South Today Research Articles

Three R’s of Economic Development: Real Estate, Rice, and Railroads Economic Growth through Expansion of Territory and Agriculture Utilizing Railroads

The history of the United States is a complex development of race, religion, and independent spirit, but all of these have been driven by economic factors that can easily be identified and quantified, no more so than in the Southern parts of the country during the time right before the Industrial Revolution and to just after it. The confluence of real estate, railroads, and the most important crop of the time, rice, lead to an explosion of both commerce and industrial growth. These enterprises allowed the country to not only grow, but to also become accountable to itself and its people, for example, after the Civil War there was introduced what was colloquially known as “Forty Acres and a Mule”, which allowed returning soldiers and freed slaves recompense for their hard labor and unpaid wages during their indentured servitudes. This allowed for even more growth in the agricultural businesses, which required more land, more transportation, and more innovation. This is still evident in the economies of the South today.

Lectorat participatif

Despite the emerging proliferation of periodical studies scholarship attentive to various facets of the publishing circuit, relatively little is known about the readers of historical periodicals. Who were they? How were they reading? Why were they reading? How did readers participate in the work of periodicals discursively and non-discursively? This article outlines the process of reconstructing, from archival subscription records, the historical subscribership of South Today, a “little” literary magazine and activist publication published in the American South in the 1930s and 1940s by editors Lillian Smith and Paula Snelling. Combining the findings of this data with reader testimony in the magazine and archive, I consider the difference between “imagined” and “real” readerships and investigate how Smith and Snelling’s curation of readerly community spaces—and the resultant reader participation both on and off the page—contributed to the magazine’s development and community-based political activism. Although South Today has fallen somewhat into obscurity, it had a relatively large circulation and long run for a little magazine, and it serves as an insightful publication in the history of the long civil rights movement. Furthermore, its community approach to publishing and openly anti-segregationist politics make it an interesting candidate for a study of readership, for as South Today was increasingly subjected to state surveillance, reading the magazine became more and more of a political act. This article contributes not only to studies of little magazines and their readerships generally, but also proposes that understanding South Today’s politics and historical significance necessitates a study of its approach to readership. Ultimately, this article offers evidence of South Today’s readers as active participants rather than passive consumers, and argues that these peripheries around print objects are important sites of community and activism that deserve greater attention.

Global South Perspectives on Youth

Abstract Young lives in the Global South are shaped by myriad dynamics of colonialism, economic inequalities, race, class, caste, and gendered and generational inequalities. In particular, the colonial legacies and contemporary capitalist inequalities within the global order have powerfully redefined what youth lives are in many countries of the Global South today. In this commentary piece, I argue that there is great value in thinking about youth through empirical, historical, and relational perspectives from the Global South, primarily for analytical sophistication but also to enrich mainstream youth sociology itself. This commentary piece also opens a dialogue between “youth sociology” and “connected sociologies” in order to produce some decolonial Global South perspectives on youth. Through focusing on changing youth cultures in India and South Africa, this commentary explores how neocolonial and neoliberal processes shape youth cultures and the many global relationalities, connections, and inequalities that emerge from thinking comparatively.

Screening Eco-trauma in the Context of Post-socialism: “The Great Flood” and Local Identity Crisis in Chinese and Vietnamese Independent Films (the Cases of Taking Father Home and 2030)

As two of the few socialist countries in the Global South today that share a deep root of Confucianism and have had intense contact with capitalism in the last two decades, Vietnam and China have many cultural, ideological, and political similarities. Significantly, China and Vietnam have a similarly long tradition of water control and pride in managing the power of rivers and water, as evidenced in mythological, fairy tales, and historical books. The Yangtze and the Mekong are the two largest rivers that profoundly influence and impact their respective cultural, spiritual, economic, and social lives. Since the 1990s, with the construction of the Three Gorges Dam and industrial plants next to the Yangtze and the mangrove deforestation next to the Mekong, in the context of Post-socialism, these two river deltas have faced unprecedented severe environmental challenges. On the other hand, the images of the two rivers and two river deltas appearing in official state-funded and commercial films are isolated from the actual situations mentioned. By examining two typical independent movies from China and Vietnam about the Great Flood, Taking Father Home (2005, Ying Liang) and 2030 (2014, Nguyen Vo Nghiem Minh), this essay highlights the eco-awareness of those affected, especially the sense of eco-trauma, related to the natural disasters in the Yangtze and Mekong deltas. This essay will in particular analyze how the globalization process in these two socialist countries causes multi-level harm in localities, both culturally and environmentally. Moreover, drawing from the concepts of indigenous cinema, we will highlight the aesthetic ability of independent films to question the limitations of commercial and state-sponsored movies, which always romanticize native natural landscapes on-screen and produce eco-ambiguity among the public.

