Plantation Romances and Slave Narratives: Symbiotic Genres
...works seem to have been unable to avoid using the form not only to promote their way of life but also to express their deep anxieties about it. Plantation Romances...
Revisiting Flaherty's Louisiana Story
...the African hot wind and percussion orchestra; the typical Zydeco combo of accordion and frottoir or washboard playing hot licks to what might be an old African chant." When set...
The Black Belt
...Geologically, the region lies within the Gulf South's Coastal Plain in a crescent some twenty to twenty-five miles wide that stretches from eastern, south-central Alabama into northwestern Mississippi. The unusually...
Deep in the Cane: The Southern Soul of Gil Scott-Heron
...African American studies at the University of Virginia. She specializes in African American history, black cultural politics, and labor history. She is the author of The Rise and Fall of...
Georgia Slavery, Georgia Freedom
Review From colonial founders' initial resistance to slavery to antebellum whites' embrace of it, Watson W. Jennison's Cultivating Race charts the first hundred years of Georgia's Anglo, African, and Native American...
"Aint that Something?"
...more than five hundred mountains, encompassing more than one million acres of central and southern Appalachia" (Appalachian Voices). The mining has not only destroyed mountains and diverse forests, but ruined...
Cultural Life in a "Chocolate City": A Review of Natalie Hopkinson's Go-Go Live
Review In Go-Go Live: The Musical Life and Death of a Chocolate City journalist and educator Natalie Hopkinson uses go-go—the ultra-local style of African American popular music that has dominated...
Cajun South Louisiana
...Zydeco music among African Americans in the area. 1900s Musicians in Cajun band contest, National Rice Festival, Crowley, Louisiana. Photograph by Russell Lee, 1938. Courtesy of Farm Security Administration/Office of...
"The Ohio River Was Not the River Jordan": A Review of Matthew Salafia's Slavery's Borderland
...a far more complex and ambivalent depiction of the river's role than the more basic—and symbolic—representations generated by Stowe, Twain, Morrison, and others. For most African Americans crossing it, he...
Ecologies of the Sacred: A Review of Valérie Loichot's Water Graves
...or remembrance. As the installation confronts the degradation of coral environments, its underwater surroundings also beckon and materialize the (un)dead of the African Diaspora whose memory—likewise rarefied and threatened—inhabits these...