“Be the red worm in the dirt. Be the honeysuckle on the vine”: Queer Southern Place-Making in A Dirty South Manifesto (2020)

Research output: Contribution to journalResearch articleContributedpeer-review

Contributors

Abstract

In light of homonormative narratives that privilege the urban as a future place of freedom, A Dirty South Manifesto (2020) by L. H. Stallings represents the manifesto’s function of disrupting hegemonic narratives in its reconfiguration of thinking futurity and its spatial dimensions for marginalized Southerners. I read Stallings’s manifesto as employing a place-making practice that condemns moral authority and aims at dismantling narratives based on Christian white heteropatriarchy and settler colonialist chronotopic social orders. Queer narrative temporality is the pivotal point through which linear progress can be countered. The manifesto’s case studies of sexual resistance in Southern hiphop and activism create a queer archive of the South which merges artistic and political imaginations and rural and urban spaces into Southern places. A Dirty South Manifesto invalidates hegemonic linear progress narratives such as metronormative narratives and instead can be read to follow Judith Roof’s call for story systems. By prioritizing long-form discourse and literacy while embracing “obscene” sexual expressions, the text aims at utopian radical reinterpretations of what it means to be situated in the South.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)105-122
JournalAmerican literatures : AmLit
Volume4
Issue number2
Publication statusPublished - 2024
Peer-reviewedYes

External IDs

ORCID /0009-0005-7856-5700/work/183166103

Keywords

Keywords

  • Creative Place-Making, Dirty South, L. H. Stallings, Manifesto, Narrative Systems, Queer Narrative