Space, Time, and Race in Dirty South Bohemia
This chapter considers how historical and contemporary patterns of racial segregation influence the development of bohemian scenes in the South with particular attention to the establishment and maintenance of southern black bohemian cultural spaces. Using Memphis, a city with a rich musical legacy rooted in the Mississippi Delta Blues, as a case study, I chronicle how black cultural entrepreneurs create a separate arts and intellectual space within the constraints of class and racial cultures. These Dirty South Bohemians combine influences from black bohemian cultures concentrated in the urban Northeast, like the Afropunk movement, with regionally-inflected understandings of race and bohemianism to create a racially and regionally distinct articulation of bohemianism within racially segregated spaces.