Race & Gender in the Latinx South: A Review of Cecilia Márquez’s Making the Latino South & Sarah McNamara’s Ybor City
[author_affiliation] Overview Introduction In 2003, Raymond Mohl’s description of the “latinization” of the late twentieth century US South (the “Nuevo New South”) helped set the stage for an expanding body of cross-disciplinary research on Latinx migration, settlement, and everyday experiences.1Raymond Mohl, “Globalization, Latinization, and the Nuevo New South,” Journal of American Ethnic History 22, no. […]
Along the Ulcofauhatche: Of Sorrow Songs and “Dried Indian Creek”
[author_affiliation] Overview Through all the sorrow of the Sorrow Songs there breathes a hope—a faith in the ultimate justice of things. The minor cadences of despair change often to triumph and calm confidence. Sometimes it is faith in life, sometimes a faith in death, sometimes assurance of boundless justice in some fair world beyond. (W.E.B. […]
Still Digging Our Own Graves: Coal Miners and the Struggle over Black Lung Disease
[author_affiliation] Overview Preface Digging Our Own Graves, first published in 1987, concluded with an ominous prediction: “Black lung disease awaits the younger generation of coal miners who are now at work underground.” Would that I had been wrong! Today, not only do coal miners still suffer from this lethal but preventable lung disease, they do […]
Psychiatry in the Wake: Racism and the Asylumed South
[author_affiliation] Overview Christina Sharpe, scholar of English literature and Black studies, articulates the concept of “the wake” as a way of thinking about the long term impact of slavery upon African American life. In her work on symbolism in African American literature and visual culture, Sharpe argues that the wake symbolizes the “endurance of […]
Writing Appalachia
[author_affiliation] Overview Excerpt Appalachian literature is thriving. From the earliest oral traditions to print accounts of frontier exploration, from local color to modernism and postmodernism, from an exuberant flowering in the 1970s to its high popular and critical profile in the twenty-first century, Appalachian literature can boast a long tradition of delighting and provoking readers. […]
Ossabaw Island Flyover
[author_affiliation] Overview Video and Essay Ossabaw Island is a barrier island on the Georgia coast. The island, which trends northeast–southwest, is about 14.5 kilometers (9 miles) long and 10.5 kilometers (6.6 miles) wide. It is located between latitudes 31° 49.5′ and 31° 43.2′ N. Of the Georgia barrier islands, Ossabaw is the most geologically unusual. […]
The Dispossessions of Appalachia: A Review of Ramp Hollow
[author_affiliation] Overview Review The yeoman farmer is a central figure in debates over the historical dispossessions that created the place we now call Appalachia. For historians like Ron Eller, these self-sufficient small landholders dominated the agrarian past, and first became exploited as residents of company towns when coal, timber, and other corporate interests began in […]
A Review of The Lynching of Mexicans in the Texas Borderlands
[author_affiliation] Overview Review On June 19, 1911, the quiet evening descending on Thorndale, Texas, shattered suddenly when a group of men exiting a saloon attacked a youth they found whittling wood. Eyewitnesses reported that the saloon’s owner grabbed fourteen-year-old Antonio Gómez and tossed him to the street. As a crowd closed in around Gómez, he […]
Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia
[author_affiliation] Overview Introduction At present, the people of Appalachia continue to endure the contraction and retreat of extractive industry with little more than big-box retail for employment. They work for local hospitals and county governments at a time when both depend on a withering tax base. Many residents hunt, fish, and garden to make up […]
Ethnic Cleansing and the Trail of Tears: Cherokee Pasts, Places, and Identities
[author_affiliation] Overview Whenever the concepts of diaspora and indigeneity come together, scholars tend to ascribe oppositional power to them. Diaspora implies transnational if not global movement, displacement, and attenuation while indigeneity connotes originality, belonging, and rootedness. In drawing together diaspora and indigeneity to compass the complexities and ambiguities of indigenous peoples’ lives, scholars of […]