“Hip Hop and the Televisual Global South: Atlanta and Sintonia”

Abstract

In recent years, audiences in the United States and around the globe have witnessed an explosion of television and streaming content focused on hip hop. Such content contemplates, historicizes, promotes, and represents the art form, artists, industry, and regional genres that have together emerged as a central feature of contemporary popular culture. This article explores the spatial and thematic links to the theoretical Global South in Atlanta and Sintonia. Analyzing the series’ respective portrayals of race and inequality from the margins, I examine how hip-hop/ funk and the Global South function as narrative tools and symbolic spaces through which notions of a shared precarity stemming from global flows of capital are constructed, consumed, and challenged. By considering the series’ connections to the Global South, this article contributes to a growing body of work that aims to move beyond research that centers the west and the nation-state.