Essay
“Discovering the North Carolina coast has felt like coming home, and its food and the fishing community who make it possible are at the heart of that homecoming.” We’re going coastal in this issue. Coastal food politics, cultures, and economies have always been a complicated mélange of people competing to utilize changing lands, waters, plants, »
Essay
Southern things have been very loud of late. Like a scene from any one of the dystopian television series so popular right now in an anxiety-ridden America—imagine a Deep South setting for The Leftovers—”things” are misbehaving. Across the South, a number of iconic southern landscapes and objects are shifting in meaning, and we cannot turn »
Essay
“My family reaches out of these photographs, pushing through time to remind me of the challenges they faced—of flood, pandemic, racial violence, and debt—the same challenges we face today.” In this moment, when connection remains paramount as our lives have shifted to isolation and virtual interaction, I picture an imaginary gathering of the captivating southern »
“Throughout the nation food strongly defines ethnic and regional identity. But in the South, and especially in the Delta, a region scarred by war, slavery, and the aftermath of reconstruction and segregation, food is especially important.” Mention “The Delta” and vivid images come to mind of a dramatic, flat landscape etched by rows of cotton »
“‘I know your damned photographer’s soul writhes, but to hell with it. Do you think I give a damn about a photographer’s soul with Hitler at our doorstep?’” A vast network of reform spread across the South in the first decades of the twentieth century as an army of progressive southerners, white and black, struggled »
Essay
“My civil engineer grandfather and father dealt with the ill-fated consequences of government programs to control and contain the Mississippi River in their lifetimes.” This issue takes me to the cultural inheritance from my own family and visceral memories of the extensive cropland, impenetrable forests, mysterious swamps, bayous, and waterways of northeastern Arkansas, where I »
Essay
“I witness the ‘absent presence’ of disability evident in the many walkers, canes, hearing aids, caregivers, silences, missing partners, and repetitive stories that fill the hallways and dining room.” “I am perfectly able to care for myself,” my ninety-seven-year-old mother, Huddy, says to me with a deep sigh. I hear the frustration and anger in her »
Essay
“The right to vote remains the most essential key to freedom and choice in all aspects of our lives.” As we move through these fraught days in America, watching with horror the incomprehensible destruction and death in Israel, Gaza, and Ukraine, I ponder if we are living in more historic, troubling times than generations before »
Essay
“I am struck by the deeply physical and emotional engagement with landscape that these scholars, writers, and artists reveal.” Welcome to this special Human/Nature issue of Southern Cultures. We are honored to have historian Andy Horowitz as our guest editor, on the heels of his brilliant new book Katrina: A History, 1915–2015, published in 2020. »
Music
July 20, 1969. I was twelve years old and at Jewish summer camp in Missouri, where we gathered in a giant circle in a field and sang “Aquarius” as Apollo 11, carrying three American astronauts, landed on the moon. The Woodstock “Music and Art Fair” happened a month later. That June, the Stonewall Riots took »
Back Porch
“My hand-pieced quilts and many pairs of gifted mittens and socks reinforced both my connection to generations of talented women before me and the post-1970s second-wave feminism I longed to represent in my daily life and actions.” I bought it in my early twenties—a bright red cotton T-shirt with the emblem “Women’s Radical Sewing Society.” I had »
“The last time I kissed him he only had on half a shirt. He has a wonderful chest. I am really crazy about him now + have the funniest feeling in me, all over.” Along with talent and energy, Elvis brought a sexual charisma into the music business that his colleagues did not possess. Certainly »