Beasts of the Southern Wild and Dirty Ecology
...white capital. The film's rags and wastelands—its killing fields—become powerful emblems of the Southland's (and our nation's) commitment to toxic inequality. But something else rages in this film; it refuses...
Living with the Ghosts of Queer Pasts
Blog Post I recently bought a crumbling old house in a historically gay neighborhood in Roanoke, Virginia. I met my ex-lover in this house five years ago. At the time...
"Beer, Prayer and Nellydrama": (Im)Possibilities in Max Vernon's The View UpStairs
...characters. For example, although the bartender-manager was historically a gay white man in "a gay white man's community," he "was known to be especially friendly to all comers," regardless of...
Sonic Zora in Florida
...from Jim Crow danger on more than one occasion for her, particularly as "racially 'mixed' teams" of WPA field researchers "travelling together were virtually unheard of." For these reasons, her...
Kara Walker's Blood Sugar: A Subtlety or the Marvelous Sugar Baby
...instance, posing in explicitly sexual postures with the statue. Rooks's point is especially well taken not only for its crucial political dimension, but also in that, as I argue, the...
Southern Spaces Recommends, October 2020
...or horror-comedy fans, consider Eli Craig's 2010 film Tucker & Dale vs. Evil, currently available on Netflix. It hilariously explores the trope of the killer hillbilly in horror movies by...
"Gaps in People's Lacks": James Franco's As I Lay Dying
...really parts at all because they all come from within the mind of the mentally handicapped Benjy. While Franco likely won't (and probably shouldn't) try to simply mimic this on...
Blues in the Lower Chattahoochee Valley
...the living exponents, and certainly still the most active, of a truly wonderful blues tradition that is unique to the southwest region of Georgia. But, unusually, not only is she...
The Supreme Court Is Overturning Brown v. Board of Education
...nonracial rationale, the vast majority of the South’s private schools had become religion-based and remained nearly entirely segregated.2Ironically, the Court’s decision in Espinoza removes one of the few restrictions that...
An Unflinching Look: An Interview with Photographer Benjamin Dimmitt
...exhibiting them. They said they weren’t going to be able to sell them, but they would exhibit them. So we did. And only two or three sold. I was eventually...