An Outkast Reader

Essays on Race, Gender, and the Postmodern South
Erscheinungsjahr 2021
ISBN: 978-0-8203-6015-7
Verlag: University of Georgia Press

Buch, Englisch, 248 Seiten, Hardback, Format (B × H): 157 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 760 g

Reihe: Music of the American South Series

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, André "André 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 Beyoncé 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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Musikwissenschaft Musikgattungen Andere zeitgenössische Musikrichtungen
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Regional- & Stadtgeschichte
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziale Gruppen/Soziale Themen Gender Studies, Geschlechtersoziologie
• Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie | Volkskunde Volkskunde

Über Autor(innen)

Regina Bradley is an assistant professor of English and African diaspora studies at Kennesaw State University. She is the founder of OutKasted Conversations, which has been featured in Ebony, the New York Times, Musiqology, and the Huffington Post. Articles of hers have appeared in south: a scholarly journal, Black Camera, Meridians, and Comedy Studies, among others journals.