The Global South, 19.1, to be published in Spring 2026
Scholars have long noted the benefits and difficulties of studying the circum-Caribbean including land masses touching the Gulf of Mexico—as a global region that shares historical and aesthetic forms but includes many nations and languages. Previous studies, often influenced by postcolonial theory, have featured histories of direct cultural exchange; in the realm of literature and the arts, these include the literary “baroque” and “marvelous real.” This issue of The Global South returns to and builds on that work with different terminology for two reasons.
- While “Gulf South” has recently become important for institutions in the United States addressing ecological and infrastructural problems, many writers, artists, and activists have suggested that neither these challenges nor quests for solutions can be separated from the broader region’s shared history of racial exploitation and the epistemologies developed by the Black, Indigenous, immigrant, and working-class peoples that have had to navigate injustices in these locales. This issue of The Global South solicits essays that place study of the larger circum-Caribbean region—including, for example, its cultural exchanges, histories of conflict, human migrations, corporate expansions, expressive forms, and activist strategies—in conversation with local histories, arts, experiences, and tactics.
- The “Global South” similarly traverses sociopolitical and humanistic inquiry. Sometimes treated as a term for “developing nations,” it also mobilizes a history through which residents of multiple nations have organized around shared concerns and goals—seeking to combat ecological destruction and the abuses of racial capitalism while also collaborating to create new tactics of interpretation and resistance. Many of the economic forms central to Gulf South and circum-Caribbean history and contemporaneity—including plantation agriculture and petroleum extraction—have been and are prevalent in other global regions. Essays in this issue of The Global South might demonstrate, for example, how forms of expression, analysis, and activism circulate across these contexts.
The Global South is published by Indiana University Press and available via JSTOR and Project Muse. An interdisciplinary journal, it publishes articles in many areas of the humanities and social sciences. For inclusion in this issue, please send 500-word proposals plus a short bio to Leigh Anne Duck (lduck@olemiss.edu) by September 9, 2024. If selected, manuscripts of 6,000 to 10,000 words will be due by March 17, 2025.
Contributions must be original, and authors must cite all publications and acknowledge all sources that have shaped their scholarship. Manuscripts will be sent out for anonymous (“double blind”) peer review. Citations should be formatted according to the guidelines of the 9th edition of the MLA Handbook.