The Sonic South – Southern Cultures Call for Submissions

The Sonic South (Winter 2021)

Guest Editor: Regina N. Bradley (Kennesaw State University)
Deadline for Submissions: February 22, 2021

Southern Cultures encourages submissions from scholars, writers, and artists for The Sonic South, to be published Winter 2021. Sound provides a dynamic lens into the South’s layered complexities, offering a provocative framework for engaging the racial, gendered, and socio-historical identities of the region. Southern sounds are musical and nonmusical: the thrum of a subwoofer rattling the trunk of a big body car, stringed harmonies of chirping cicadas and crickets in the heat of a summer night, the laughter of people talking trash at a cookout, the quiet of a felled Confederate monument, the wail of grief at a funeral, volatile protest at a political rally. Noise, harmony, resonance, release, or reverberation. Amplified or absent, idiosyncratic or symphonic, natural or mechanical. Sound is cyclical and multivalent, shaping history and place (and southernness) in subtle, complicated, even speculative ways.

For the Sonic South, we seek work that uses sound to mine southern experiences existing outside academic, literary, and cultural canons; to break up the monotony of stereotypical, essentializing, and (a)historicized southernness; and to create new genealogies and archives. What hidden and visible sonic narratives disrupt our expectations of southern identity?