An OutKast Reader: Essays on Race, Gender, and the Postmodern South

OutKast, the Atlanta-based hip-hop duo, has had a significant impact on American popular culture over the past twenty-five years, creating a postmodern, post-civil rights southern identity that combines funk, psychedelia, haute couture, R&B, faith, and spirituality with Afrofuturism. An OutKast Reader explores contemporary issues of Blackness, gender, urbanism, southern aesthetics, and southern studies through the group's aesthetic, featuring essays by hip-hop and African American studies scholars.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 248 pages
Publication date: 30 May 2022
Publisher: University of Georgia Press

OutKast, the Atlanta-based hip-hop duo formed in 1992, has left an indelible mark on American popular culture over the past twenty-five years. Through their Grammy-winning albums, music videos, feature films, theatrical performances, and fashion, André 3000 Benjamin and Antwan Big Boi Patton have created a unique postmodern, post-civil rights southern identity that blends funk, psychedelia, haute couture, R&B, faith, and spirituality with Afrofuturism. This aesthetic, which has been widely disseminated by OutKast and its collaborators, has become so prevalent in mainstream American culture that it is often taken for granted. However, the essays in An OutKast Reader challenge this notion by exploring the challenges and experimental nature of creating a new southern aesthetic. 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.

Dimension: 229 x 152 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780820360133