Home with Hip Hop Feminism
Performances in Communication and Culture
Summary
Home with Hip Hop Feminism brings together popular culture and the everyday experiences of black women from the hip hop generation to highlight the epiphanic moments when the imagined and real body converge or collide.
To date, there are no books devoted exclusively to black women that integrate performance auto/ethnography and media studies from a hip hop feminist perspective. This book serves as a three-sided intervention against a textually dominated feminist media studies, a white-centered feminist third wave theory, and a masculinist hip hop cultural project. Aisha S. Durham not only reclaims her voice in these three spaces, she also rewrites her hip hop history by returning to the intellectual, cultural, and physical places she calls home.
The book will appeal to undergraduate and graduate students interested in media and cultural studies, race and ethnic studies, and gender and sexuality studies.
Excerpt
Table Of Contents
- Cover
- Title
- Copyright
- About the author(s)/editor(s)
- About the book
- This eBook can be cited
- Table of Contents
- Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction On Going Home
- THE REPRESENTATIONAL POLITICS OF LOCATION: MEDIA/CULTURAL STUDIES/FEMINISM/ME
- INTERPRETIVE INTERACTIONISM AS METHOD, MODEL, AND WRITING PRACTICE: AUTOETHNOGRAPHY, TEXTUAL EXPERIENCE, AND REFLEXIVE INTERVIEWS
- PART ONE: RECALLING THE HOMEGIRL
- Autoethnography
- Chapter 1 Behind Beats and Rhymes: Working Class from a Hampton Roads Hip Hop Homeplace
- Hip Hop as a Homeplace
- (RE) WORKING CLASS AT HOME: THE CONSTRUCTION OF HIP HOP AND THE UNDERCLASS
- MY HIP HOP HOME STORY: GOING HOME AND HOMECOMING
- Go(ing) Home: Greekfest Race Riots and the Erasure of Class
- Homecoming: Diggs Town and the Staging of Respectability
- CONCLUSION
- Chapter 2 The [News] Wire: My Life Script[ed]
- Leading Roles (Listed in Order of Appearance)
- I
- Cocaine in Diggs Town. Within Two years,
- II
- III
- IV
- Chapter 3 Between Us: A Bio-Poem
- I
- Dee-Dee dead
- II
- III
- IV
- V
- PART TWO: (RE)MEMBERING THE HOMEGIRL
- Textual Experience
- Chapter 4 From Hip Hop Queen to Hollywood’s Mama Morton(s): Latifah as the Sexual Un/desirable
- Hypervisibility, Mass Media, and Black Feminist Thought on the Sexual Un/desirable
- Film Synopses: ‘Chicago’ and ’Bringing Down The House’
- READING LATIFAH: [A]SEXUAL BLACK FEMALE BODY
- Surrogate Mammies
- Hot Mamas, Hoochies, and Hoodrats
- CONCLUSION
- Chapter 5 “Single Ladies,” Sasha Fierce, and Sexual Scripts in the Black Public Sphere
- Get Me Bodied
- Beyoncé’s Duel: The Lady and the Freak
- The Freak
- The Lady
- CONCLUSION
- PART THREE: REPRESENTIN’ THE HOMEGIRL
- Poetic Transcription as Performance Ethnography
- Chapter 6
- Every Day
- Looking Up, Looking Down: Donna’s Diggs Park Place Familial Story
- Latina’s Refrain
- Taressa: A Rasta Mother’s Answer(s) Rap
- Brooklyn
- From The Projects of New York to the Projects of Virginia
- The World Is So Stereotypical
- (Re)definitions
- SPEAKING THROUGH/TO HIP HOP DEFINITIONS OF BLACK WOMANHOOD
- Latina, Donna, Renisha, Nicole, and Taressa shake their head, no.
