Editor’s Note: Y’all

A contraction.

An invitation (of sorts).

An indication that somewhere, someone is making community.

The Urban Dictionary observes that the contraction of “you-all” (y’all) has its roots in the South, with its origin in Scottish-Irish lingua franca but its home on the tongues of African American communities.

Y’all is meant to indicate belonging; as a term of endearment, it outlines the better part of who we are to one another. Finding one’s way to the feeling that the term inspires in southerners near and far is perhaps easy. Discovering a way out of its sometimes cloying stereotype, regional specificity, and propensity to split the North and South into ideologically opposed political entities is sometimes more trouble than it’s worth.

This final cover of SLJ provides a historical spectrum of its visual history. Moving clockwise through almost 50 years of the journal’s publication history, the cover takes us both toward and away from that South that so vexes us and provides the occasion for our current moment—the sense of an ending, the passing of the guard—all clichés gesturing toward the truth of endings and beginnings overall: they are sorely overrated. But cover art remains; it, at least, is not ephemeral. On the cover of the inaugural issue of SLJ (pictured top left), a colonial figure stands at the door of the “academy”—poised to take it by storm, if necessary. It is work central to what we do. The third cover pictured (top right) is of a cabin—connoting those both enslaved and free—a ubiquitous, yet haunting presence in any southern landscape. Last, but not least, the final cover depicted reminds us of the power of nature—hurricanes and tropical storms tie us to the global South. Warm-air weather events focus our attention in this part of the hemisphere upon one another; they create relation and opportunity for signs of institutional failure.

This last issue of SLJ closes the door on a beloved scholarly landscape at the same time that it signals the arrival of yet another iteration of that word “south.” At the center of this issue is a preview of the new cover of “south: a scholarly journal.” The title is reflective of our vision for the journal’s interdisciplinary future and its new institutional home in the Department of American Studies at the University of North Carolina. SLJ especially has encouraged global and hemispheric comparative scholarship linking the American South to other Souths. We envision a journal that thinks of that entity in circumgulfic terms.

The first issue of south will be published in the fall of 2015 and will focus on the word “deep.” By choosing a word, much like “y’all,” that evokes both the vernacular and the regional, I hope to reanimate our collective vision of the south—one that travels, one that contours the senses, and finally, one that follows upon the heels of SLJ’s superb tradition of invitation and innovation.