention to Carrie Mae Weems's photography, this photo essay focuses on the artist's critical engagement with architecture through a series of black and white images in the "Louisiana Project." We argue that by contrasting the built environment of Greek Revival houses with industrial and impoverished neighborhood spaces in and around New Orleans, Weems leverages a subtle and searing critique of entrenched systems of racism and racial oppression. The photographs, centered on a mysterious witness figure dressed in period clothing and portrayed by Weems herself, point out long-lasting effects of racial hierarchy expressed in architectural and preservationist practices. Weems's critical subjectivity evokes the colonized body trapped in a mythos that created and still, in the twenty-first century, sustains systemic racism in economic and social modalities, particularly in the southeastern United States. Our article interprets Weems's photography, here, as an indictment of and a protest against continuing patterns of racism.

Grant Park, Atlanta

by Southern Cultures

This article examines the role that Atlanta's Grant Park (1883) played in promoting the idea of social continuity between the Old and New Souths in the final decades of the nineteenth century. By the 1880s, Atlanta's leaders successfully leveraged their city's quick recovery from the Civil War to present it as an exemplar of New South success that would lead the region into an era of prosperity. As they did, they simultaneously sought to reassure white citizens that the march into the future did not require them to abandon their cultural attachment to the romanticized Old South. Consequently, they simulated the purported environmental and social conditions of the antebellum period within the grounds of Grant Park in order to reassure white Atlantans that central tenets of antebellum society would be maintained amid the push for modernization. The result was a space that privileged a conception of southern identity premised on white supremacy and patriarchal control above all others and codified social difference within the landscape.

The Kinetic South

by Southern Cultures

Outside Waco, Texas, a staged train collision from 1896 known as the "Crash at Crush" illuminates how movement and speed formed an organizing principle and perceptual framework for everyday life in the modern New South. After the Civil War, Waco remained unscarred by battles and unphased by Reconstruction. On the promise of starting anew on antebellum terms, white southerners moved to Central Texas in mass migrations that set off a boom in the region's physical and economic development. Looking at directories, city guides, and newspapers, this article traces how white southerners sacralized movement as a racialized privilege that structured their perceptions of their natural, built, and social geographies.

How to Build a Home

by Southern Cultures

This photo essay presents the moments and changes that the artist and her family have experienced during the modification of their very first home in the United States. It is based on the artist's exploration of cultural identity and understanding of what home means to a person. Having arrived to the United States as a child and adjusted to a new culture and community, the artist reflects on her immigrant parents finally being on the path to achieving the American Dream, the contrast of living in two different cultures, and discovering her identity and place.

Monuments for the Interim Twenty-Four Thousand Years

by Southern Cultures

This article considers the aesthetic and durational implications of the Savannah River Site in South Carolina (a largely hidden node in the American nuclear project, where 40 percent of the Cold War's plutonium was produced). As we come to understand the Anthropocene as a process-state at the edge of geo-history—or, in other words, an always "being-towards-death"—this article asks how a slippery (and often deceitful, in a white settler imaginary) relationship with time in the American South affects how we can imagine 20,000 years of living with a nuclear hangover. This sight- and site-based investigation looks at historical markers, nuclear semiotics, public sculpture, spatial and racial histories, and atomic ecologies to wonder how we are able, or unable, to perceive the radioactive leftovers of empire.

Reptilian State

by Southern Cultures

This article explores the American Museum of Natural History's (AMNH) Florida Group display that opened in 1918 and provides insight into evolving US conceptions of Florida as a reptilian state on the eve of modernity. Scholars of the AMNH's historic animal dioramas—what one calls the museum's "windows on nature"—point to their importance within the institution's educational agenda. At a time when film and wildlife photography were fledgling technologies, these three-dimensional exhibits offered a form of "virtual reality," aided by the museum's claims to the authentic reproduction of nature. The Florida Reptile Group, however, has been overlooked by historians, despite being a major display for several decades; moreover, the diorama coincided with a period of rapid development in South Florida, a site of real estate, tourism, and population booms, including the reclamation of waterlogged environs that inspired the exhibit. Visitor perceptions of the display are unfortunately absent from the historical record, but we can glimpse the diorama for ourselves: photographs survive in the archive, allowing us to contemplate its physical representation but also interpretation of Florida. Building upon older ideas of the region as a primeval wetland, but crucially one being "conquered" by the inroads of drainage and development, the diorama highlights the fraught significance of reptiles and amphibians to how Florida has been popularly imagined, often in deeply ambivalent ways.

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.

Front Porch: Built/Unbuilt

by Southern Cultures

Front Porch essay for the Built/Unbuilt issue.

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).

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.

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.