Project MUSE®: The Southern Quarterly - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/666
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in The Southern Quarterly.daily12026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 52 (2014) through current issueLatest Articles: The Southern QuarterlyTWOProject MUSE®The Southern Quarterly2377-20500038-4496Latest articles in The Southern Quarterly. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Guest Editor’s Introduction: Why Doing? Why Europe?
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/884441
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It has been almost two decades since Shelley Fisher Fishkin announced the transnational turn in American Studies and, while this is not a publication dedicated to the effects of this turn, it is important to note that it did not only bring about change in American Studies, but also heralded an (ongoing) period of Southern Studies scholarship dedicated to thinking and relating the South transnationally and globally (cf. Bone, Stecopoulos, Trefzer and Abadie, Jones and Monteith, Cobb and Stueck, Ward et al.). Southern Studies has been shaped by transnational dialogue and—to return to the basics of transnational theory—“multiple ties and interactions linking people and institutions across the borders of nation-states”
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/666/image/coversmallGuest Editor’s Introduction: Why Doing? Why Europe?2023-03-13text/htmlen-USGuest Editor’s Introduction: Why Doing? Why Europe?2023-03-132023TWOProject MUSE®221222026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002023-03-13Faulkner Across the Pond: The State of European Faulkner Studies
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/884442
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The presence alone of Faulkner in our midst makes a great difference in what the writer can and cannot permit himself to do. Nobody wants his mule and wagon stalled on the same track the Dixie Limited is roaring down.I begin with the words of Flannery O’Connor to establish an indisputable fact from the outset of this essay: for better or worse, William Faulkner is one of the icons of Southern literature, who stands among the most widely read, studied, and critiqued of all Southern novelists. Since Malcolm Cowley’s introduction to The Portable Faulkner in 1946, Faulkner’s work has widely been regarded in the history of literary scholarship throughout the United States “as a parable or legend of all the Deep South”
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/666/image/coversmallFaulkner Across the Pond: The State of European Faulkner Studies2023-03-13text/htmlen-USFaulkner Across the Pond: The State of European Faulkner Studies2023-03-132023TWOProject MUSE®1169222026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002023-03-13Pointing Fingers?: Massive Resistance and German Reactions to the Little Rock Crisis, 1957
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/884443
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Orval Faubus looked at the camera. “We are now an occupied territory,” the Arkansas governor proclaimed; “[e]vidence of the naked force of the federal government is here apparent in these unsheathed bayonets in the backs of school girls” (Speech). Two days earlier, on September 25, 1957, US President Dwight D. Eisenhower had federalized the state’s National Guard that had denied the Little Rock Nine entry to Central High School for nearly three weeks, and deployed the US Army’s 101st Airborne Division to Arkansas’s capital to disperse segregationist mobs and escort the African American students into school. The governor lamented these “police state methods” and continued that “news commentators and press reports of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/666/image/coversmallPointing Fingers?: Massive Resistance and German Reactions to the Little Rock Crisis, 19572023-03-13text/htmlen-USPointing Fingers?: Massive Resistance and German Reactions to the Little Rock Crisis, 19572023-03-132023TWOProject MUSE®966272026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002023-03-13A Tender Returnee: Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother and Olga Tokarczuk’s Tender Narrator
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/884444
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In her brief address delivered upon receiving a doctorate honoris causa from Jagiellonian University (Kraków, Poland) in 2021, Olga Tokarczuk, the Nobel-prize winning Polish novelist, spoke of her mission as a writer. She acknowledged the fact that as a creative agent, she does not need a “methodology” in the academic sense. Rather, Tokarczuk’s practice as a novelist aims to “unify the fragmented world” and to “provide it with meaning”2 (Uniwersytet Jagielloński). To her, literature is “participation in the eternal flow of storytelling” as the narrative crosses the boundaries of language and of individual beings. The most fitting way to explore the fundamental relevance of storytelling is to liken literature to a
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/666/image/coversmallA Tender Returnee: Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother and Olga Tokarczuk’s Tender Narrator2023-03-13text/htmlen-USA Tender Returnee: Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother and Olga Tokarczuk’s Tender Narrator2023-03-132023TWOProject MUSE®706462026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002023-03-13Bearing Witness: Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” and the Ethical Power of Testimony
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/884445
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In Zora Neale Hurston’s canonical novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Janie, on her return from the destruction of the hurricane in the Everglades and the death of her beloved Tea Cake, contemplates her experience and confides in her best friend Pheoby: “yuh got tuh go there tuh know there” (192, emphasis original). “Going there” and “knowing there” stand for the experience that transcends words, a journey that can be traced on a map but is individually experienced and requires empathy, a listener to understand. Bridging the geographical distance suggested by Janie’s return, Pheoby bears witness to Janie’s story, her testimony, affirming her experience. In turn, Hurston’s novel allows readers, distanced in
