Chronicling Stankonia

This vibrant book pulses with the beats of a new American South, probing the ways music, literature, and film have remixed southern identities for a post-civil rights generation. For scholar and critic Regina N. Bradley, Outkast's work is the touchstone, a blend of funk, gospel, and hip-hop developed in conjunction with the work of other culture creators-including T.I., Kiese Laymon, and Jesmyn Ward. This work, Bradley argues, helps define new cultural possibilities for black southerners who came of age in the 1980s and 1990s and have used hip-hop culture to buffer themselves from the historical narratives and expectations of the civil rights era. Andre 3000, Big Boi, and a wider community of creators emerge as founding theoreticians of the hip-hop South, framing a larger question of how the region fits into not only hip-hop culture but also contemporary American society as a whole.Chronicling Stankonia reflects the ways that culture, race, and southernness intersect in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Although part of southern hip-hop culture remains attached to the past, Bradley demonstrates how younger southerners use the music to embrace the possibility of multiple Souths, multiple narratives, and multiple points of entry to contemporary southern black identity.

Chronicling Stankonia is an engaging read, one that adroitly balances rigorous academic research with a deeply personal narrative about Black life and art in the post-Civil Rights Era in the South."--The Arts Fuse , Chronicling Stankonia is the book that Regina N. Bradley was meant to write. She has emerged in recent years as one of the best scholars of Southern hip hop, and she is able to create discussion in really accessible ways that are fun to read without sacrificing any challenging concepts. It all comes through in a really impactful book that I'm sure we'll be referencing for years to come." --Chi Chi Thalken, Scratched Vinyl , "Dr. Regina N. Bradley does an amazing job of reminding us how important the south is to hip-hop culture....Bradley challenges us to acknowledge how southern culture influences Black identity and music."--Book Riot , [Bradley] is less interested in writing a biography tracing the short reign of the South's greatest rap group. . . . and more fascinated with why OutKast matters. . . . [As] Bradley maintains, Big Boi and Andre continue to influence a new era of outkasted artists--musicians, filmmakers, and authors, most notably two of the best American writers working today: Kiese Laymon and Jesmyn Ward. . . . The best parts of this short book of essays find Bradley reminiscing about her own outkastedness."--A.V. Club , Regina Bradley's book gives Southern rap the academic treatment it was long overdue." --Reckon South

Regina N. Bradley is an alumna Nasir Jones Hiphop Fellow at Harvard University and an assistant professor of English and African diaspora studies at Kennesaw State University.