Call for Papers

Clyde Woods and Kalamu ya Salaam, Guest Editors

The Gulf Coast and the Lower Mississippi Valley have repeatedly transformed American culture, consciousness, and political economy over the last century and a half. Hurricane Katrina ushered these regions, their dilemmas, and their unfinished agendas back onto the national stage. This issue will focus on the region’s new, and old, theories, histories, cultural practices, movements, paradigms, epistemologies, and visions. The goal is to open a dialogue and a debate on emerging intellectual traditions, social conditions, and social movements.

The tragedy revealed the presence of a far-reaching intellectual impoverishment within all disciplines and fields. It has called forth a new era of critical investigations into many arenas: the South, region, race, ethnicity, gender, class, community studies, cultural studies, environmental studies, media, neoliberalim, and the poverty of progressive social theory. Louisiana and Mississippi have become the subjects of unprecedented institutional experimentation. Deserving intense scrutiny, these new models represent relics of the past, harbingers of the future, or both simultaneously: planning, philanthropy, criminal justice, education, environmental policy, health care, hunger, elderly care, youth polices housing, and so on. Finally, a new era of research is demanded on the still poorly understood transformative power of Gulf Coast cultural traditions and movements: music, literature, the visual arts, festivals, religion, the use of public space, and others. 

This issue will bring together the social, historical, and cultural research of scholars in the broadest sense of the term. Essays should be no longer than 10,000 words, including notes. Short statements by community and cultural leaders, less than 1,000 words, on the meaning of the disaster for the United States, new agendas, and visions of social change are also encouraged. Similarly, paradigmatic poems, lyric, art, and photographs are sought.

Send essays, statements, and other materials to American Quarterly via email by September 1, 2008, to aquarter@usc.edu. Information about American Quarterly and submission guidelines can be found on our Web site: www.americanquarterly.org.