A Measure of Belonging: Twenty-One Writers of Color on the New American South

by Cinelle Barnes (Editor)

Overview

A New York Times Books New & Noteworthy book • A Most-Anticipated Book from BookPage, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and Paperback Paris • Glowing reviews and features in Garden & Gun, CNN Philippines, Chapter16, Kirkus Reviews, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and more

This fierce collection celebrates the incredible diversity in the contemporary South by featuring essays by twenty-one of the finest young writers of color living and working in the region today, who all address a central question: Who is welcome?

Kiese Laymon navigates the racial politics of publishing while recording his audiobook in Mississippi. Regina Bradley moves to Indiana and grapples with a landscape devoid of her Southern cultural touchstones, like Popeyes and OutKast. Aruni Kashyap apartment hunts in Athens and encounters a minefield of invasive questions. Frederick McKindra delves into the particularly Southern history of Beyonce's black majorettes.

Assembled by editor and essayist Cinelle Barnes, essays in A Measure of Belonging: Twenty-One Writers of Color on the New American South acknowledge that from the DMV to the college basketball court to doctors’ offices, there are no shortage of places of tension in the American South. Urgent, necessary, funny, and poignant, these essays from new and established voices confront the complexities of the South's relationship with race, uncovering the particular difficulties and profound joys of being a Southerner in the 21st century.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781938235719
Publisher:	Hub City Press
Publication date:	10/06/2020
Pages:	189
Sales rank:	1,162,717
Product dimensions:	4.90(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Cinelle Barnes is a memoirist, essayist, and educator from Manila, Philippines, and is the author of Monsoon Manshion: A Memoir and Malaya: Essays on Freedom. She earned an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Converse College. Her writing has appeared in Buzzfeed Reader, Catapult, Literary Hub, Hyphen, Panorama: A Journal of Intelligent Travel, and South 85, among others. Her work has received fellowships and grants from VONA, Kundiman, the John and Susan Bennett Memorial Arts Fund, and the Lowcountry Quarterly Arts Grant. Barnes is the 2018-19 writer-in-residence at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art in Charleston, SC, where she and her family live.

Table of Contents

Introduction Cinelle Barnes xi

A New Normal South: Southern Cooking By Indian American Chefs Offers Refreshing Ways To Connect Osayi Endolyn 1

Foreign and Domestic: On Color, Comfort, and Crime in Miami Jaswinder Bolina 7

Face Soniah Kamal 15

My Sixty-Five-Year-Old Roommate Jennifer Hope Choi 23

That's Not Actually True Kiese Laymon 33

Duos Devi Laskar 43

I Feel Most Southern in the Hip-Hop of my Adolescence: On Black Southern Mobility, Intra-regionality & Internalized Misogyny Joy Priest 51

Suddenly, an Island Girl M. Evelina Galang 67

Treacherous Joy: An Epistle to the South Tiana Clark 77

Nuisance: An Essay about Home Latria Graham 87

Are You Muslim? and Other Questions White Landlords Ask Me Aruni Kashyap 95

Auntie Minda Honey 105

Outta the Souf Regina Bradley 111

Dysplasia Natalia Sylvester 121

White Devil in Blue: Duke Basketball, Religion, and Modern Day Slavery in the "New" South Christena Cleveland 129

Southern, Not a Belle Nichole Perkins 137

White, Other, and Black Ivelisse Rodriguez 145

Ain't Misbehavin Gary Jackson 151

The Rich, Southern History of Black College Majorettes Frederick McKindra 157

Pass Toni Jensen 167

Gum Diana Cejas 175

Contributors 183

Editorial Reviews

08/10/2020

“What constitutes being a Southerner? What constitutes being an American?” Each of the 21 contributors to this splendid assembly by memoirist Barnes (Malaya) reflect upon those two questions. They include both Northerners and native Southerners, as well as both first-generation Americans and immigrants. Some capture moments in time, such as the origins of the majorette tradition at historically black colleges, the impact of hip-hop music on generational identity, or familial memories of Klan terror. “Are you a Muslim?” Aruni Kashyap reports being asked by prospective landlords while apartment-hunting in Athens, Ga., reflecting, “I could say I am a Hindu and solve this problem.” Toni Jensen writes, “I’m Native, but I absolutely can pass,” while Ivelisse Rodriguez wrestles with racial identity queries at the DMV. Life in America for writers of color is not confined to race and ethnicity, the essays remind the reader. Jennifer Hope Choi describes living with an elder parent, Minda Honey learns “what it’s like to be an auntie,” Sonia Kamal deals with a miscarriage, and Latia Graham handles flooding on her family’s South Carolina farm. Totally engaging, this informing, thought-provoking collection is valuable for its vision of a South that is not monolithic. Agent: Noah Ballard, Curtis Brown. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

