Chronicling Stankonia: The Rise of the Hip-Hop South By Regina N. Bradley. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2021.

Abstract

Although scholars recognize the U.S. South as the most influential region for hip-hop music today, there remains a dearth of academic work on it. 1 Regina N. Bradley ’ s Chronicling Stankonia: The Rise of the Hip-Hop South helps to fill that gap, to be sure; it contributes to the growing, and yet still deeply insufficient, number of histories of hip-hop in the South, such as those by journalists Roni Sarig, Ben Westhoff, and Briana Younger. 2 However the book does far more than narrate a vital strand of the history of southern hip-hop: Its analysis of music, literature, and audiovisual media makes clear the centrality of hip-hop in contemporary Black life in the U.S. South. In Bradley ’ s study, hip-hop does not just function as a musical genre, it becomes a way to understand Black Southern identity after the civil rights movement of the mid-twentieth century. The book ’ s interrogation of the cultural possibilities for the contemporary Black American South begins by acknowledging the absence of academic work in this area. As Bradley notes, scholarship on post-civil rights Black culture rarely focuses on the South, and popular representations of it all too often center the experiences of white southerners, with Black narratives typically confined to three historical moments: The antebellum era, Jim Crow, and the modern civil rights movement. This book ’ s focus on the hip-hop South — what Bradley defines as “ the experiences of black southerners who came of age in the 1980s and 1990s and use hip-hop culture to buffer themselves from the historical narrative and expectations of civil rights movement era blacks and their predecessors ” (6) — offers a necessary corrective, highlighting the complexity of Black southern life in the post-civil rights era and making plain the unrefined nature of popular representations of the South that fail to account for these experiences.