Hip Hop Revolution In The Flesh

An extended study of the writings of Lil' Kim, the multi-platinum selling Hip Hop artist. Examines Lil' Kim's anti-sexist, gender-defiant and ultra-erotic verse alongside issues of race and the politics of imprisonment. This is the first study to apply the tools of literary criticism to Hip Hop's lyrical writings.

As hip-hop artists constantly struggle to "keep it real," this fascinating study examines the debates over the core codes of hip-hop authenticity--as it reflects and reacts to problematic black images in popular culture--placing hip-hop in its proper cultural, political, and social contexts.

"This is the first book-length project to examine the relationship between blackness, queerness, and hip hop. Using aesthetics as its organizing lens, Hip Hop Heresies attends to the ways that hip hop cultural production in New York City from the 1970s through the first fifteen years of the 21st century produced hip hop cultural products (film, visual art, and music) that offer "queer articulations" of race, gender, and sexuality that are contrary to hegemonic ideas and representations of those categories in hip hop production, as well as in writing about hip hop culture"--

This book focuses on the culture and politics involved in building hip-hop archives. It addresses practical aspects, including methods of accumulation, curation, preservation, and digitization and critically analyzes institutional power, community engagement, urban economics, public access, and the ideological implications associated with hip-hop culture’s enduring tensions with dominant social values. The collection of essays are divided into four sections; Doing the Knowledge, Challenging Archival Forms, Beyond the Nation and Institutional Alignments: Interviews and Reflections. The book covers a range of official, unofficial, DIY and community archives and collections and features chapters by scholar practitioners, educators and curators. A wide swath of hip-hop culture is featured in the book, including a focus on dance, graffiti, clothing, and battle rap. The range of authors and their topics span countries in Asia, Europe, the Caribbean and North America.

Detroit, MIchigan, has long been recognized as a center of musical innovation and social change. Rebekah Farrugia and Kellie D. Hay draw on seven years of fieldwork to illuminate the important role that women have played in mobilizing a grassroots response to political and social pressures at the heart of Detroit’s ongoing renewal and development project. Focusing on the Foundation, a women-centered hip hop collective, Women Rapping Revolution argues that the hip hop underground is a crucial site where Black women shape subjectivity and claim self-care as a principle of community organizing. Through interviews and sustained critical engagement with artists and activists, this study also articulates the substantial role of cultural production in social, racial, and economic justice efforts.

In the world of hip-hop, "keeping it real" has always been a primary goal-and realness takes on special meaning as rappers mold their images for street cred and increasingly measure authenticity by ghetto-centric notions of "Who's badder?" In this groundbreaking book, Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar celebrates hip-hop and confronts the cult of authenticity that defines its essential character-that dictates how performers walk, talk, and express themselves artistically and also influences the consumer market. Hip-Hop Revolution is a balanced cultural history that looks past negative stereotypes of hip-hop as a monolith of hedonistic, unthinking noise to reveal its evolving positive role within American society. A writer who's personally encountered many of hip-hop's icons, Ogbar traces hip-hop's rise as a cultural juggernaut, focusing on how it negotiates its own sense of identity. He especially explores the lyrical world of rap as artists struggle to define what realness means in an art where class, race, and gender are central to expressions of authenticity-and how this realness is articulated in a society dominated by gendered and racialized stereotypes. Ogbar also explores problematic black images, including minstrelsy, hip-hop's social milieu, and the artists' own historical and political awareness. Ranging across the rap spectrum from the conscious hip-hop of Mos Def to the gangsta rap of 50 Cent to the "underground" sounds of Jurassic 5 and the Roots, he tracks the ongoing quest for a unique and credible voice to show how complex, contested, and malleable these codes of authenticity are. Most important, Ogbar persuasively challenges widely held notions that hip-hop is socially dangerous-to black youths in particular-by addressing the ways in which rappers critically view the popularity of crime-focused lyrics, the antisocial messages of their peers, and the volatile politics of the word "nigga." Hip-Hop Revolution deftly balances an insider's love of the culture with a scholar's detached critique, exploring popular myths about black educational attainment, civic engagement, crime, and sexuality. By cutting to the bone of a lifestyle that many outsiders find threatening, Ogbar makes hip-hop realer than it's ever been before.

This book maps complex ethical dilemmas in social justice research practices in media and communication. Contributors critically analyse power dynamics that arise when building equitable research relations with media activists, social movements, and cultural producers, considering issues of access, control, affective labour, reciprocal critiques, and movement pedagogies. Authors probe the ethical challenges faced when horizontal relations inadvertently create conflicts leading to oppressive communication; when affective demands generate non-reciprocal relations of care; and when participant anonymity has to be balanced with self-expression and voice. Chapters explore engagements with digital technologies in developing research relations, covering new research practices from horizontal collectives to dialogical auto-ethnography; from community scholarship and pedagogies to decolonising research. The book asks researchers to consider the complexities of ethical practices today in socially engaged global research within the neoliberal university.

Transnational Cinematic & Popular Music Icons: Lena Horne, Dorothy Dandridge, & Queen Latifah, 1917-2017 centers twentieth and twenty-first century black-transnational stereotypes, celebrities, and symbols Lena Horne's, Dorothy Dandridge;s, and Queen Latifah’s transnational popular cultural struggles between domination and autonomy, with a particular emphasis on their films and popular music. Linking each performer to twentieth century U.S., African-American, and global gender histories and noting the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, class, and empire in their overlapping transnational biographies, Transnational Cinematic & Popular Music Icons: Lena Horne, Dorothy Dandridge, & Queen Latifah, 1917-2017 connects Horne, Dandridge, and Latifah to each other and legacies of Hollywood stereotypes and popular music’s internationally-routed politics. Through a close reading of Horne's, Dandridge's, and Latifah’s films and popular music, the performers tie to historic black-transnational caricatures, from the “tragic mulatto” to Sapphire, Mammy, and Jezebel, and additional, non-white female performers, from Josephine Baker to Halle Berry, maneuvering within transnational popular culture industrial matrices and against white supremacist and hetero-patriarchal forces.