Project MUSE®: Southern Cultures - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/177
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Southern Cultures.daily12026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USInaugural Issue (1993) through currentLatest Articles: Southern CulturesTWOProject MUSE®Southern Cultures1534-14881068-8218Latest articles in Southern Cultures. Feed provided by Project MUSE®In Spirit, in Blood, and in Truth
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987447
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I always talk about the paternal side of my family—Nana Boo, Paw Paw, Daddy ’nem—but rarely share about my maternal southern roots. Mommy’s side of the family is a mystery wrapped up in a legend that eggs on my curiosity ’bout where my Mommy’s people ’nem from. On her side, I got different types of southern blood running through my veins: My Oma Klara Viol is from Passau, a city in southern Germany, and my Opa Ray Stephenson is from Yazoo City, Mississippi. Two different Souths, one blended southern family. I never asked Mommy or my uncles and auntie if they felt southern in the same way I do as a Black girl predominantly raised in southwest Georgia, but I do wonder if those branches and roots of the family tree
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/177/image/coversmallIn Spirit, in Blood, and in Truth2026-04-04text/htmlen-USIn Spirit, in Blood, and in Truth2026-04-042026TWOProject MUSE®90032026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-04Collecting Ourselves: Archives, Family History, and Black Southern Migration to Chicago
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987448
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So much of Black life and work and resistance goes missing. Black people work to hold all of this information in our heads, oftentimes unbolstered by institutions, oftentimes against such institutions’ purposeful forgetting. We have to function as a living library, as an institution.In the summer of 2020, the Alabama State Archives issued a statement acknowledging its role in upholding systematic racism by, among other things, putting into practice a collection policy focusing on the Lost Cause. This meant that it had “declin[ed] to acquire and preserve materials documenting the lives and contributions of African Americans in Alabama.” This statement came at a moment that was believed by some to have been an
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/177/image/coversmallCollecting Ourselves: Archives, Family History, and Black Southern Migration to Chicago2026-04-04text/htmlen-USCollecting Ourselves: Archives, Family History, and Black Southern Migration to Chicago2026-04-042026TWOProject MUSE®722332026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-04How to Fire a Professor at the University of Florida: Two Historical Blueprints
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987449
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1905 Blueprint, Property of University of Florida at Gainesville, University of Florida Division of Planning, Design, and Construction Records, George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida.The university classroom is a recurring setting in the theatre of the American reactionary imagination. For those possessed of nightmarish and creative minds, the classroom is a stage upon which catechists whisper into young ears radical notions about sex, radical ideas about race, and radical lies about America. Professors in close proximity to young people. Professors whose morals, ideas, and politics are unknown to parents. Professors who might be charming, charismatic, and convincing.
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/177/image/coversmallHow to Fire a Professor at the University of Florida: Two Historical Blueprints2026-04-04text/htmlen-USHow to Fire a Professor at the University of Florida: Two Historical Blueprints2026-04-042026TWOProject MUSE®595572026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-04Cousin Jimmy
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987450
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ONE DRIZZLY TUESDAY NIGHT in Chapel Hill—April Fool’s Day, 1975—my girlfriend and I were studying in the student union at the University of North Carolina. We’d found a vacant room then shut the door, spreading out books and notes to prepare for upcoming exams.After a few hours, we needed a break. Walking into the open common area, each of us noticed something we hadn’t seen when coming in: a large punchbowl filled with peanuts. Nobody was protecting it, nor did it seem to be a prank. And so—being college kids, and therefore poor, and always hungry—we walked straight to it and started eating nut after nut, enjoying this salty manna that the Lord had so generously provided.But not for long. Behind us, double doors
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/177/image/coversmallCousin Jimmy2026-04-04text/htmlen-USCousin Jimmy2026-04-042026TWOProject MUSE®304522026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-04Florida Boys
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987451
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For the past five years, Florida has been my studio and my muse. It is something I’ve been circling, leaving, returning to, and trying to understand. I moved here from Canada when I was three, and I grew up with that strange double feeling. I was an insider because I was raised in the Sunshine State, and an outsider because my family had no roots here. For a long time, I thought I knew Florida, but I only knew its edges—the suburbs, the highways, the palm-lined shortcuts between errands. I didn’t really know the springs, the swamps, the forests. I didn’t know how vast it was, or how haunted.I began Florida Boys in late 2020 as an attempt to look closer. The pandemic made the car feel like the only reliable way to
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/177/image/coversmallFlorida Boys2026-04-04text/htmlen-USFlorida Boys2026-04-042026TWOProject MUSE®77892026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-04That’s No Way to Live Your Life: My Family’s Gay Hairdresser
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987452
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Hearing the line that will stay in my head for weeks and years and decades to come goes like this: I am fourteen or fifteen or maybe even sixteen. I am in Tallahassee, in my parents’ backyard. I am lying in our hammock, sharing it with my father, when he asks me if I know Ken Johnson. Of course I know Ken. He cuts my mother’s hair. He cuts my hair and my father’s too. For years, we’ve kept appointments with him at Ardan’s, an old home converted into a salon where every surface is somehow pink or purple or mauve or lavender. So, how could I not know Ken? But before I can ask my father why he would ask such a weird question, my father says, of Ken: “He’s a nice guy. A good person. But that’s no way to live your
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/177/image/coversmallThat’s No Way to Live Your Life: My Family’s Gay Hairdresser2026-04-04text/htmlen-USThat’s No Way to Live Your Life: My Family’s Gay Hairdresser2026-04-042026TWOProject MUSE®318092026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-04A Mecca for a Million: Lincoln Beach and the Struggle over Black Public Space
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987453
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Edward X. Dunn Sr., director and instructor at Lincoln Beach, lines up his Tee Pee swimming class for the final session of the 10-week program. Times-Picayune File Photos.IN THE SUMMER OF 2023, I followed behind families toting floaties and foam coolers, trudging up an incline on the side of a levee. As I fumbled over a fence and down a ladder, the families walking ahead of me nimbly stepped over long and wide railroad tracks. In the distance, a canopy of oak trees blocked the sun, and from behind them came sounds of gentle waves and laughter. Without knowing, I walked past remnants of a boardwalk, a restaurant, and filled-in swimming pools—features that were once central to Lincoln Beach, a now-shuttered
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/177/image/coversmallA Mecca for a Million: Lincoln Beach and the Struggle over Black Public Space2026-04-04text/htmlen-USA Mecca for a Million: Lincoln Beach and the Struggle over Black Public Space2026-04-042026TWOProject MUSE®521092026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-04Holding Ground: Climate Change, System Collapse, and Home in New Orleans
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987454
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Bourbon Street during rare snowfall, New Orleans, by Michael DeMocker, January 21, 2025. Getty Images.Home is identity and inheritance, memory and continuity, and a place where intellectual knowledge and emotional allegiance often collide without resolution. In a city like New Orleans, home perhaps takes on a denser meaning because of the interwoven social structures that provide the protections allowing us to remain there at the frontlines of buckling systems that once buffered our risks. As our fragile infrastructure is put to new tests, we’re in the middle of a rapid unraveling as natural, political, financial, and social pressures mount. The story of New Orleans is not easily categorized under the popular
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/177/image/coversmallHolding Ground: Climate Change, System Collapse, and Home in New Orleans2026-04-04text/htmlen-USHolding Ground: Climate Change, System Collapse, and Home in New Orleans2026-04-042026TWOProject MUSE®391252026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-04