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. André 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.<br/><br/><i>Chronicling Stankonia</i> 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.