- Conclusion The Fundamentals of a Hip Hop Feminist Approach
- Notes
- INTRODUCTION
- PART 1: AUTOETHNOGRAPHY
- CHAPTER 1
- CHAPTER 2
- PART 2: TEXTUAL EXPERIENCE
- CHAPTER 4
- CHAPTER 5
- PART 3: POETIC TRANSCRIPTION AS PERFORMANCE ETHNOGRAPHY
- CONCLUSION
- Bibliography
- MOTION PICTURES
- SONGS
- TELEVISION SHOWS
- Index
1. Queen Latifah in Chicago
2. Queen Latifah in Bringing Down the House
3. Beyonce’s Robotic Hand in the “Single Ladies” Music Video
4. Beyonce Spanking Her Booty in the “Single Ladies” Music Video
5. Beyonce Dancing in the “Single Ladies” Music Video
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THIS BOOK DOCUMENTS A JOURNEY—A MOVEMENT OF CULTURE AND BODIES FROM Diggs Park to the Ivory Tower and back again. I carry with me the stories of women who refused to be erased. Some present, some passed on. Tarsha, LaToya, Delneice, Tanesha, Artesia, Maria, Portia, and Keyisha—I see you. Latina, Taressa, Nicole, Renisha, and Donna, I rewrite your stories in spaces where we are unseen. Let this book be my community love letter to you all and all of the Diggs Park women who “make do” and “make time” to love, laugh, and live fearlessly.
Along this journey, I have been sustained by the unwavering support of my families at home and in the academy. To my parents Sharon and Jerome McInnis: This is the world in word that you dared me to be. To my brother, Sherwood “DJ Wood” Durham: I am the rhyme to your rhythm. Felicia Brown and Adrian Gale, you are soul-stirring life givers. To Celiany Rivera Velázquez, Jillian Báez, Himika Bhattacharya, Carolyn Randolph, and others in the ICR (Institute of Communication Research) Collective; to Brittney Cooper, Susana Morris, Rachel Raimist, Robin Boylorn, and others in the Crunk Feminist Collective; and to Ruth Nicole Brown, Claudine Taaffe, Chamara Kwakye, and others in SOLHOT (Saving Our Lives Hear Our Truths): Thank you. You provided the creative-intellectual space for me to cultivate my ideas, and your work has nourished me from Illinois to Texas to Florida. Claudio Moreira, Manoucheka Celeste, Neha Vora, and Vanita Reddy, you offered to read unready versions to help me over writing hurdles. Angie Cruz, you offered your home so I could ← xi | xii → push through writer’s block. I read your cheers in the blank space where/when there are no words. Know that I am because we are.
There are phenomenal people who laid the groundwork for this project. Mary Savigar, Cameron McCarthy and Norman Denzin, it has been your guidance and your vision early on that has helped me make concrete lofty ideas about a multivoiced, mixed method book on hip hop feminism. Joan Morgan, this book would not have been possible without you. It has taken the research help of David Reeves, Megan Farah, Joelle Cruz, and Heather Curry to archive it. It has taken “gender talks” with antisexist hip hop scholars John Jennings, Stephen Parris, Byron Hurt, Mark Anthony Neal, and Bakari Kitwana to smooth some of my ideas. Most important, it has taken the loving feedback and mentorship of Paula Treichler, Sarah Projansky, Gwendolyn Pough, Angharad Valdivia, Elaine Richardson, Cynthia Dillard, Mary Weems, Robin Means Coleman, Bernadette Calafell, Devika Chawla, Srividya Ramasubramanian, Carolyn Ellis, Susan Hare- wood, Shoshana Magnet, Desiree Yomtoob, Zenzele Isoke, and Tanya Saunders to see this process to the end. Among a constellation of stars, you all are my feminist universe. I look up to you.
Throughout this process, I have looked to one person: Kevin Dolan. Kevin, you’ve heard my stories as many times as I told them, you’ve massaged them, you’ve dressed them, and you’ve made them presentable to the world. Whatever beauty folks find in the pages that follow will be because your hands blessed them.
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Bullets fly, mothers cry and friends die in Oakleaf Forest, but April
Johnson has tuned her ear to sounds unlike those echoed throughout her Norfolk neighborhood. Armed with a bow in one hand and a large bass violin in the other, April, 17, plays melodies sweet enough to block out the wailing cries of hopelessness coming from her housing project.
Details
- Pages
- XII, 180
- Year
- 2014
- ISBN (PDF)
- 9781453913826
- ISBN (ePUB)
- 9781454195900
- ISBN (MOBI)
- 9781454195894
- ISBN (Hardcover)
- 9781433107085
- ISBN (Softcover)
- 9781433107092
- DOI
- 10.3726/978-1-4539-1382-6
- Language
- English
- Publication date
- 2010 (June)
- Keywords
- feminist perspective cultural project voice theory
- Published
- New York, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Frankfurt am Main, Oxford, Wien, 2014. 180 pp.
