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Call for Papers: Death & Grieving

Guest edited by Kami Fletcher (Goucher College)

Southern Cultures encourages submissions from scholars, writers, and artists for a special issue, Death & Grieving, to be published Winter 2026. We will accept submissions for this issue through March 2, 2026, through Submittable.

In the colonial and antebellum South, a racial system of hypodescent—the “one drop rule” that categorized someone as Black—followed a person to their grave. Marked by plantation slavery, racialized burial grounds reflected a social order in which people were categorized not only as Black or white but also as enslaved or free. These categories determined who would be remembered and who would be forgotten after death, divisions that became deeply imprinted on southern culture, particularly in the aftermath of the Civil War. Through cemetery rituals, commemorations, and, eventually, the establishment of holidays such as Memorial Day, mourning became a public act that reinforced racial boundaries and competing historical narratives.

This duality that came to normalize southern deathways lays bare the social constructions that shaped death and mourning. It also forces us to contend with our understandings of the living and their influence on death and to consider how racial hierarchies shaped ideas of memory and the afterlife. Although southern death culture has often been framed in dichotomous terms, this special edition encourages readers to move beyond such binaries and consider the heterogeneous nature of death in the South—one shaped by Indigenous nations, immigrant communities, and the southern border. Examining the racialized politics of mourning on the borderlands reveals how contemporary death care, death work, and burial practices are shaped by transnational movement of people, cultural hybridity, and the precarious realities of immigration.

Submissions may explore the role racial understandings play in both past and contemporary southern death practices. We seek submissions that interrogate the role of deathscapes in how we understand race, memory, and identity in southern culture, including the ways in which public acts reinforced racial boundaries and historical narratives. We encourage critical perspectives on how death care work, underscored by gender, race, and class, serve as catalysts for change. Submissions exploring the performance of death, loss, mourning, and commemoration are also welcomed.

Submissions may explore any topic related to the theme, and we welcome investigations of the region in the forms Southern Cultures publishes: scholarly articles, creative nonfiction, memoir (first-person or collective), interviews, surveys, photo and art essays, and shorter feature essays.

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

  • Racialized burial grounds and cemetery segregation in the pre-contact, colonial, antebellum, and post–Civil War South
  • The legacy of plantation slavery in shaping southern deathscapes and memorial practices
  • Hypodescent, racial classification, and the politics of remembrance and forgetting
  • Gendered labor of mourning: women’s roles in death care, memorialization, and remembrance
  • The material culture and arts of deathways from grave sites to foodways, visual arts, and music
  • Death doulas and death doula-ing in the South
  • Southern funeral directors and the Civil Rights Movement
  • Jazz funerals and other celebratory commemorations of death and grieving
  • Memorial Day, public commemoration, and the racialization of national mourning
  • Death care work as a site of racial, class, and gender inequality and resistance
  • Indigenous deathways and burial practices in the South, past and present
  • Borderland culture and deathways along the US-Mexico border
  • The border as a symbolic and material site of death, mourning, and exclusion
  • How deathways reveal broader structures of power, belonging, and citizenship in the South
  • Resistance, remembrance, and alternative memorial practices that challenge racialized death regimes

As Southern Cultures publishes digital content, we encourage creativity in coordinating print and digital materials in submissions and ask that authors submit any potential video, audio, and interactive visual content along with their essay or artist’s statement. We encourage authors to gain familiarity with the tone, scope, and style of our journal before submitting. For full submissions guidelines, please click here.

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Header image: The Bolling family plot at the historic African American burial ground in the late evening, by Brian Palmer. Evergreen Cemetery, Richmond, Virginia, January 22, 2024. From “Confronting the Afterlife of Jim Crow” in Home (vol. 30, no. 4: Winter 2025).

Brian Palmer is a Peabody Award–winning journalist living in Richmond, Virginia. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Smithsonianmagazine, Richmond Free Press, and on PBS, BBC, and Reveal. Palmer has worked at The Village Voice, U.S. News & World Report, Fortune, and CNN. He’s currently a visiting professor of journalism at the University of Richmond.