Return to the South: The Complexities of Southern Culture in Ryan Coogler's film Sinners
Return to the South: The Complexities of Southern Culture in Ryan Coogler’s film Sinners.
On April 18, Warner Brothers released Ryan Coogler’s long anticipated film Sinners. Since its release, the film has achieved both critical acclaim and popular resonance, marking a significant entry in contemporary Southern cinema. Critics and audiences praise Sinners for its nuanced treatment of inter/intra-racial dynamics, spirituality, and regional identity. In addition, the film has prompted sustained cultural discourse, and now, academic interest in the South. Its layered narrative and atmospheric rendering of the South position Sinners as a vital text for examining the complexities of Southern culture and history.
The Southern United States has long been mythologized, contested, and critically dissected; its socio-cultural historical complexities have been largely ignored. Ryan Coogler’s Sinners presents the complexities of the South and Southern culture(s) as it situates the story within the Mississippi Delta in 1932. Coogler utilizes the genre of horror and the conventions of the vampire to explore these complexities through a contemporary lens. The film situates itself at the crossroads of religion, race, history, and redemption, challenging romanticized and reductive portrayals of the American South.
The Journal of American culture is seeking contributions for a special edition titled, Return to the South: The Complexities of Southern Culture in Ryan Coogler’s film Sinners. We invite scholars, critics, and practitioners to submit papers that explore the multilayered dimensions of Sinners, with particular attention to how Coogler crafts, critiques, and complicates Southern cultural narratives. Interdisciplinary approaches, especially, are welcome, drawing from fields such as film and visual culture studies, Southern studies, African American studies, gender studies, theology, history, and cultural geography.
An abstract of 250-500 words is due July 15, 2025. If the abstract is accepted, the complete paper (3,500–7,500 words) is due October 15, 2025. Include your full name, institutional affiliation, title, and email address (not included in the 250-500 text limit) at the beginning of your abstract. Submissions and queries should be sent to Kwakiutl L. Dreher kdreher2@nebraska.edu and Katrina Moore katrina.moore@slu.edu
Topics of interest include but not limited to:
- Coogler’s directorial vision in reimagining the South
- The return to the south as a space of (re)ro(u)oting
- Identity of Cast and Director with the South
- Folklore and folk traditions in Southern Black culture
- The politics of sin, salvation, and moral ambiguity in Southern storytelling
- (Black) fe/male entrepreneurship
- Nature (birds, land, cotton, etc.)
- Lessons taught/lessons learned
- The performance of Black love and Black Joy
- Representations of kinship
- Generational trauma
- Black Southern identity and cultural resistance
- The role of religion, churches, and spiritual spaces
- Memory, land, and contested Southern geographies
- Intersections of gender, sexuality, and faith in Southern contexts
- Cinematic aesthetics of the Southern Gothic and its subversion
- Historical reckoning and the burden of legacy
- The role of sound, music, and silence in evoking Southern atmospheres
- Immigrant culture and influence/exchange on Black Southern tradition
- Dance and Spirituality
- Secular and Sacred traditions
- African/Ancestral cultural traditions in religion, dance, music, etc in Southern society
- Voodoo, Christianity and other practices
- Cultural analysis of other works by Coogler
Last updated May 28, 2025
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