The Spread of New Chinese Socialist Martial Arts Films in Africa

ABSTRACT In the 1970s, Hong Kong kung fu films were distributed across Africa and reached large audiences. Although the spread of Hong Kong films in Africa has received some scholarly attention worldwide, the African reception of Chinese films in the post-Mao era has rarely been analysed. Based on archival research and the collation of historical data and materials, this article discusses the background and advancement of the new Chinese socialist martial arts films across Africa and uses the acclaimed film Wudang as a case study to explore the spread of Chinese socialist martial arts films. This article argues that Mainland Chinese films’ imitation of Hong Kong films was a strategic choice made in the context of the Economic Reform and Opening Up policies, in response to Africans’ changing attitudes toward socialist ideology. The research contributes to the understanding of the historical exchanges between China and Africa in the post-Mao era, as well as to the topic of cooperation in the Global South today.

Exploring Teachers’ Lived Experiences on the Integration of Values Education in South African High Schools

Values education has become a necessary tool in response to the rise in moral deterioration in an average South African society today. The school is viewed as one of the key players in nurturing children into adulthood. The teaching of values that can give the growing generation, necessary moral development is one of the responsibilities of the schools. Hence, this study aims at exploring teachers’ experiences on how they integrate values education into South African learners in various high schools. This qualitative study engaged five schools in its case study, where five teachers from each of the schools were purposively selected for semi-structured focus group interviews, to share their experiences on the integration of moral values in schools. Moral development theory was used to underpin the study. Findings from the inductive thematic analysis from the participants from both rural and urban schools indicated a misunderstanding of the concept of values education by some teachers, which affects its effective integration. The study established that role modelling of learners by teachers and parents are inevitable to save the society from moral decadence, while some participants indicted overpopulation, single parenthood, social media as some of the challenges to the integration of value education in schools. The study, therefore, recommends capacitation of teachers through various professional development programmes, to integrate values education and adequate parental support as some of the strategies to promote effective integration of values education in schools.

Moving While Waiting for the Future: Mobility and Education in Šid, Serbia

ABSTRACT The status of the “double transit” countries is associated with the ex-Yugoslav (Western) Balkan countries used to depict perspective towards the EU for both the local population and the people on the move coming from the Global South. This article explores mobilities in the Serbian town, Šid, both during the 1990s and in the aftermath of 2015, by analyzing ethnographic fieldwork notes and interviews conducted during joint research. Considering its location, on the very border with Croatia, also forming the external border of the EU, this town has been a stopover and a transit place during various migration movements. The lives of people involved in these movements may seem very different at the moment, but they are connected by similar experiences of mobility and/or “stuckedness.” We ask how one can relate concepts of transit, waiting, hope and stuckedness to the process of education in Šid. Like transit and waiting, education always anticipates some kind of future; it represents “a ticket to the future.” In considering the entangled perspectives of local Šid inhabitants and migrants from the Global South today, we will critically consider the concept of “waiting for the future.”

We carry history within us: Anti-Black racism and the legacy of lynchings on life expectancy in the U.S. South.

The United States lags in life expectancy compared to most of the world's similarly wealthy nations, driven by pronounced regional disparities particularly between the South and the rest of the country. The U.S. South has a violent history of lynchings of Black Americans by White mobs after the ending of slavery and up to the Civil Rights Era. Building on critical race scholarship, the objective of this study was to determine whether there exists an association between historical lynchings and overall life expectancies in the U.S. South. We created a cross-sectional county-level data set with 1221 data points utilizing data from the Equal Justice Initiative and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Country Health Rankings. The average life expectancy for 2019-2020 was 76.1 years, ranging from 68.2 years to 90.2 years. Overall life expectancy was found to be highest (76.6) in counties with no recorded lynchings, and lowest (75.5) in counties with the most lynchings (p<.001). In the spatially enabled regression model, the history of lynching along with other covariates explained 57.1% of the variance in life expectancies across the study area. Counties with a history of lynchings also score lower compared to the reference group in various socioeconomic indicators, including median household incomes and high school graduation rates. The findings suggest that lynchings were pivotal in creating the social and physical environment affecting health outcomes in the U.S. South today. We call for further public health research which acknowledges and explores this form of violent and institutional anti-Black racism as foundational to the nation's regional health disparities.