A Measure of Belonging challenges the idea of a monolithic Southern culture." —New York Times Book Review

"The South on exhibit here does feel new: polygot, multiracial, small-c catholic, urbanized, unwilling to accomodate or overlook the past but instead primed to confront it head-on, and keen to sift the South's virtues—lovingly—from its flaws." —Garden & Gun

"Sharp and witty, this collection shows that there are many different ways to live, breathe, thrive and be a person who belongs in the South." —Bookpage, starred review

"Cinelle Barnes has compiled the most diverse portrayal of the contemporary South I've read to date. These beautifully-written, clear-eyed essays present the American South through the eyes of its black and brown voices and expand the reader's view of belonging to or hailing from the region. I love this collection and its depictions complicate the South in ways that mainstream America sometimes refuses to believe about our ugly/beautiful South. A Measure of Belonging is a major contribution to the canon of Southern literature and each of the writers give of themselves fully. It is a book for our times. Welcome to the 21st century!" —Crystal Wilkinson, author of The Birds of Opulence

"Totally engaging, this informing, thought-provoking collection is valuable for its vision of a South that is not monolithic."—Publishers Weekly

"Across the collection, the writers push against the limits of what we think we know about the South." —Kirkus Reviews

"A Measure of Belonging is a stark reminder that, behind the draping magnolias and weeping willows, the south has a loaded history, the effects of which still ripple through today’s society. Cinelle Barnes's anthology is but one call to awareness, a call to artful rebellion." —NewPages

From the Publisher

12/11/2020

Editor Barnes (Monsoon Mansion) invites 21 writers to tell their story as people of color living in the American South. Essays address topics such as race, home, identity, loss, and family. Aruni Kashyap relates the difficulty of renting a house from white landlords, who test his intelligence and ask questions about his religion. Frederick McKindra celebrates majorettes as a unique, Southern dance style. Working on her grandfather's tobacco farm as a child, Diana Cejas remembers the smell of tobacco on her hands as she enters the medical profession. Ivelisse Rodriguez, a dark-skinned Puerto Rican, struggles to get a North Carolina driver's license because the only racial categories are white, black, and other. With the bottom floor of her house flooding, Latia Graham comments on how disasters disproportionately affect African Americans. Christena Cleveland and Toni Jensen describe the institutional and personal racism in academic settings. In the book's best essay, Soniah Kamal recounts the physical, spiritual, and emotional circumstances of her miscarriage. A notable exclusion to this collection is the lack of LGBTQ representation. VERDICT A wonderful, thought-provoking collection of essays that highlight the various experiences of immigrants, people of color, and women in the American South. Recommended for public and academic libraries.—Chris Wilkes, Tazewell Cty. P.L., VA

Library Journal

2020-06-18
A collection of writers of color wrestling with the struggles and joys of living in a region rife with tension and possibility.

Edited by Barnes, a Charleston, South Carolina–based author who was raised in the Philippines, the book promises to document the American South “as big as it actually is,” refusing to engage with biased and flattened descriptions of the South that seek to portray a cultural homogeneity. The contributors, some emerging and some established, take on variations of the theme that readers may pull from Devi Laskar’s “Duos”: “I’m supposed to write about being a Southerner while simultaneously being a person of color. I’m somehow supposed to negotiate, on the page, how I have managed to be both at the same time for all of these years.” Fortunately, the roads taken by these authors are anything but rehearsed. In the wake of his critically acclaimed memoir, Heavy, Kiese Laymon digs into the complexity of race and class tension in Oxford, Mississippi, where he is a professor at the university. Soniah Kamal delivers a heartbreaking elegy for the loss of a child in Georgia. Hailing from Louisville, Kentucky, Joy Priest remaps her childhood through male-dominated Southern rap anthems toward feminine self-possession and mental mobility. Natalia Sylvester walks us through a lifelong history of doctor visits due to dysplasia of the hip. “My case turned out to be different,” she writes, “in the way that all bodies are different, in the way that science can often explain how but not why.” Not all the contributors are from the South; however, as the title suggests, they all lay claim to the ways they have come to feel “a measure of belonging” there. Across the collection, the writers push against the limits of what we think we know about the South.

A sweet Southern sampling of a new generation of talented writers.

Kirkus Reviews