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Southern Spaces
A journal about real and imagined spaces and places of the US South and their global connections

Searcy County Livestock Auction

...sold only cattle—as many as three thousand steers a day from up to a hundred miles away. As business dwindled—and only months after I documented it in 2009—Simpkins decided to...

Reckoning with Enslavement

...the United States, rose to address the descendants. He wore a plain black business suit and Roman clerical collar. With an air of earnestness, he spoke slowly, like a pastor...

How I Shed My Skin

...Algonquin Books.  The transformations from sixth to seventh grade, from lackadaisical Mr. Vaughn's class to the precise Mrs. Ferguson, from foe to friend of black classmates, helped expose southern white...

Revisiting Flaherty's Louisiana Story

...vision of Louisiana in the documentary classic Louisiana Story. The making of that Louisiana story follows Flaherty's standard format. He created "narrative documentaries," what we might call today "docudramas." But...

"Aint that Something?"

...Fiction Since 1878: "Appalachia in the national geographic imaginary . . . has largely remained an essentialist vision of the region—white, rural, poor or working-class mountain people with highly specific...

Local Color

...harnessing the genre's equal potential for irony to expose the blindness or self-serving motives of the master class. Local Color became America’s first national literature of race. It also became...