BRYOZOAN FAUNA FROM THE OOLITIC LIMESTONE FROM PAJAREJOS, SW SPAIN

Outcrops of Devonian rocks at the hill of Pajarejos near Campillo de Llerena, south-western Spain, expose oolitic limestone which contains abundant fragments of bryozoans, whereas other macrofauna is scarce. Eight bryozoan species were identified, which date the outcrop as Middle Devonian. The assemblage shows close affinities with that described from Sabkhat Lafayrina reef complex in Western Sahara, which is situated more than 1,000 km further south today. The studied association supports the previously proposed hypothesis that South-western Spain belonged to the northern margin of Gondwana during the Middle Devonian.

Mission in the Middle

Abstract Miguel Álvarez, a native of Honduras, explores how mission theology and the contextual implementation of Missio Dei is impacted by Latino hermeneutics. As a foundation, the article compares the North American and Latin American approaches to missiology. It shows how mission as an act of benevolence in the practice of faith differs from mission as a total commitment to the gospel in the execution of the Great Commission. Álvarez contends that because of their context of service, Latinos interpret God’s mission based on a paradigm that favors the poor and disenfranchised of society, and he argues that the ministry of Jesus Christ followed the same paradigm. This Latino perspective on mission helps to explain the current revival that is taken place in the Global South today.

The History of LGBTQ Discourses in Indonesia

There is a prevalent perception that the past colonialization and the expansion of Christianity have deeply affected the sexual regulations and norms in the formerly colonized countries. This perspective unavoidably affects how Christians today see the recent debate on the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) issue. The most prevailing perspective embraced by many conservative Christian leaders in the Global South today is that there is a political agenda from western countries by importing their liberal opinion on sexuality as a socially-chosen construct and not a naturally-given condition. For them, this is a new kind of colonialism. By discussing the specific case of Indonesia, the author argues that this is not always the case. By tracing back to the history of LGBTQ discourses in Indonesia, he attempts to show that colonization brought no impact on the recent LGBTQ debates. The discourses began to thrive in the last twenty years, mainly due to the internal political dynamics of Indonesia and the rise of Islamic populism after the 1998 reformation.

China\u2019s corridor bridges: heritage buildings over water

Essentially unknown in the rest of the world and only recently appreciated in China, the globally significant 3000+ ‘corridor bridges’ (langqiao) in China far outnumber the better-known ‘covered bridges’ found in North America and Europe. Rivaling or exceeding those in the West in number, age, complexity, and architectural ambition, some of China’s outstanding timber langqiao in the mountains of Fujian and Zhejiang provinces are on the cusp of being inscribed as UNESCO World Heritage cultural sites. Throughout south and central China today there is moreover a resurgence of new timber langqiao being erected using traditional carpentry alongside the unprecedented construction of modern marvels of steel and concrete.Archaeological evidence in 2001 uncovered China’s earliest ‘corridor bridge’—thus the oldest known covered bridge in the world—with a length of 42 m dating to the Han dynasty 2000 years ago. The Rulong Bridge, which dates to 1625 and is documented as the oldest standing woven arch-beam langqiao, can be visited today in Qingyuan county, southern Zhejiang. Even older langqiao with parallel log beams as the substructure have come to light in neighboring Fujian province, most notably the Zhiqing Bridge in a rural area of Jian’ou city that dates to 1490.China’s bridges, whether with a corridor atop or without, have traditionally not been included under the umbrella of ‘vernacular architecture’ even as they usually were created by local craftspeople employing the same approaches and practices for dwellings and temples. Just as with these better researched structures, langqiao must be studied not only from the perspective of architecture, but also anthropology, geography, history, and sociology, among other disciplines.Rather than being abandoned as artifacts from the past, China’s langqiao today represent a living tradition that continues serving rural communities as places of passage, spaces for leisure and marketing, sites for worship, and increasingly destinations for tourists in search of nostalgic connections with China’s past.The research presented in this article draws heavily from the authors’ China’s Covered Bridges: Architecture over Water, a comprehensive book published in late 2019 in Shanghai and London by Shanghai Jiao Tong University Press that will be distributed in 2020 by the University of Hawai’i Press. Despite the scope of this book, the complexity of China’s langqiao remains understudied.

