Editor's Introduction

This general issue offers readers five essays (six counting a review essay), a trio of interviews, a photo essay, and a gathering of poems. What these diverse contributions have in common is that each explores the importance of the visual—in photography, cinema, music, jazz, poetry, fiction—as it sheds light on Southern authors, landscapes, and texts.

Marcus Tribbett's lead essay examines agency and identity in Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom, an antebellum slave narrative that recounts the story of William and Ellen Craft who escaped from Georgia in 1848 with the light-skinned Ellen, "ambiguously gendered and racialized," dressed as a man named "William Johnson" who claimed to be her husband's owner. Though narrated from a first person male perspective, the pair in all likelihood wrote the narrative themselves with help from William Wells Brown. Tribbett's essay argues that this unique text represents "collaboration within a communally resistant tradition of literature and politics" where the cross-dressed and white-passing Ellen challenged elitist, patriarchal, white supremacist ideologies of gender and race. Tribbett insightfully concludes that this narrative is "as relevant for readers who would resist oppressive racial force in the twenty-first century as it was for the original readers of Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom."

In her study of Faulkner's Go Down, Moses (1942), Julia Simon holds that the novel sets into motion "competing economies of exchange and transfer . . . to tease out multiple ways of understanding both forms of accounting and forms of settling accounts." These forms of accounting and settling, she argues, are accompanied by concepts of fairness, equity, or justice that the novel tackles in various guises—familial and spiritual. Viewing the commissary ledgers as key symbols in the novel, Simon sees in the space between repudiation and redemption a charged spectrum of contractual obligations that highlight the struggle over equity and justice in Southern history. According to Simon, interwoven narratives parallel the novel's cryptic ledgers and emphasize the social justice that Faulkner advocated.

Derek Wood's following essay focuses on Les Cenelles Society of Arts and Letters, a 1940s circle that takes its name from an 1845 collection of African American poetry. Even though they were not a well-known group, the members of Les Cenelles accomplished notable success with their 1942 art exhibit in New Orleans. Led by Marcus Christian, these African American artists navigated around the restrictions of a Jim Crow South to create and to present their art. Following the lead of their nineteenth-century predecessors, Les Cenelles produced art often inspired by French Romanticism while advocating the moral necessity of equal rights for African Americans. Many of its members worked on the Federal Writers' Project (FWP) led by Lyle Saxon, who, by the way, befriended Tennessee Williams. In addition to their work on the FWP, these writers published widely, both articles and editorials, in African American newspapers, most notably the Louisiana Weekly, exemplifying yet again the political and artistic contributions of African Americans throughout Louisiana's history to fight for equal rights for "free people of color."

Filmmaker and historian Sascha Alexandra Just explores the contributions of another African American group collectively known as the Black Indian Tribes of New Orleans who, during Mardi Gras, parade down the streets of the city's black neighborhoods in feathered and beaded costumes paying tribute to Native Americans who helped their enslaved African ancestors escape and with them form so-called "maroon societies" in the Louisiana swamps. As a result of her field research and filmmaking, Just claims that these performances (1) remind us of the Black Indians' past struggles against white oppression, (2) express Black Indians' continuous opposition to today's racialized society, and (3) strengthen their communities' sense of self. Filming the performance history of this marginalized group, Just sees their struggle as emblematic of the larger nationwide opposition to white oppression. Throughout her essay, Just thus visually contextualizes the radical quality of Black Indian masking practices in contrast to those of New Orleans's dominant carnival festivities, and reminds us about the city's recent efforts to control representations of Black Indians in the media...