Back Porch
2023; University of North Carolina Press; Volume: 29; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/scu.2023.a899713
ISSN1534-1488
Autores ResumoBack Porch Regina N. Bradley RAPPER PASTOR TROY gave me my first for-real lesson in southern Black geography back in 1999. I’d been living in Albany, Georgia, for about a year when Troy forcefully and confidently declared “ain’t no mo play in G-A” against a background of lower-pitched piano notes and rounds of gunfire and sonic booms. Troy’s declaration, also the name of the track, staked claim on multiple Gina Mae mixtapes. Them tapes had the sole mission of developing my budding Down South Georgia Guh status as I transitioned from the DMV to the Dirty South. If I was gonna do this down-south ish, I needed to be all in. Ain’t no room to play, ain’t no time to be shamed about where I’m from or where I live. “No Mo Play in G-A” was the anthem for anybody in Georgia who wanted—or wanted to give—the smoke. If there wasn’t no play in Georgia, there damn sure wasn’t none in Memphis, where Three Six Mafia challenged folk to “Tear the Club Up,” or in New Orleans, where Master P dared people to see if they could cut it as a No Limit Soldier. What my radio mixtapes made abundantly clear to my fifteen-year-old self was that the Hip-Hop South was nobody’s foil or wannabe. The Gina Mae mixtapes opened up my mind to southern hip-hop as an act of geographic making and reclamation for younger generations of Black southerners. The Hip-Hop South was its own self-describing and self-sustaining thang. André Benjamin’s declaration that the “South got something to say” in front of a room full of New Yorkers in 1995 kicked the door open for multiple southern artists to speak their truths. [End Page 105] Southerners from a little bit of everywhere gained a boost of confidence to talk about where they’re from. Geography and hip-hop are kissing cousins. Like our Up North and West Coast kin, the Hip-Hop South pays hella attention to locale, updating maps of what the contemporary Black South looks like through a hip-hop lens. Still, even a fresh lens gets dirty. ________ THE SOUTH IS HAUNTED by its past and the belief it is a rigid relic of trauma, and this is imprinted on any effort to document the region. The past sits in a rocker on the present South’s porch, sips moonshine from a mason jar, and drunkenly stumbles to the door, demanding attention and more likka. It was not until working on this issue of Southern Cultures that I thought more deeply about Black Geographies as a form of legibility for the region. Historical geographies—plantations, cemeteries, highway systems, churches, historic trails, and markers—point to physical places and moments, often trauma-inflicted, that are part of southern Black folks’ history yet are still tangible enough to evoke strong emotion in the present. Historical geographies overlap with cultural geographies— foodways, language, spiritual beliefs, and where and how they’re practiced—that present a dynamic and complicated Black experience. There are also sonic geographies—music, dialect, laughter, wailing—that make room for what increasingly captures my interest, imagined southern Black geographies. Hear me out: the southern Black imagination is as dynamic as it is laborious. It reforms, revises, and reclaims spaces where Black people are present but unwelcome, underserved, or unseen. Imagined geographies are a by-product of this work. Zora Neale Hurston did this work in multiple genres for rural Black Florida. Jean Toomer’s Cane creatively theorized about Black life in North Georgia. They created southern Black geographies that pushed back against the reductionist propaganda of Black folks leaving the South during the Great Migration simply to flee racial terror. Even stories about southern Black exports to the North, such as Rudolph Fisher’s “City of Refuge” or Richard Wright’s autobiography, Black Boy, tug and pull at the exaggerations and realities of uprooted southerners during the Great Migration. Regardless of intention, the purpose is clear: to [End Page 106] create a space that centers southern Black autonomy and to complicate the...
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