Review

Abstract The differences between the countries of the 'Global North' and those of the 'Global South' are clear in various fields, namely sociocultural fields, due to unequal wealth distribution and its consequent economic inequalities. But to what extent can the phenomenon of urbanization join these two worlds that seem so far apart? Considering the rapid urbanization of several cities in the Global South today, compared with the stabilized rate of urbanization in the Global North, information sharing would be beneficial and the Global North may provide guidance to those rapidly growing cities presently undergoing the process of urbanization. Such a transmission of knowledge could be achieved through cooperation between social institutions, such as universities and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and social actors, such as public decision-makers. Editors Agostino Petrillo and Paola Bellaviti, in their book Sustainable Urban Development and Globalization: New Strategies for New Challenges, present a number of practical examples from around the world of such cooperation between the Global North and Global South.. This review presents a general summary of the book, as well as an evaluation of its possible contribution to the field of urban sociology.

South Korean animation today: national identity and the appeal to local audiences

The astonishing rise over the last two decades of the South Korean film industry – a domestic box-office titan, a continued presence on the global stage – is a subject that has received exhaustive ...

The Meeting of the Waters

The Meeting of the Waters

Of monsters and boomerangs: Colonial returns in the late liberal city

Our crisis is colonial. This is not a metaphorical statement. It is a historical assessment. If the global South today holds up the mirror of the future to the global North, this is but the effect of the endurance of forms of colonialism at work precisely in their contemporary deformations. When Aimé Césaire in 1950 spoke of the ‘terrific boomerang effect’ of colonialism he had fascist Europe in his sights. This article suggests that today, in the days of revanchist austerity and resurgent far-right populism, the boomerangs are again coming back thick and fast; it traces three intensified points of convergence between liberal-democratic and (post)colonial geographies: mass eviction, the deeper extraction of value from social-biological life, and repressive force. Dispossession—as a modality of government in its own right—is one name through which we might think this conjuncture. A conjuncture that marks the unraveling of not only the normative self-image of liberal politics (as it tumbles closer to its self-ascribed Other—the authoritarian), but also the very foundations upon which our critical urban thought rests—the liberal city.

The Ladder by Alan Michael Parker

Reviewed by: The Ladder by Alan Michael Parker Leah Miranda Hughes Alan Michael Parker. The Ladder. Tupelo Press, 2016. Some literary voices hit a tone that can be identified by only a few words, like playing “Name That Tune” with just a few lines, and Alan Michael Parker projects one of those voices. From his distinctive gang of Vandals to sundry romances to verbal calculations, the poet manages a smart and frank philosophical voice throughout eight collections of poems. The Ladder, named the best book of 2016 in North Carolina with the NC Poetry Society’s notable Brock-Campbell Award, sounds as true to Parker as ever from the first note. The Ladder begins with the perfect epigraph, lines from Puccini’s poet Rudolfo in La Boheme: “What do I do? I write. And how do I live? I live.” A reader might view Parker’s collection with the opera in mind: a poor but happy, artistic life, the poet’s lover romantically dying in his arms, proving that art and love fill living with value. Parker begins the collection gathering the leaves of “this life the next life,” settling in to “Give a Little Talk on Singing.” This poem reveals a narrative philosophy that Parker and Puccini’s Rudolfo obviously share, for the poet, to write is to live. Illustrative of the struggle inherent in living (not to mention creating art), Parker’s narrator sings only begrudgingly. With a dry, discontented humor, the poems scan the horizon from offering prayers for daily living to making demands of God. What is enough? What to remember? What wishes to make? The collection gestures towards a potential reset at a midpoint as opposed to a midlife crisis. In the middle years of his life, the narrator of the title poem gets a grass sack “to start [a] new life.” Parker would use the ladder contained in his grass sack to “climb down from ambition.” Does the reader suppose that the speaker indicates a realization or expectation: To not expect so much? To descend from some height reached? To negotiate the expected anticlimax of a plot diagram in any given narrative? The Old Testament tells the story of Jacob’s Ladder: as Jacob flees for his life, his murderous brother Esau close on his heels, he dreams of a ladder that angels ascend and descend with God standing alongside. It is the gate to heaven. An old spiritual memorializes the story, one still sung as a hymn in the South today to remind the choir and congregation that “we are climbing…higher higher” everyday. In fact, Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie further popularized the song in folk music, bringing the Old Testament tale to a celebration of the steady daily human struggle of living in this world. [End Page 50] Through hair, X-rays, the moon, hotel rooms, and postcards, Alan Michael Parker also celebrates a person’s daily wrestling with life. With a keen eye on some inevitable end, the poems convey a sense of hope and home from the self-professed curmudgeonly singer. Parker brings clever diction and even more witty parallels, observations, and speculations to pull the extraordinary out of the ordinary. In each volume, Parker has an emotive house pet representing domestic love. In this collection, the dog misses “you,” an infamous use of second person, so much that he learns regretful, wistful, simple and sincere phrases in a multitude of foreign languages. These dogs and cats often extend gracious compassion, fetching the reader a heartbreaking moonful of amour or affection. Alan Michael Parker’s collection The Ladder keeps alive his distinctive voice over time. The poems convey honest statements with humor, yet, deepen in sincerity, with pretense or bluff stripped away for the reader to sit at the center of experiences such as burying a relative, going through the airport, taking a swim, turning 50. To illustrate, one of Parker’s speakers would steal a work of art, a Matisse representing hope, but not burn it to cover up the crime. Another speaker will ponder the eternal to come at peace with the ephemeral nature of a full head of hair. Such vulnerable honesty creates heartbreakingly beautiful poems...

