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Although hip hop culture has widely been acknowledged as a global cultural movement, little attention has been given to women's participation in hip hop culture in various parts of the world or how this participation interacts with and impacts the lives of other women. Hip Hop Harem is the first book solely dedicated to female rap artists in the Middle East and North Africa region. Throughout the book, Angela S. Williams explores the work of seven prominent rappers from the region. Through the lens of hip hop feminism, she seeks to express how the artists' work affects female audience members who relate to themes of self-determination and liberation within their own lives. The popular imagery of the harem is flipped, turned on its head in likely hip hop fashion, as the artists speak back to voices of male dominance and a power structure that has sought to define them and the region.
Info autore
Angela S. Williams earned her PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she is the Associate Director at the Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies.
Riassunto
Hip Hop Harem is the first book solely dedicated to female rap artists in the Middle East and North Africa region. Through the lens of hip hop feminism, Angela Williams seeks to express how the artists' work affects female audience members who relate to themes of self-determination and liberation within their own lives.
Relazione
"In a fresh and excitingly iconoclastic account, Angela S. Williams' Hip Hop Harem carves out a new generative space in the scholarship on Hip Hop and Rap music. This succinct but highly illuminating and readable book tells the story of the extraordinarily rich and vital production of feminist Hip Hop by young women from North Africa and the Middle East. Hip Hop Harem highlights their diasporic subjectivities and their surprisingly worldly experiences of the West and of the MENA regions. Particularly impressive is Dr. Williams' fluent grasp of the latest techniques of digital discourse ethnography. In foregrounding the rich life experiences of MENA female artists as represented in their music video productions, Dr. Williams confronts the epistemic blindness with which Western orientalist scholars have too long viewed the agency of MENA women in their scholarly discourse. She maintains that MENA female Hip Hop artists are cosmopolitans! In turn, she places at the forefront of cultural and policy debates the matter of the aesthetic production of MENA women and their thoroughgoing transnational reach and relevance."-Cameron McCarthy, University Scholar, Former Director of Global Studies in Education, University of Illinois
