Special features include “Un-Redacted: A Census of Native Land,” a collection of writings by Native authors on the legacy of settler colonialism in the U.S. edited by LeAnne Howe and Nathan Dixon; a section on the internment of people of Japanese descent in North America during World War II, with a conversation between Joy Kogawa and Masumi Izumi and an essay on early graphic memoirist Miné Okubo; and dispatches from an innovative research project on prison labor in the post–Civil War “New South” undertaken by faculty and students at UGA, Spelman College and other institutions.
With 300 pages of original poetry, fiction, essays, book reviews and art, the issue also contains a forum with public intellectual and writer Ralph Eubanks, theater and performance critic Martin Harries, Athens activist Sujata Winfield, and writer and Undocupoet founder Janine Joseph; work inspired by the topic of the census, each piece titled “The Citizenship Question”; a selection of historic census records and original maps; and a portfolio of paintings by Eddie Arroyo, with an interview and a new work created for this issue. Supplementary materials will be available online, including a multimedia feature on the Sept. 4, 2019, readings in support of Writers for Migrant Justice.
Several pieces address Southern history and contemporary culture. In an excerpt from her forthcoming book Administrations of Lunacy: Racism and the Haunting of American Psychiatry at the Milledgeville Asylum, Mab Segrest explores the legacy of a troubled Georgia institution. In “A Distant Goal We Seek,” Ralph Eubanks reflects on Mississippi difficulties of census takers in describing the marriage between his white grandfather and black grandmother and the racial classification of their children (when mixed-race marriage was illegal in the state), and how those tensions continue to resonate in the U.S. In “Writing the Immigrant Southern in the New New South,” Soniah Kamal discusses her experience of finding literary community in Georgia as an immigrant from Pakistan.
The full table of contents for the spring 2020 issue at www.thegeorgiareview.com.
The issue will be used in several university classes around the country. Readers are invited to join the discussion on social media, using the hashtag #GRCensus2020.
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An award-winning quarterly literary journal, The Georgia Review was founded at the University of Georgia in 1947. Visit www.thegeorgiareview.com or call 706-542-3481 for additional information.