SOUTH AFRICA: POLITICAL LIFE TODAY

Atualmente, a África do Sul enfrenta diversos dilemas políticos que influenciam toda a organização social do país. Dessa forma, a historicidade dos processos políticos que permeiam a sociedade sul-africana atualmente, os jogos de poder das elites do país, bem como as influências externas que agem internamente por meio dos partidos políticos da África do Sul, e a presença dessa importante nação africana dentro do âmbito dos BRICS são elementos essenciais para a compreensão do contexto da política sul-africana. Através de experiências vivenciadas in loco, se buscou nesse artigo uma análise minuciosa e abrangente acerca de tal conjuntura, apontando os agentes políticos que interferem ativamente nesse jogo e construindo possíveis cenários para o desenrolar dos eventos.

Voluntary resettlement in land grab contexts: examining consent on the Ecuadorian oil frontier

ABSTRACTForced resettlement, central to state-led development throughout the twentieth century, still paves the way for agroindustrial, hydroelectric, urban, and other forms of development in much of the global South today. In response to pressures from social movements challenging human displacement, states, firms, and multinational institutions increasingly seek the consent of impacted communities, often offering monetary compensation and resettlement, along with development assistance. Some states obtain consent by offering resettlements with urban infrastructures and public services. In Ecuador, the state has planned 200 urban-like resettlements called “Millennium Cities” for communities on the Amazonian oil and mining frontiers. Although resettlement in this context transforms human–environment relations and generates new social ills by isolating residents from food supplies and market networks, many communities do consent to resettlement. In this paper, I call attention to voluntary rural–urban resettlement in land grab governance and I explore why communities might consent to their own displacement. This paper suggests the need to account for the material and social conditions that structure consent.

My pipes say I am powerful: belonging and class as constructed through our sewers

This review examines the social and political roots and ongoing implications of centralized, waterborne sewerage. This system has served as a marker of class, a signal of wealth and political power, and a mechanism of social reform. As sewerage networks ballooned in the mid‐19th century throughout Europe and North America in response to a growing public health movement, their use and attendant hygiene practices served to intertwine physical and moral hygiene. The new infrastructure prioritized a felt distance between the user and their excreta, particularly signaled by the absence of odor, access to privacy, and the disassociation of users from any part of the management process beyond the flush of the toilet. Furthermore, the resource intensive system advertised affluence, and emphasized emerging notions of the networked urban space, which had the potential to tame and control Nature. This infrastructure model and its social and political underpinnings were exported to many cities under colonial influence throughout much of the 19th and 20th centuries, and were used to justify class differentiation and racialized agendas. Differential sewerage access in municipal centers of the Global South today continues to serve as a marker of class distinction, and many modern scholars explore how lack of sewerage renders the urban poor politically invisible. Ultimately, consideration of the social and political legacy of the linear sewerage system may offer new ways forward in addressing urban sanitation crises faced across the globe today, including problems posed by aging, unsustainable, and insufficient infrastructure. WIREs Water 2016, 3:63–73. doi: 10.1002/wat2.1108This article is categorized under: Human Water &gt; Value of Water