Southern Spaces

09/13/2023

Learn more about one of the largest sales of enslaved people in US history in this revamped article
by interdisciplinary scholar Dr. Kwesi DeGraft-Hanson.

In 1859, one of the largest sales of enslaved people in US history took place at the Ten Broeck Race Course, now an obscured landscape, on the outskirts of Savannah, Georgia. Four hundred and twenty-nine enslaved persons from the Butler plantations near Darien were sold in an event remembered as "Th...

08/15/2023

New publication alert: Check out this interview and except from Michelle Fishburne's Who We Are Now: Stories of What Americans Lost and Found during the COVID-19 Pandemic (UNC Press)

Michelle Fishburne's Who We Are Now: Stories of What Americans Lost and Found during the COVID-19 Pandemic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2023) is an edited collection of interviews recorded in-person across the US between September 2020 and September 2021. Asking only one questio...

07/18/2023

Check out our latest publication: Nannie's Stone: Commemoration and Resistance!

Mount Zion and Female Union Band Society cemeteries, which together constitute the oldest African American burial ground in the Washington, DC area, is a long-contested space with powerful emotional holds on local communities of color. Among the cemetery’s most charged and beloved sites, the locus...

07/14/2023

We're disheartened by the passing of Minnie Bruce Pratt. Here she is reading above the Cahaba River back in 2004 for our Poets in Place series.

Poet Minnie Bruce Pratt (1946-2023) reads her poem "No Place," July 9, 2004, on a bridge over the Cahaba River in Bibb County, Alabama.

06/30/2023

New publication alert: Ra'Niqua Lee writes about the end of the COVID state of emergency and the resulting impact on mutual aid efforts in Atlanta.

Grassroots organizer Ra'Niqua Lee addresses the "end" of the COVID public health emergency and the impact on mutual aid efforts in Atlanta and beyond. The collapsing of safety nets put in place in response to the pandemic will leave millions without the help they still need, but grassroots organizat...

05/22/2023

Read about COVID response in Bangladesh in our newest publication!

Monzur Patwary of the Task Force for Global Health presents an array of tailored cultural responses to COVID-19 developed in his native Bangladesh. Underfunded centralized health services collaborate with NGOs in the creation of lively public service announcements in local dialects, video endorsemen...

04/12/2023

Come take a virtual tour of this Florida waterway with our newest publication: Thomas Hallock's "Draining Paradise: A Tour of Salt Creek in St. Petersburg, Florida!"

Urbanized streams take us into the heart of a city's history. When a creek becomes a culvert, protections disappear. St. Petersburg's Salt Creek, a fragmented stream that feeds the Gulf coast of Florida, flows northwest from the Pinellas Peninsula into Tampa Bay. This culverted and fragmented waterw...

03/15/2023

Check out our latest publication: CDC in the Pandemic's Wake by former CDC branch chief Daniel Po***ck!

https://southernspaces.org/2023/cdc-pandemics-wake/

02/17/2023

New publication alert:
Scott L. Matthew's review "Segregation's Habits and Horrors: The Photographs of O. N. Pruitt."
https://southernspaces.org/2023/segregations-habits-and-horrors-photographs-o-n-pruitt/

02/09/2023

"This is Zora's form of phonography, that which loops together a zone in which she operates at the crossroads of the modern and the folk."

You know Zora Neale Hurston, the author. Now learn about Hurston the ethnographer.

In this media-enhanced excerpt from Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021), Daphne A. Brooks delves into Zora Neale Hurston's 1939 experiences as the only Black woman on the staff of the Federal Writers Project's....

01/31/2023

Check out our latest publication, an excerpt from Chantal Mouffe's A GREEN DEMOCRATIC REVOLUTION from Verso Books.

A Green Democratic Revolution offers the most appropriate strategy for articulating the many democratic struggles against different forms of domination, exploitation, and discrimination with the defense of the habitability of the planet. Excerpted from Chantal Mouffe's Towards a Green Democratic Rev...

01/30/2023

"Overall, the event reinforced how righteous white Pendletonians wanted to see themselves as on the vanguard of a battle, defending their way of life against anyone who might see things differently. In particular, it represented something unique about the place and the space—the town elites of Pendleton were insistent about policing ideas that might reach the less elite white neighbors."

Learn about the attack on the Pendleton Post Office:

In 1849 a mob of white supremacists eager to seize anti-slavery mailings attacked the US Post Office in Pendleton, South Carolina. They burned leaflets and letters in a bonfire on the village green to make clear their stance against incendiary ideas. This essay explores the context of these events b...