“Put My City on the Map”: The Restorative Project of J. Cole’s Dreamville

• In Event: Dreamscaping: J. Cole’s Dreamville and the Ecologies of Black Masculinity in Hip-Hop

Description for Program

Hip hop has always been a spatial project. As a genre born from Black culture, it necessarily engages with the ecological transformations of Blackness. Whether it’s Arrested Development’s Tennessee, which directly interrogates the relationship of rootedness to Southern spaces, or the historic East coast versus West coast rivalry that temporarily segmented the genre and American Black youth into two sectors, hip hop has always delineated the ways Black subjects engage with their environment. In hip hop the Black imaginary and the worlds they make meet with the physical reality of Black living in a White supremacist regime that inflicts ontological violence onto those subjects. In Chronicling Stankonia, Regina Bradley traces the impact of Southern hip hop and how geographies factor into the discourse of hip hop. Tyler Bunzey joins Bradley in her attention to space in hip hop with his article “Sounding Soul (Food)” wherein he traces the way hip hop music actively works to create and frame Southern notions of place through lyrical food imagery, underscoring hip hop’s efficacy in world making. J. Cole’s Dreamville is a project in Black world making with impacts that are both artistic and material. Dreamville, the name for Cole’s annual music festival as well as the name of the record label he founded in collaboration with rapper and producer Ibrahim Hamad, is a quintessentially Southern hip hop enterprise. Through the label and festival Cole turns national attention to Greenville, NC, producing economic benefits for the space and actively setting up structures within the natural makeup of the community. Thus, Dreamville emerges as a plane on which to investigate hip hop’s tangible effects on the physical landscape of the South. It is a space where the immaterial and the physical converge for the project of communal restoration.

Author

• Victoria Washington, Texas Christian University