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/666/image/coversmallBearing Witness: Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” and the Ethical Power of Testimony2023-03-13text/htmlen-USBearing Witness: Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” and the Ethical Power of Testimony2023-03-132023TWOProject MUSE®962332026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002023-03-13A Theory of Southern Time and Space: Memory, Place and Identity in Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/884446
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“You’ve been running from the ghost / You keep it hidden in your past”Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard (2006) opens with a poem whose title, “Theories of Time and Space,” introduces the overarching theme of the whole collection. A kind of manifesto, the text is noteworthy for a number of reasons. First of all, it firmly roots the author’s poetics in spacetime, stating right from the start that Native Guard is concerned with different alignments, or better, with specific interpretations of geographical and chronological data. However, and in spite of the title, readers are not presented with a strict scientific or philosophical analysis, but rather with a “poem intended as a meditation” (Warren 84), a reflection and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/666/image/coversmallA Theory of Southern Time and Space: Memory, Place and Identity in Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard2023-03-13text/htmlen-USA Theory of Southern Time and Space: Memory, Place and Identity in Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard2023-03-132023TWOProject MUSE®774682026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002023-03-13Haunting Back: A Study of Spectrality in Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/884447
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“But my ghosts were once people, and I cannot forget that”The South, as both a geographical and imaginative region, has been constructed in the US collective imagination as an entity anchored in a liminal space, one where the past and the present coalesce, where frustrated dreams and emerging hopes find themselves in a battle with no obvious outcome. This presence, even burden, of the past in the present has been explored through multiple themes. The legacy of slavery for the construction of race and for race relations is perhaps the most relevant, and one that seems to be taking a central position in the literary realm. The number of African American revisionary works of fiction set in the South has steadily
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/666/image/coversmallHaunting Back: A Study of Spectrality in Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing2023-03-13text/htmlen-USHaunting Back: A Study of Spectrality in Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing2023-03-132023TWOProject MUSE®676822026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002023-03-13An Ecocritical Reading of the Marsh as a Liminal Space in Delia Owens’s Where the Crawdads Sing
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/884448
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Before publishing her debut novel Where the Crawdads Sing (2018), Delia Owens wrote three non-fiction books on her experience as a wildlife scientist in Africa (“About the Author”).1 Owens’s professional knowledge as a biologist and nature writer certainly inspired Where the Crawdads Sing and allowed the author to adopt a profound ecocritical perspective on Southern wetlands. The novel not only explains the ecological properties of the North Carolina marsh, but also takes the reader on a journey to discover the animals that inhabit this unique environment, including their survival strategies. Where the Crawdads Sing portrays the Southern wetlands as a complex interdependent and fragile liminal environment between
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/666/image/coversmallAn Ecocritical Reading of the Marsh as a Liminal Space in Delia Owens’s Where the Crawdads Sing2023-03-13text/htmlen-USAn Ecocritical Reading of the Marsh as a Liminal Space in Delia Owens’s Where the Crawdads Sing2023-03-132023TWOProject MUSE®823462026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002023-03-13“Mississippi You’re on My Mind”: Stoney Edwards and the Complex Interplay of Race and Region in 1970s Country Music
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/884449
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Recent years have seen a welcome rise in discussions of the historical and present contributions of non-white artists in country music.1 Fueled in part by the controversy surrounding Lil Nas X’s 2019 hit “Old Town Road”—which was removed from Billboard’s country chart for not sounding country enough—this conversation has especially highlighted the role of Black country musicians. After Black Grand Ole Opry pioneer DeFord Bailey was fired from the show in 1941, it was Charley Pride’s ground-breaking achievements that, starting in the late 1960s, brought the idea of a Black country artist (back) into public consciousness. Indeed, Pride’s success was frequently taken as a sign that the powerful connection between
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/666/image/coversmall“Mississippi You’re on My Mind”: Stoney Edwards and the Complex Interplay of Race and Region in 1970s Country Music2023-03-13text/htmlen-US“Mississippi You’re on My Mind”: Stoney Edwards and the Complex Interplay of Race and Region in 1970s Country Music2023-03-132023TWOProject MUSE®907282026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002023-03-13Notes On Contributors
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/884450
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Rebecca Brückmann is an Associate Professor of history at Carleton College. She is the author of Massive Resistance and Southern Womanhood: White Women, Class, and Segregation (U of Georgia P, 2021). Her research interests include African American history, the history of white supremacy, Southern history, and gender history.Hendrik Burfeind is a PhD student at Kiel University. He completed his MA in English and American Literatures, Cultures, and Media with a thesis on Black country music and is currently working on a study exploring the relationship between popular music and technology.Michał Choiński is an Associate Professor of American Studies in the Institute of English Studies at Jagiellonian University
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/666/image/coversmallNotes On Contributors2023-03-13text/htmlen-USNotes On Contributors2023-03-132023TWOProject MUSE®53812026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002023-03-13