Southern Expatriates

deadline for submissions: 
February 15, 2020
full name / name of organization: 
The Southern Quarterly: A Journal of Arts & Letters in the South

Special Issue Call for Papers:

Southern Expatriates

 

Publication Schedule: Volume 57, numbers 3/4 (Spring/Summer 2020)

 

Submission Deadline: February 15, 2020

 

Given Thomas Wolfe’s famous sentiment “you can’t go home again,” it’s impressive how many Southerners elect to leave home in the first place, much less stay away from the South. According to James N. Gregory, in his 1995 article “The Southern Diaspora and the Urban Dispossessed,” the Great Migration of African Americans from the 1920s through the 1950s was accompanied by an even larger white migration out of the South. Robert Coles, in his three-volume series The South Goes North, documented how white and black expatriates from the South were largely disappointed in their hopes for a better, more prosperous life in the urban North. Today, Southerners of all races and ethnicities continue to leave: in January 2018, U.S. News & World Report indicated the main reason was a lack of job opportunities. But from the earliest so-called “Southern expatriates” like Frederick Douglass to more recent examples like Richard Wright, Robert Penn Warren, Dorothy Allison, Alice Walker, and Richard Ford, Southern writers who move away articulate unique viewpoints about the South.

 

With this call for a special double issue of The Southern Quarterly, we want to encourage interdisciplinary scholars at any stage of their career to submit examinations of the Southern expatriate phenomenon. Some possible topics include but are not limited to:

  • Analyses of Southern expatriate artists (novelists, short story writers, poets, playwrights, essayists, musicians, visual artists) and how their work is/is not affected by their expatriation 
  • The rise of postsouthernism and/or decline of a distinguishable South
  • The role of nostalgia or trauma in recollections of a Southern past
  • Indian removal and other forced expatriation
  • Social conservatism (with attendant intolerance for racial, sexual, religious, and other minorities) as a stimulus for migration
  • Immigration into the South, particularly by undocumented workers
  • The relevance of the Global South

 

SoQ does not consider multiple submissions or work that has been approved elsewhere. Themanuscriptsubmission deadline is 15 February 2020. All submissions should follow the SoQ guidelines, which are available online: https://aquila.usm.edu/soq/. Please direct any questions to SouthernQuarterly@gmail.com.

 

NOTE: For purpose of refereeing, please anonymize the paper by submitting a separate title pagewith all authors’ contact information. Electronic submissions of MSWord documents through our online submission portal (url above) are preferred. Please use the “submit article” link in the left menu.

 

The Southern Quarterly is an internationally-known scholarly journal devoted to the interdisciplinary study of Southern artsand culture. For SoQ, "the arts" is defined broadly, and includes painting, sculpture, music, dance, theatre, poetry, photography, and popular culture. We also publish studies of Southern culture from such disciplines as literature, folklore, anthropology, and history. "The South" is defined as the region south of the Mason Dixon Line, including the Caribbean and Latin America. Regular features include reviews of books and films, periodic reviews of exhibitions and performances, as well as interviews with writers and artists.