Hip-hop enthusiasts at Armstrong State University in Savannah, Georgia, will be able to further indulge with an upper level English course about the rap group OutKast.

The class, “OutKast and the Rise of the Hip-Hop South,” is being offered this semester. Regina Bradley, a languages, literature and philosophy professor who also was a Nasir Jones fellow at Harvard University’s Hiphop Archive and Research Institute, is teaching the course.

“I wanted to teach this course as an effort to expand conversations about hip-hop outside of the familiar East Coast and West Coast experiences,” Bradley said. “It is way past time for hip-hop studies and culture to recognize the significance of Southern hip-hop artists.”

As the course is an upper-class seminar, Bradley said, the students will be expected to write a 12- to 15-page original research article. She also said the students will participate in daily listening exercises and submit an annotated playlist that represents their definition of the hip-hop South.

“It is important for students to stretch and challenge their ideas about popular culture as sites of inquiry,” she said. “Specifically, it is important to introduce OutKast as worthy of academic analysis.”

Courtesy of outkast.com

Bradley also said she was honored and excited to teach this course as a Southerner and hip-hop fan. She added that she hoped the students will develop a critical listening ear and find new ways to think about music and popular culture as sites of analysis.

Elizabeth Howells, the head of the languages, literature and philosophy department at Armstrong State, said she thought the course was important because of Bradley’s approach to teaching it.

Howells said Bradley saw OutKast in terms of a larger trajectory of African-American literature and suggested that people think more broadly about the art forms that flesh out the African-American literary tradition.

The course is not a course on music, Howells said, but a course on art and discourse that situates this art in a literary tradition.

“If we see slave narratives as early forms of the tradition, where are we today? How are voices being heard and expressed? What does that look like? So I think the students will be encouraged to think interdisciplinarily,” she said.

Howells said that in today’s world, especially with larger movements like Black Lives Matter, this kind of broader thinking is necessary to make English relevant and keep citizens informed.

“There has been an incredible outpouring of positive press about the course and also some comments about ‘Why offer such a thing in a university?’” Howells said. “But a course like this in a place like a university is going to allow students to have the insight and be given the tools to have the difficult conversations we should all be having in this nation at this time.”

Published on January 18, 2017 at 11:35 pm

Contact Deniz: dsahintu@syr.edu