Carry on Tradition--Celebrating the Legacy of Hip-Hop Feminism

On the cusp of the millennium, several books by young Black women ushered in a fresh perspective on Black womanhood.

Carry On Tradition
by Britni Danielle

On the cusp of the millennium, several books by young Black women ushered in a fresh perspective on Black womanhood. Writers like Joan Morgan, Lisa Jones, Dream Hampton, Tricia Rose, Rebecca Walker, and others, represented a new brand of post-civil rights, hip hop-influenced feminism that spoke to young women in ways in which older Black and White female writers could not. The f-word was no longer a stance reserved for White women who wanted to get even with men. It was no longer the struggle in which our foremothers fought for inclusion. This new brand of feminism was relatable. It understood that we liked to look cute, have fun, discuss serious issues, and loved our brothas, despite their inherent privilege.

I remember reading When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost when it debuted and thinking that Joan Morgan was speaking FOR me. I loved hip hop, hard. It was my first crush, the soundtrack to my youth, it inspired my passion for writing, but I always felt some kind of way about the ease in which women were relegated to the sidelines. With the exception of a few dope women (Latifah, MC Lyte, Salt-n-Pepa, Lauryn), women were almost always seen as sidepieces and groupies.

But I kept listening. Even though I danced to its beats, would argue about who was the best emcee, and would defend hip hop like it was my big brother, I always felt uneasy about its willingness to label other women (because clearly, they couldn’t be talking about ME, right?) bitches and hoes. Joan Morgan’s in-your-face exploration of women maturing in the age of hip hop articulated my own contradictory feelings about a culture I loved, but didn’t always love me.

This new brand of feminism understood that the struggle of women wasn’t about hating men. It wasn’t about writing them off and branding them as enemies. Our feminism—as beneficiaries of many movements of equality—was about claiming our voice, articulating our worth, and fighting our own, modern, battles.

Read the Full Essay @ Clutch Magazine

Tricia Rose on the Michael Eric Dyson Show

The Michael Eric Dyson Show
WEAA-FM Baltimore
CPB (Corporation for Public Broadcasting)

A professor and chair of the Department of Africana Studies at Brown University, Dr. Tricia Rose holds the distinction as one of the foremost scholars in hip-hop culture. After breaking ground in a relatively new area of academic study when she wrote Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America in 1994, she shook the academy again by writing on a topic long ignored by the black community and scholars with the 2003 publication of Longing to Tell: Black Women Talk About Sexuality and Intimacy. Rose revisited hip-hop with The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip Hop and Why It Matters in 2008. Rose stops by to join the Open Mike series and weigh in on the female perspective in hip-hop, women’s sexuality, intimate justice, sexual identity, and much more.

Listen HERE

Tricia Rose on Afro-Futurism

Brother from Another Planet

Sun Ra was from Alabama - or from Saturn - depending on who you ask. He’s not the only musician to ride on the Mothership Connection. As professor Tricia Rose points out, the Afro-futurist urge to escape Earth continues to this day. Produced by Studio 360's Derek John.

hat-tip to Professor Kim

NBM Booknotes: December 2008

The Hip Hop Wars
What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip Hop--and Why it Matters
by Tricia Rose
Published by Basic Civitas Books

Hip-hop is in crisis. For the past dozen years, the most commercially successful hip-hop has become increasingly saturated with caricatures of black gangstas, thugs, pimps, and ’hos. The controversy surrounding hip-hop is worth attending to and examining with a critical eye because, as scholar and cultural critic Tricia Rose argues, hip-hop has become a primary means by which we talk about race in the United States. In The Hip-Hop Wars, Rose explores the most crucial issues underlying the polarized claims on each side of the debate: Does hip-hop cause violence, or merely reflect a violent ghetto culture? Is hip-hop sexist, or are its detractors simply anti-sex? Does the portrayal of black culture in hip-hop undermine black advancement? A potent exploration of a divisive and important subject, The Hip-Hop Wars concludes with a call for the regalvanization of the progressive and creative heart of hip-hop. What Rose calls for is not a sanitized vision of the form, but one that more accurately reflects a much richer space of culture, politics, anger, and yes, sex, than the current ubiquitous images in sound and video currently provide.

Tricia Rose was born and raised in New York City. She has taught at NYU, University of California at Santa Cruz and is now a Professor of Africana Studies at Brown University.



Ain't I a Feminist?
African American Men Speak Out on Fatherhood, Friendship, Forgiveness, and Freedom
by Aaronette M. White
Published by SUNY Press

Interview-based study of contemporary African American feminist men.

Ain’t I a Feminist? presents the life stories of twenty African American men who identify themselves as feminists, centering on the turning points in their lives that shaped and strengthened their commitment to feminism, as well as the ways they practice feminism with women, children, and other men. In her analysis, Aaronette M. White highlights feminist fathering practices; how men establish egalitarian relationships with women; the variety of Black masculinities; and the interplay of race, gender, class, and sexuality politics in American society. Coming from a wide range of family backgrounds, ages, geographical locations, sexualities, and occupations, each man also shares what he experiences as the personal benefits of feminism, and how feminism contributes to his efforts towards social change. Focusing on the creative agency of Black men to redefine the assumptions and practices of manhood, the author also offers recommendations regarding the socialization of African American boys and the reeducation of African American men in the interest of strengthening their communities.

“This powerful book makes a unique and substantive contribution to the fields of women’s studies, gender studies, ethnic studies, psychology, and sociology. It will surely garner a great deal of attention in the academy.” — Aída Hurtado, author of Voicing Chicana Feminisms: Young Women Speak Out on Sexuality and Identity

Aaronette M. White is Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of California at Santa Cruz.


Out of the House of Bondage
The Transformation of the Plantation Household
by Thavolia Glymph
Published by Cambridge University Press

The plantation household was, first and foremost, a site of production. This fundamental fact has generally been overshadowed by popular and scholarly images of the plantation household as the source of slavery's redeeming qualities, where ‘gentle’ mistresses ministered to ‘loyal’ slaves. This book recounts a very different story. The very notion of a private sphere, as divorced from the immoral excesses of chattel slavery as from the amoral logic of market laws, functioned to conceal from public scrutiny the day-to-day struggles between enslaved women and their mistresses, subsumed within a logic of patriarchy. One of emancipation's unsung consequences was precisely the exposure to public view of the unbridgeable social distance between the women on whose labor the plantation household relied and the women who employed them. This is a story of race and gender, nation and citizenship, freedom and bondage in the nineteenth century South; a big abstract story that is composed of equally big personal stories.

Focuses on the plantation household as a site of production and thus class relations and violence • Unique analysis of the precise forms of struggle and negotiations that led to the transformation of the plantation home in the Civil War era • Places black and white women at the center of an analysis of the plantation household

Thavolia Glymph is Associate Professor of History and African & African-American Studies at Duke University.