Recently added articles from The Southern Literary Journal:
Introduction: reading history, memory, and forgetting.
Mar 22, 2008; Gwin, Minrose ... <Pre>the dead must be mourned and sung overand prayers told them to carry to the other side.the dead must be chanted and marched to their tombsand the tombs then tended and the dogs kept away. </Pre> --Brenda Marie Osbey, "Faubourg" (1) Cultural memory ...
Morna.(Poem)
Mar 22, 2008; Osbey, Brenda Marie ... <Pre> Morna they sayis the song of the slaves of portugaland carries only one meaning: africa of the soul ground down like coffee, cocoa, millet, beans.where is my africa of the soul? morna, morna, ...
Litany of Our Lady.(Poem)
Mar 22, 2008; Osbey, Brenda Marie ... <Pre> Litany of Our Lady our lady of the sidewalksthe pavements and the crumbling brickthe mortar rock and oyster-shell roadsour lady of sorrows and sadnessesof intolerable agonies tolerated dailyof drifters grifters scrappers and scrapersour lady of ...
Requiem for a Tall Man (for Thomas Covington Dent 1932-1998).(Poem)
Mar 22, 2008; Osbey, Brenda Marie ... <Pre> Requiem For a Tall Man (for Thomas Covington Dent 1932-1998) and so they took your heartbroken breaking poor strapped and strangledtook it as they'd taken dozens, hundreds beforeand tried to feed its own life's blood back to it on thesly.who could have ...
Writing home.(Essay)
Mar 22, 2008; Osbey, Brenda Marie ... I don't much care for literary projects intended to pay posthumous tribute. "Give me my roses while I'm living," my grandfather is quoted as having habitually told his daughters. And I quite agree. Much as he prided himself in both the care and devotion of his four girls, evidently he did ...
Surveying memory: the past in black and white.(Essay)
Mar 22, 2008; Griffin, Larry J. ... This much we know; the past is not really, can never be, past at all. It is recalcitrant, stubbornly refusing to go away or be discarded. It haunts recovery and sabotages amnesia. The past reminds--makes--us who we are and, sometimes, when we acknowledge that past, it also makes us wish we ...
On flags and fraternities: lessons on cultural memory and historical amnesia in Charles Chesnutt's "Po' Sandy".(Critical essay)
Mar 22, 2008; Bauer, Margaret D. ... <Pre>I think South, which I love, and then I think racist,which I hate, and those two ideas are stuck together inthis flag--forever. --Mary Elizabeth, Any Day Now We come up to the courthouse, and I see the flag wavingthere. This flag ain't like the one we ...
Jean Toomer's Cane and the erotics of mourning.(Critical essay)
Mar 22, 2008; Williams, Jennifer D. ... In a 1924 review essay titled "The Younger Literary Movement," W.E.B. Du Bois and Alain Locke praise Jean Toomer for his daring portrayal of black sexuality in Cane. They proclaim him the first black writer to challenge the conventions of black genteel literature of the late nineteenth and ...
A southern sublimation: lynching film and the reconstruction of American memory.(Critical essay)
Mar 22, 2008; Jackson, Robert ... History, Genre, Projection "As I am finishing this book," National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) executive secretary Walter White writes in How Far the Promised Land? (1955), "something seems to have been left out. It would have been impossible a ...
Mourning Emmett: "one long expansive moment".(Emmett Louis Till)(Critical essay)
Mar 22, 2008; Mark, Rebecca ... <Pre>However the image entersits force remains withinmy eyes --Audre Lorde, "Afterimages" </Pre> A Klee painting named "Angelus Novus" shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his ...
Making civil rights harder: literature, memory, and the black freedom struggle.(Critical essay)
Mar 22, 2008; Metress, Christopher ... In a March 2005 essay in The Journal of American History entitled "The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past," Jacquelyn Dowd Hall notes how "[t]he civil rights movement circulates through American memory in forms and through channels that are at once powerful, ...
"Pretty as pictures": family photography and southern postmemory in Porter's Old Mortality.
Mar 22, 2008; Edelstein, Sari ... <Pre>Men do not have with myth a relationship basedon truth but on use: they depoliticize accordingto their needs. --Roland Barthes, Mythologies </Pre> William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! (1936) hinges on a family photograph. Unlike the intersecting and contested ...
History and intertextuality: a transnational reading of Eudora Welty's Losing Battles and Sindiwe Magona's Mother to Mother.(Critical essay)
Mar 22, 2008; McHaney, Pearl Amelia ... Eudora Welty's 1970 novel Losing Battles, the story of a family reunion set in the impoverished northeast Mississippi hill country of the 1930s, and Sindiwe Magona's 1999 novel Mother to Mother, the fictional confession of the mother of one of the South African boys who murdered Fulbright ...
Restoration, metanostalgia, and critical memory: forms of nostalgia in contemporary southern poetry.(Critical essay)
Mar 22, 2008; Turner, Daniel Cross ... White southerners and their literature traditionally have been known for nostalgia (sometimes even defined by it), and contemporary southern poetry does not escape its influence. In fact, nostalgia is arguably the most prevalent paradigm of current southern poetics, even as much post-World ...
Evil empires: Blood Meridian, war in El Salvador, and the burdens of omniscience.(Critical essay)
Mar 22, 2008; Shaw, Jonathan Imber ... In the months following the death of former President Ronald Reagan in June 2004, a seemingly endless succession of pundits, politicians, and historians enjoined their audiences to remember a number of things about his two terms in the Chief Executive's office. Heading many lists of things ...
"I can't believe it was really real": violence, Vietnam, and bringing war home in Bobbie Ann Mason's In Country.(Critical essay)
Mar 22, 2008; Hinrichsen, Lisa ... In Witnessing, a 2004 collection of essays, Ellen Douglas reflects on her writing life and notes the degree to which it was marked by the difficult struggle to "take possession of our personal pasts [and] our history" (19). For Douglas, taking "possession" means actively working through ...
"But what if I can't change?": desire, denial, and melancholia in Randall Kenan's A Visitation of Spirits.(Critical essay)
Mar 22, 2008; Tettenborn, Eva ... The African American novel has an established tradition of depicting grieving characters to comment on socio-political circumstances; moreover, the melancholic's grief in African American literature often signifies resistance to a historiography that has systematically neglected the ...
Telling forgotten stories of slavery in the postmodern South.(Critical essay)
Mar 22, 2008; Donaldson, Susan V. ... <Pre>Talk not about kind and Christian masters.They are not masters of the system. Thesystem is master of them.--J. W. C. Pennington </Pre> Forty years ago, Ralph Ellison served notice that one of the legacies of Jim Crow's demise would be the remaking of American ...
Forgetting New Orleans.(New Orleans, Louisiana)(Essay)
Mar 22, 2008; Salvaggio, Ruth ... In late October of 2007, over two years since Katrina, the New Orleans Times-Picayune was featuring front-page articles on the wild-fires that had recently destroyed over a thousand homes in California. Under their headline "No Comparison," local news reports documented, bit by bit, the ...