Abstract: Margaret Walker Alexander addressing political issues through a moral lens is the blueprint and epitome of what Kalamu ya Salaam calls the Black Blues Aesthetic, which blends gospel, blues, and funk sensibilities into freedom psalms to create mass popular art. Much like Prince’s 2001 album Rainbow Children , Margaret Walker Alexander’s 1970 poetry collection Prophets for a New Day is both anthem and protest work, designed to convince listeners that Civil Rights work is God’s work, for when Yeshua was resurrected from the grave He liberated humans from spiritual and physical enslavement, which, for Alexander and Prince, are manifested as police harassment, discriminatory hiring and promoting practices, poorly-funded educational systems, poverty, and discrimination in the judicial system, especially as it relates to sentencing practices. Using R. Baxter Miller’s “The ‘Etched Flame’ of Margaret Walker: Biblical and Literary Re-Creation in Southern History” as a guide, I will show that Prince uses Alexander’s mode of signifying biblical imagery to parallel and highlight the struggle and heroic essence of African American people. Ultimately, for Alexander and Prince, there was no way of addressing the socio-political evils of humanity without addressing the notion that in God lay all the answers.

Abstract: This article delves into the profound connection between Black life in Alabama, the temporal qualities of Southern geographies, and emerging formulations of time from the interdisciplinary field of Black Time Studies. The paper positions RaMell Ross’ 2019 experimental documentary, Hale County This Morning, This Evening , within an emerging field that examines radical representations of time in experimental Black art, aesthetics, and everyday life. Black Time Studies underscores the critical role of time in the ordering of Black life and labor, acknowledges modes of resistance, and envisions forms of liberation within the unique temporal landscape of the South, inviting this discussion of abstraction, framing practices, waiting, and patience. Hale County This Morning, This Evening explores and enacts an intricate interplay between time, place, and Black aesthetics, offering a generative contribution to theories of time in the South. Situating the film within this particular interdisciplinary discourse enables us in turn to draw from the methods, traditions, and analytical tools of poetry, experimental prose, sound, and music—fundamental elements of Black Time Studies, to create an expanded reading of the film. It is through this lens that we will ponder the film’s central question: “What is the orbit of our dreaming?”

Abstract: Studies of the southern United States have “the potential to renovate geographic knowledge by centering a Black sense of place in research examining race and region” (Bledsoe et. al 7). Appalachia, a region which both overlaps with portions of the South and maintains a separate regional identity, likewise holds this potential to renovate geographic knowledge. A Black sense of place can be centered through examining how narratives that connect food, land, and collective struggle (White xviii) help to “recover, tell, and honor” the stories of Black rural residents (3). In particular, oral history has the power to disrupt dominant narratives (see Johnson; see D. Scott), address regional knowledge gaps through collective memories (see Grim; Brown, Gone ), and seek to understand the lives and experiences of Black rural people and Black rural spaces (see Grim; see Johnson; see D. Scott). In this paper, the author examines twelve oral histories he conducted with Black farmers in central and eastern Kentucky and analyzes how these narratives fit within broader understandings and theorizations of community, identity, agriculture, race, and Appalachia.