Zandria F. Robinson

About

Zandria F. Robinson is a writer and cultural critic from Memphis. She is the author of This Ain't Chicago: Race, Class, and Regional Identity in the Post-Soul South and co-author of Chocolate Cities: The Black Map of American Life. Her writing has appeared in Rolling Stone, The Believer, and New York Times Magazine.

Articles

Issue 95, Winter 2016

Listening for the Country

It was the other side of sound, the other side of Southern blackness, a steady if muffled undercurrent that persisted and quietly buoyed new generations. I left the radio on WDIA, listening for what...

By Zandria F. Robinson

Issue 99, Winter 2017

Border Wars

By Zandria F. Robinson

Issue 107, Winter 2019

Sing Across the Ocean

Funk is at once spiritual and pugilistic and reparative and confrontational.

By Zandria F. Robinson

Issue 115, Winter 2021

The Watts Miracle

As ravenous as anyone else, the thing I had most wanted to see in Amazing Grace was Franklin calling Lazarus.

By Zandria F. Robinson

Web Feature

Dear Sweet June Baby, Taste Good

If you swallow the air, funky and smoky and sweet, you can taste the ecstatic, everyday moments of freedom in your bones. It’s the time the city taste most like home.

By Zandria F. Robinson

Web Feature

Long Live the Queen of Memphis

How is it that you could be anywhere in the whole wide world and still sound like you and us and home?

By Zandria F. Robinson