“My People all over the World”: Hip Hop, Gender, and Black Nationalism
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2008
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Safundi: Journal of South African and American Comparative Studies
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University of Cape Town
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Abstract
T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting’s Pimps Up, Ho’s Down: Hip Hop’s Hold on Young Black Women (2007) and Charise L. Cheney’s Brothers Gonna Work It Out: Sexual Politics in the Golden Age of Rap Nationalism (2005) both offer committed and informed analyses of the gender politics of a cultural movement with which their authors identify. Sharpley-Whiting’s personal story prefaces her investigation into how, why, and at what cost hip hop’s representations of young black women are perpetuated by these women. Cheney’s investment emerges most strongly at the end of her fascinating historical foray into the form of black nationalism that she finds emerging at a particular point in the development of rap music. She calls black nationalism’s true emancipatory potential into question, charging that it has failed even to ‘‘conceive [... of] a politics of liberation that is not dependent upon a masculinist discourse that incorporates a subordination of the feminine’’ (169). Both authors identify themselves as members of the hip hop nation they write about. What is at stake in their intellectual inquiries, then, is brought powerfully home, as each author engages with a tradition of which she is at once part, and by which she is interpolated.
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Distiller, N. (2008). “My People all over the World”: Hip Hop, Gender, and Black Nationalism. Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies, 9(3), 351-356.