Check it while I wreck it : Black womanhood, hip hop culture, and the public sphere

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Title:

Author:

Pough, Gwendolyn D., 1970-

ISBN:

9781555536084

9781555536077

Personal Author:

Pough, Gwendolyn D., 1970-

Publication Information:

Boston : Northeastern University Press, 2004.

Physical Description:

xiii, 265 p. : ill. ; 24 cm.

Contents:

Introduction : hip-hop is more than just music to me : the potential for a movement in the culture -- 1. Bringing wreck : theorizing race, rap, gender, and the public sphere -- 2. My cipher keeps movin' like a rollin' stone : black women's expressive cultures and black feminist legacies -- 3. I bring wreck to those who disrespect me like a dame : women, rap, and the rhetoric of wreck -- 4. (Re)reconstructing womanhood : black women's narratives in hip-hop culture -- 5. Girls in the hood and other ghetto dramas : representing black womanhood in hip-hop cinema and novels -- 6. Hip-hop soul mate? : hip-hop soul divas and rap music : critiquing the love that hate produced -- 7. You can't see me/you betta recognize : using rap to bridge gaps in the classroom -- Conclusion : imagining images : black womanhood in the twenty-first century.

Subject Term:

African American women -- Social conditions.

Hip-hop -- United States.

Rap (Music) -- History and criticism.

Popular culture -- United States.

Copies:

Available:*

Library	Material Type	Item Barcode	Shelf Number	Copy	Status
Searching... 1:IIEMSA	1:GEN-BOOK	33168025566643	305.48896073 P872C 2004	1	Searching... Unknown

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Summary

Hip-hop culture began in the early 1970s as the creative and activist expressions - graffiti writing, dee-jaying, break dancing, and rap music - of black and Latino youth in the depressed South Bronx, and the movement has since grown into a worldwide cultural phenomenon that permeates almost every aspect of society, from speech to dress. While hip-hop has been assimilated and exploited in the mainstream, young black women who came of age during the hip-hop era are grappling with the gender politics of a predominately masculine space. In this provocative study, Gwendolyn D. Pough explores the complex relationship between black women, hip-hop, and feminism. Examining a wide range of genres, including rap music, novels, spoken word poetry, hip-hop cinema, and hip-hop soul music, she traces the rhetoric of black women bringing wreck. Elliot, and Lil' Kim are building on the legacy of earlier generations of women - from Sojourner Truth to sisters of the black power and civil rights movements - to disrupt and break into the dominant patriarchal public sphere. She discusses the ways in which today's young black women struggle against the stereotypical language of the past (castrating black mother, mammy, sapphire) and the present (bitch, ho, chickenhead), and shows how rap provides an avenue to tell their own life stories, to construct their identities, and to dismantle historical and contemporary negative representations of black womanhood. Pough also looks at the on-going public dialogue between male and female rappers about love and relationships, explaining how the denigrating rhetoric used by men has been appropriated by black women rappers as a means to empowerment in their own lyrics. music as well as of third wave and black feminism. This fresh and thought-provoking perspective on the complexities of hip-hop urges young black women to harness the energy, vitality, and activist roots of hip-hop culture and rap music to claim a public voice for themselves and to bring wreck on sexism and misogyny in mainstream society.