[Download] "Histories and "Her Stories" from the Bronx: Excavating Hidden Hip Hop Narratives (Report)" by Afro-Americans in New York Life and History ~ Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Histories and "Her Stories" from the Bronx: Excavating Hidden Hip Hop Narratives (Report)
- Author : Afro-Americans in New York Life and History
- Release Date : January 01, 2009
- Genre: Social Science,Books,Nonfiction,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 240 KB
Description
Popular and academic understandings of the cultural production of hip hop tend to focus on the music as a site of misogyny, aggressive masculinity and rampant consumerism. Historical accounts of hip hop have privileged male narratives, stifling women's stories and their valuable contributions to hip hop music and culture. This paper utilizes oral history interviews from the Bronx African-American History Project (BAAHP) to shed light on hidden hip hop narratives constructed by female Bronx-based artists who reside at the margins of the music industry and are peripheral to the dominant discourses surrounding hip hop music. Utilizing an anthropological approach to oral history research, I explore the unexpected, complex and often contradictory ways in which women's "creation narratives" figure into their use of hip hop as an educational tool, as a mechanism for political activism and as a springboard for articulating feminist ideologies. I argue that for contemporary Bronx female artists, hip-hop represents a means for demonstrating a feminist consciousness and for claiming racialized belonging. I further assert that women's hip hop narratives generate critical understandings of how Diasporic Blackness is (re) conceptualized in relation to local and global racializations (Thomas and Clarke 2006). My title "Histories and 'Her Stories' from the Bronx: Excavating Hidden Hip hop Narratives," borrows from a long-standing tradition in feminist oral history research and is inspired by a collaboration between the pioneering feminist oral historian, Sherna Gluck (whose work began in the 1970s) and her students. That paper was entitled, "Whose Feminism, Whose History? Reflections on Excavating the History of (the) U.S. Women's Movement(s)" (Gluck et al.: 1998). The notion of "hidden narratives" is related to James Scott's concept of "hidden transcripts" which he characterizes as "discourse that takes place ... beyond the observation of power holders" (Scott 1990: 4). In his framework, "the hidden transcript is produced for a different audience and under different constraints of power than the public transcript" (Scott 1990: 5). Scott sees such hidden transcripts as "represent[ations] of power spoken behind the back of the dominant" (Scott 1990: xii). I aim to illustrate how Bronx women's oral histories reveal hidden narratives surrounding women's critical oral traditions and their ways of defying social norms that de-legitimize women's role in hip hop. In this paper, 1 wish to uncover or excavate what is valuable about women's narratives--narratives that often remain obscured from the public realm but which are vital contestations of how women are represented in mainstream hip hop. In turn, I will also emphasize the usefulness of oral history research for uncovering a second, related hidden narrative--the ways in which Puerto Rican and Dominican women use hip hop to claim local and global notions of African Diasporic belonging.