Faculty, staff, and a alumnus of the Center will participate in the [Re]Defining Liberal Arts Education in the 21st Century Conference on the Liberal Arts next week at Jackson State University. The Conference, to be held October 6 – 8, will include a keynote address by Dr. William D. Adams, Chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Brown Bag Lecture Series Analyzes Songs Sept. 28 The Brown Bag Lunch and Lecture Series continues Wednesday, Sept. 28 with three faculty members who offer 10-minute analyses of individual songs of their choice. The format is an experiment to see what scholars can accomplish in a short time. Presenters, who will announce their songs as …
On three Wednesdays this fall, the Center is partnering with Shelter on Van Buren to screen films made by Center institutes the Southern Documentary Project and the Southern Foodways Alliance. The first screening is this Wednesday, September 14 at 6pm, and will include a screening of Longleaf by Rex Jones and Otha, made from archival footage by Ava Lowrey from the Southern Foodways Alliance.
Edward L. Ayers of the University of Richmond was our 2016 Gilder-Jordan Lecturer on Wednesday, September 7. The Gilder-Jordan lecturer spends the day with faculty and students from the Center and History Department before delivering the evening lecture.
Documentary work will be the theme of the Brown Bag Lecture for Wednesday, Sept. 14 at noon in Barnard Observatory. Several faculty and staff members of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture will discuss documentary photography, film, oral history, and audio recording and show examples of their work and teaching. Participants will include Becca Walton (Mississippi Stories), Rex Jones and Andy Harper (Southern Documentary Project), Sara Wood (Southern Foodways Alliance), and David Wharton (director, documentary studies).
The Gilder-Jordan Lecture in Southern Cultural History will take place at 7pm on Wednesday, September 7 in Nutt Auditorium on the UM campus. The 2016 lecturer is Edward L. Ayers of the University of Richmond, and his talk will be “When History Doesn’t Move in a Straight Line: The Civil War Then and Now.”
SouthDocs recorded an interview of Zandria Robinson by Jazmine Walker at the 2012 Blues Symposium. Robinson discusses hip-hop as a needed “contemporary lens on the South” and “articulation of regionalism.”
The following article, by Assistant Professor of History and Southern Studies Darren Grem, was originally published in Southern Cultures, Volume 12, Number 4, Winter 2006, pp. 55-73.
Beginning in the late 1980s, southern hip-hop and rap effectively trumped contemporary R&B as the foremost popular urban music trend. A regional response to the then-burgeoning East and West Coast hip-hop scenes, purveyors of southern rap simultaneously surfaced in cities ranging from Atlanta and Miami to New Orleans, Memphis, and Houston. Although many older music fans downplay the significance and artistic credibility of the genre, southern rap—created by an MC, or rapper, and a DJ, or producer—has emerged as a primary motivator in the youth market, influencing fashion, language, the mass media, and other facets of commercial and popular culture. Similarly, southern rap artists have become avatars of pop culture in their own right, receiving consistent radio airplay, crossing over to film and television roles, and emerging as popular personalities in the marketing and advertising fields.
Up today, an academic article by new Southern Studies faculty member Brian Foster. His article “Everybody Gotta Have a Dream”: Rap-centered Aspirations among Young Black Males Involved in Rap Music Production – A Qualitative Study” was published in 2014 in Issues in Race and Ethnicity: An Interdisciplinary Global Journal.