Biography
This fellowship will fund fieldwork for a book co-authored by Kyle DeCoste (Tulane University) and Alex Blue V (McGill University). Our book is a co-written ethnographic study of country rap (a.k.a. “hick-hop”), an underground music genre performed primarily by white men in the U.S. South that combines an imagined Black sound with white rural imagery, evoking radical—and sometimes drastically opposed—political visions of the nation. The book investigates the grassroots emergence of the genre in the early twenty-first century in online spaces and traces these developments into the present political moment in the United States through both online and offline ethnography. How do artists use sound to simultaneously negotiate the boundaries of race (white and Black), place (urban and rural), and music genre (country and hip-hop)? This fellowship allows us to conduct fieldwork at the Redneck Rave, the biggest country rap festival in the country which has been integral to the formation of the genre.
