Editor’s note: south: Farewell . . .

Since 1968, SLJ (Southern Literary Journal), now south: a scholarly journal, has produced forward thinking and innovative scholarship in the field. It has been my distinct pleasure as editor to shepherd the transition from a more disciplinary home to an interdisciplinary one. In addition and perhaps most importantly, it has been an honor to publish many emerging scholars like Regina N. Bradley and Amy King along the way. Our emphasis upon the importance of creative arts and humanities in the critical studies imaginary has highlighted work from Fred Moten, Joo Ok Kim and Ben Hamburger. Special issues on the legacy of Patsy Yaeger, manifestations of white supremacy in the global south, pedagogical praxis and the “southern” syllabus (David A. Davis) and finally, quaring childhood have helped to develop the critical lens of southern studies more generally.

As we look toward a future that this critical gaze might enable, it is with great excitement and some sadness—what in this part of the world is not bittersweet?—that I announce that south will cease its print and online production in the fall of 2019. south committed itself to a rigorous reimagining of the territory and its intellectual work. I am pleased to also announce that the work that south began just a few years ago will continue in another initiative: the Critical Ethnic Studies Collective (CES) at UNC. In order to provide some continuity between the journal and the larger initiative (described below), we will retain our website as a focal point and public facing documentation of our efforts to continue to press for a vibrant, inclusive and interdisciplinary space for critical engagements and ultimately for an engaged shift in the kind of work on the south that is possible.

This initiative is populated by a group of faculty across the College of Arts and Sciences at UNC-Chapel Hill committed to re-envisioning the global south by engaging it critically and thinking through the energies that diverse community can bring to such an endeavor. I am pleased to also report that the combined intellectual work of SLJ and south will have tangible manifestation in an endowment for the Initiative. As those of us engaged in critical ethnic studies/scholarship have remarked upon, these are challenging and often dangerous times, and some of our best minds (many of whom have graced the pages of south) have been put to the task of creating innovative approaches to and solutions for our current dis-order.

If we cast our eyes up and down the east coast, and of course, to the west, we can find any number of intersectional critical ethnic studies driven programs, many of which have been in existence for at least twenty years. Such programs help to ground University efforts to retain and promote faculty of color and indigenous faculty by providing a diverse intellectual home for faculty and especially graduate students. These programs appear across a range of University spaces—from research one and Ivy League, to land grant institutions, large and small. When a predominantly POC pool of students in the coming community search for a college home, they will be looking for these intellectual units as indicators of how committed a university is to having such truly diverse conversations on the ground.

In the global community, the role of intersectional thought has been transformative for both institutions and individuals. Critical Ethnic Studies at Carolina can provide visionary leadership for Universities and Colleges in the region through focused intellectual work on institutional power, systems of privilege and inequity, and the regional and global cultures that engage and survive them. We not only can create the institutional space for the powerful lens of CES at Carolina and in the region, but also utilize our strengths in the state among indigenous and Latinx scholars and communities. We envision a different kind of “south,” one in which students and faculty can engage, for example, issues of reparation and sovereignty, (im)migration and labor, gender difference and inclusion as categories with overlapping strands, rather than competing ideologies an constituencies.

Robust CES work has long happened at Carolina, but most of this...