Regina Bradley - Department of English, Kennesaw State University

This is Ashley Newby and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a Mellon grant sponsored series of conversations examining the history of the field. Our conversations engage with a wide range of activists and scholars - senior figures in the field, late doctoral students, and everyone in between, culture workers, and political organizers - in order to explore the cultural and political meaning of Black Studies as an area of inquiry and its critical methods.Today’s conversation is with Professor Regina Bradley, who teaches in the Department of English at Kennesaw State University. In addition to both scholarly and popular essays, she is the author of Chronicling Stankonia: The Rise of the Hip Hop South, Boondock Kollage: Stories from the Hip Hop South, and editor of An Outkast Reader and co-editor with Mark Anthony Neal and Murray Forman of That's the Joint: The Hip Hop Studies Reader. In this conversation, we discuss the multiple resonances of the term "Black" across geographies, the relation of Black Studies to popular culture, and how questions of region, gender, and class impact thinking in a Black Studies context.