Sacrifice, Love, and Resistance: The Hip Hop Legacy of Assata Shakur

Journal of Black Studies, 2010

The culture of hip-hop and the legacy of some artists have received much criticism during the past two decades. At the center of that controversy is one artist who is never forgotten, for better or worse, Tupac Amaru Shakur. Although the legacy of Tupac looms large in urban centers around the world among the popular culture of youth, there has been little attention paid to him as a central figure in the professional literature. This article explores his life and lyrics, placing his contributions and struggles on a cycle of the Maat, Maafa, Sankofa paradigm, challenging critics to rethink his legacy.

Community Literacy Journal, 2021

This work draws upon Hiphop feminism, studies of Black girlhood, and Black women and girls' literacies to illuminate the layered and violent narratives that shape society's treatment of Black women and girls, what these narratives look like in everyday life, how they are taken up and negotiated in different social spheres, such as an after school club for Black middle school girls and the platforms and artistry of women Hiphop artists and creatives. Richardson considers what activism is possible through juxtaposing Black girls as emerging creatives, celebrity corporate artist activists Nicki Minaj and Cardi B, independent activist artists such as Noname and dream hampton. Given the far-reaching representations of Black women and girls in popular culture, the art, lives and platforms of women in Hiphop are critical sites to understanding complexities, strategies and possibilities for social change.

This essay explores the contributions of Beyoncé to what I call “the New Niggerati,” a cadre of Black cultural producers engineering American popular culture. eir pro- motion of individual economic improvement is a discursive shi in Black music, a “dap” to advanced capitalism. Beyoncé’s hegemonic power to move the culture places her at the apex of the New Niggerati. With the simultaneity of her privilege and a perceived Black southern realism, she represents a new frontier for Black feminist cul- tural studies. I examine a selection of her work to demonstrate the complicated nature of her manipulations of protest iconography within an apparatus of capital designed to suppress revolutionary consciousness. Beyoncé’s fetishized Black feminist radicalism has transformed the politics of social movements into a set of commodities that ulti- mately sustain her personal empire.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate, through the examination of women’s rap music from 1976 to the present, that women in rap have maintained a dually oppositional stance within hip hop culture. On the one hand, this stance has allowed Black and Latino women to critique the sexism of men of their same race or ethnicity, using hip hop as a platform. On the other hand, this stance has enabled Black and Latino women to express solidarity with men of their same race or ethnicity in their critique of and struggle against mainstream society’s racism, classism, and race-d sexism (which affects both women and men of color). One feature of the second aspect of women’s oppositional stance in hip hop is that it has allowed “everyday” women of color to critique and contest certain aspects of mainstream (including academic) feminism. After presenting a brief historical overview, we will buttress our central thesis by advancing three major propositions: (a) hip hop presents feminism and w...

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the role of Hip Hop in translating the distress and anger experienced daily by African Americans in the United States during the last decade and how this culture has also been used as a vessel for gifted black youth to reach to the masses. As such, this paper is an attempt to shed light on the influence of rap as a musical genre to divulge, on one hand on societal white privilege that eventually leads to institutional racism and police brutality against people of color; while on the other hand, on interracial racism that ultimately induces violence and "black-on-black crime". Therefore, covering both institutional and communal aspects will be carried out through critical examination of the lyrics and interviews of two progressive Hip Hop artists-Childish Gambino and Kendrick Lamar; two major representatives of African Americans with two different approaches to reach different audiences as well as by diving into the ways both artists have been using their platform to positively impact black lives in America. Lyrics and styles of both artists will be framed through major concepts of Critical Race Theory emphasizing color disparities and oppression in American society.

Icons of Dissent: The Global Resonance of Che, Marley, Tupac, and Bin Laden

This chapter narrows the analytical scope to examine a transnational icon's audience in one nation. More precisely, it explores the convergence of mass media and social discontent in the early post-Cold War era by focusing on the popularity of American hip-hop artist Tupac Shakur in Sierra Leone. Shakur's worldview was more nihilistic than that of either Guevara or Marley, and his iconic resonance has not reached the level of these figures. Nonetheless, Shakur offered poignant critiques of contemporary inequalities and so came to embody post-Cold War disillusionment and social alienation, particularly for young male audiences. To demonstrate this point, this chapter looks closely at rebel combatants' attraction to Shakur during the Sierra Leone civil war, one of the most harrowing conflicts of the late twentieth century. Militant factions embraced Shakur as an inspirational figure representing those attributes combatants wished for: empowerment and the ability to overcome great odds. They used Shakur T-shirts as uniforms and incorporated his lyrics into their everyday rhetoric. As a result, Tupac references in Sierra Leone offer a window on how young people sought broader relevance for their experiences and searched for meaning through the iconography of global popular culture.

Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism, 2018

‪Women hip hop artists in Africa have created spaces for themselves within hip hop’s (hyper)masculine culture. They have created these spaces in order to craft their own narratives around gender and sexuality and to challenge existing narratives. This research uses African feminism as a broad lens through which to examine how these women artists present challenges to patriarchy, gender norms, and the politics of respectability that may or may not align with African feminist ideologies. In addition to resistance, this research examines how these artists use their art to construct their own dynamic and multidimensional representations in ways that find parallels within African feminisms. In this study, more than three hundred songs produced by women hip hop artists were surveyed. The study revealed diverse expressions of feminist identities, implicit and explicit rejections of patriarchy, and expressions of sexuality that included agency and nonconformity.

Governors State University, 2017

This work uses grounded theory and the framework of Black feminist thought to analyze the messages in contemporary hip hop music. Grounded theory was chosen to create an unbiased setting that allowed the themes to emerge rather than looking for specific occurrences. The beginning sections focus on the history of hip hop music, Black women in media and hip hop culture, hyper-masculine blackness, before reviewing key points in Black feminist thought. The top twenty hip hop songs from 2016 were studied lyric by lyric and coded into various themes resulting in three main areas of study: Formation of Black Femininity, Hyper-Masculine Blackness, and Foundations of the Hip Hop Community. These areas are specifically connected to the history of both the hip hop and Black communities. Following the analysis of lyrics, the real messages portrayed in hip hop will be discussed and what these messages could potentially mean for the hip hop community presently and going forward.

Journal of Hip Hop Studies, 2020