CFP: Southern Cultures issue: Inheritance

Southern Cultures, the peer-reviewed quarterly from UNC’s Center for the Study of the American South, encourages submissions from scholars, writers, and artists for a special issue, Inheritance, to be published Fall 2022. Editors will accept submissions for this issue through October 18, 2021.

The Fall 2022 issue grapples with inheritances: personal, familial, communal, national, and global, as well as political, social, cultural, economic, legal, and intellectual. “Inheritance” invites a multi-generational perspective on an object, a story, an archive, or other memento (broadly defined) that remains with us.

Submitters should imagine how the subject of their work might address questions about labor, gender, class, race, ethnicity, social movements, and related topics for undergraduate students as well as members of Southern Cultures’s broad readership. Essays and creative works for this issue will seek especially to engage undergraduate readers with interests including the fine arts, humanities, social sciences, environmental sciences, health, law, and government.  Editors envision essays that are grounded in the specifics of experience and community by authors who design accessible work.

Submissions can explore any aspect of the theme, and editors welcome explorations of the region in the forms Southern Cultures publishes: scholarly articles, memoir, interviews, surveys, photo essays, and shorter feature essays.

Possible topics and questions to explore might include (but are not limited to):

• What constitutes an authentic reckoning with intersectional identities in the US and Global South today?
• What histories and origin stories must we know to recognize and reckon with the complexity of America’s political, social, and cultural palette?
• How does Indigeneity get defined, historically and in the present day, in the South and the nation?
• How do the experiences of Indigenous peoples in the United States resonate with those in the global South?
• What reckoning must we undertake to understand and act upon calls to decolonize?
• Where do concepts like “nation,” “sovereignty,” “territory,” and/or “federal recognition” succeed, and where do they fail to support the human and civil rights of the people of Native nations and settler nations?
• How do Indigenous epistemologies reshape ways of belonging crafted through oral history, material culture, foodways, music, and literature?
• How are relationships to place fundamental to our definitions of belonging?
• What happens when we are separated from our places of birth or origin?
• Why do origins matter? Should they?
• Unexpected alliances and accidental or spontaneous protests
• Family secrets and ghost stories
• Adoption, alienation, and reconnection
• Success and failure in reckoning and reconciliation
• Genealogies of heritage, culture, wealth, and thought
• Legal precedents and their impacts

As Southern Cultures publishes digital content, editors encourage creativity in coordinating print and digital materials in submissions and ask that authors submit any potential video, audio, and interactive visual content with their essay or introduction/artist’s statement.