{"title":"The Promotora System: Community Care and Indigenous Women’s Organizing in Mississippi","authors":"Epsiva X., Manuela X., Lorena Quiroz, Juan Quinonez Zepeda, Paola Tejeda Gonzalez, Lizet Garcia, Irina Sandoval, Yisiara Aguirre, Raniyan Zaman, Nadine Lorini Formiga, Anahita Kodali, C. Moreda, Lily Ding, Polyana Freire, J. Pérez","doi":"10.1353/scu.2022.0038","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/scu.2022.0038","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article features an interview with Lorena Quiroz, the director of the Immigrant Alliance for Justice and Equity in Jackson, Mississippi, and with two other immigrant organizers from the organization, Manuela and Espita. The Mississippi Freedom Writers of Dartmouth College, a student collective, conducted the interviews and analyzed immigrant organizing in the context of shifts in capitalist production.","PeriodicalId":42657,"journal":{"name":"SOUTHERN CULTURES","volume":"28 1","pages":"100 - 119"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49108637","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"New Denim City","authors":"Michelle Crouch","doi":"10.1353/scu.2022.0039","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/scu.2022.0039","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:When Cone Mills’ White Oak denim plant shut its doors in 2017, blue jeans enthusiasts went into mourning. Much of the outcry centered around the fact that the Greensboro, North Carolina mill had been the last one in the United States producing selvage denim. Two years later, the vintage looms used at White Oak resurfaced at Vidalia Mills in Louisiana to great fanfare. Blue jeans sewn with this fabric command prices in the $200-$400 range. This essay uses a personal and familial lens to explore the relationship between nostalgia for the pre-NAFTA southern textile industry, high-priced “heirloom” denim, and the material reality of the workers who operate the storied Draper X3 looms.","PeriodicalId":42657,"journal":{"name":"SOUTHERN CULTURES","volume":"28 1","pages":"120 - 131"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43259331","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Catchin’ Strays: On Pet Negroes, the Black Domestic, and the Politics of Comfort","authors":"Jordan McDonald","doi":"10.1353/scu.2022.0036","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/scu.2022.0036","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:What if the category of the pet as a category was defined by forced domestication rather than species? In her 1943 essay “The Pet Negro System,” published in The American Mercury, Zora Neale Hurston theorizes the “pet Negro” within the social and political structure of the 20th century American South as a figure whose existence is shaped by an anti-Black economy of allowances, which has significant consequences for what Hortense Spillers refers to as “intramural Black life.” Exploring Hurtson’s formulation and delineation of the “pet Negro” and “stray” classes, this article argues that Hurston offers us a critique of Black elite comfort and complicity beyond the popular rhetorical discourses of domesticated (dis)loyalty thus opening up a framework for thinking of intraracial betrayal not as a matter of idiosyncratic cowardice, but as a reminder of how the singularity of anti-Blackness assures ontological precarity and produces anti-sociality. Taking seriously Saidiya Hartman’s articulation that “the domestic space, as much as the field, defined [the enslaved’s] experience of enslavement and the particular vulnerabilities of the captive body,” this essay considers the narrative of domestication as it concerns theories of the pet, the animal, and the enslaved fungible Black subject.","PeriodicalId":42657,"journal":{"name":"SOUTHERN CULTURES","volume":"28 1","pages":"74 - 87"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43317443","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Filmmaking as a Classroom: A Documentary Practice for the Climate Crisis","authors":"Kira Akerman","doi":"10.1353/scu.2022.0040","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/scu.2022.0040","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:“Filmmaking as a Classroom: A Documentary Practice for the Climate Crisis” is about the making of the documentary Hollow Tree. The filmmaker invited three young women, who did not previously know each other, to learn with her and her filmmaking team, and their respective communities. Her idea was to use filmmaking as a classroom, and to try to develop a documentary practice for the climate crisis. The young people in the film begin to imagine Louisiana’s past—its history of slavery, Indigenous dispossession, and colonization—and, by extension, Louisiana’s future. The one that they will experience and help to shape.","PeriodicalId":42657,"journal":{"name":"SOUTHERN CULTURES","volume":"28 1","pages":"132 - 141"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45121440","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"And the Devil Take the Hindmost","authors":"B. Moreton, Pamela