An Outkast Reader: Essays on Race, Gender, and the Postmodern South (Music of the American South #4) (Paperback)

An Outkast Reader: Essays on Race, Gender, and the Postmodern South (Music of the American South #4) By Regina N. Bradley (Editor), Fredara Hadley (Contribution by), Michelle Hite (Contribution by) Cover Image

An Outkast Reader: Essays on Race, Gender, and the Postmodern South (Music of the American South #4) (Paperback)

By Regina N. Bradley (Editor), Fredara Hadley (Contribution by), Michelle Hite (Contribution by)

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OutKast, the Atlanta-based hip-hop duo formed in 1992, is one of the most influential musical groups within American popular culture of the past twenty-five years. Through Grammy-winning albums, music videos, feature films, theatrical performances, and fashion, Andr "Andr 3000" Benjamin and Antwan "Big Boi" Patton have articulated a vision of postmodern, post-civil rights southern identity that combines the roots of funk, psychedelia, haute couture, R&B, faith and spirituality, and Afrofuturism into a style all its own. This postmodern southern aesthetic, largely promulgated and disseminated by OutKast and its collaborators, is now so prevalent in mainstream American culture (neither Beyonc Knowles's "Formation" nor Joss Whedon's sci-fi /western mashup Firefly could exist without OutKast's collage aesthetic) that we rarely consider how challenging and experimental it actually is to create a new southern aesthetic.

An OutKast Reader, then, takes the group's aesthetic as a lens through which readers can understand and explore contemporary issues of Blackness, gender, urbanism, southern aesthetics, and southern studies more generally. Divided into sections on regional influences, gender, and visuality, the essays collectively offer a vision of OutKast as a key shaper of conceptions of the twenty-first-century South, expanding that vision beyond long-held archetypes and cultural signifiers. The volume includes a who's who of hip-hop studies and African American studies scholarship, including Charlie Braxton, Susana M. Morris, Howard Ramsby II, Reynaldo Anderson, and Ruth Nicole Brown.
Regina N. Bradley is Assistant Professor of English and African Diaspora Studies at Kennesaw State University in Kennesaw, GA. Her research interests include southern hip hop, the contemporary Black American South, race and sound studies, and southern studies. She is the author of the forthcoming book Chronicling Stankonia: The Rise of the Hip Hop South (UNC Press). She can be reached at www.redclayscholar.com.
Product Details ISBN: 9780820360133
ISBN-10: 0820360139
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Publication Date: October 1st, 2021
Pages: 248
Language: English
Series: Music of the American South