Voekel","doi":"10.1353/scu.2022.0045","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/scu.2022.0045","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Analyzed as implicit assertions about moral values, the 2022 revelations of systemic disinvestment in Jackson’s public water system and the state’s theft of federal Temporary Assistance to Needy Families both represent the larger violence of systematic resource extraction and wealth hoarding that generalizes to the nation the political economy of the plantation. Under the allegedly scientific and value-free rubric of “economics,” moral values are asserted every time a budget is proposed, a bank charter is issued, a mortgage is written, or a ledger is balanced. Questions of distribution, extraction, care, labor, production, reciprocity, and subsistence rest upon inescapably moral assumptions: what is fair, who owns, who owes, who makes, who takes, what is work, and what—who—is property. Just as inescapably, the norms that compete to govern moral life require particular orderings of economic resources and obligations. A “fully loaded cost accounting,” in historian Nell Irvin Painter’s words, must be demanded of economic assumptions that deny their cruelly punitive model of the market as a perfect moral sorting device—and devil take the hindermost.","PeriodicalId":42657,"journal":{"name":"SOUTHERN CULTURES","volume":"28 1","pages":"15 - 2"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49082269","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“Heavy with Plenty”: Writing Abundance in the Plantationocene","authors":"D. Brown, Brian Williams","doi":"10.1353/scu.2022.0044","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/scu.2022.0044","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay engages with the work of Margaret Walker and Richard Wright alongside and against the dominant archives of plantation research and development in the United States South. As their work vividly illustrates, Black Southern laborers of the land were not just passive subjects serving the grand design of the landowner. They carved out spaces of radical possibility on the land against the wishes of White property owners. Black Southern writers, working at the intersection of history and historical fiction, read and wrote against the grain of dominant archives to represent Black ecological agency. Their work provides not just a counterpoint to logics of racial and ecological control characteristic of what many scholars now term the “Plantationocene,” but holds seeds of resistance and abundance within and against plantation ecologies.","PeriodicalId":42657,"journal":{"name":"SOUTHERN CULTURES","volume":"28 1","pages":"56 - 73"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47037180","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Lights Out","authors":"Alex Beasley","doi":"10.1353/scu.2022.0046","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/scu.2022.0046","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay frames the author’s experience of Winter Storm Uri in Texas in 2021 as a moment that rehearses future climate events. The essay argues that the event illuminates the ways in which narratives about scarcity and sacrifice obscure the causes and the stakes of climate change’s present and future dislocations. The author suggests that the short-term calculations and thin margins incentivized by profit-seeking in energy markets are inextricable from human-caused ecological destruction. Moreover, the consequences of the pursuit of profit are directly linked to the lived experience of extreme weather events. Thus understanding and addressing profit-based incentives must be at the core of our response to climate change.","PeriodicalId":42657,"journal":{"name":"SOUTHERN CULTURES","volume":"28 1","pages":"16 - 29"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45154569","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Los Autobuses del Sur: Mexican Migrant Routes and Economies in the US South","authors":"Ilia Rodríguez","doi":"10.1353/scu.2022.0037","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/scu.2022.0037","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay traces the regional expansion of migrant economies through the case of Mexican bus companies established throughout the US South in the 1990s. It draws on familial memories, archival collections, and newspaper articles to illustrate how entrepreneurs in the transit industry expanded their businesses regionally in the late twentieth century as Mexican communities settled and grew across the US South. Specifically, the piece examines how the ruta sureña (southern route) between Houston, Texas, and Atlanta, Georgia, in this era was established by Mexican migrants and facilitated by ethnic Mexican transit entrepreneurs. The bus routes traversing this ruta sureña, alongside migrants’ lived experiences, form part of a broader Latinx South, a region with multiple historical and contemporary points of entry.","PeriodicalId":42657,"journal":{"name":"SOUTHERN CULTURES","volume":"28 1","pages":"88 - 99"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45628583","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}