Elaine Richardson’s Hiphop Literacies, following on the heels of her African American Literacies, is a provocative examination of literacy practices in the context of Hiphop (as the word is written in the book). Here, literacy is defined under the broader rubric of New Literacy Studies (NLS), a paradigm sensitive to the gray areas demarcating “orality” and “literacy,” emphasizing instead a liberal and multivalent understanding encompassing alternative modalities (visual, sonic, and their multi-medial synergisms) and seeking to situate literacy within its social settings and cultural practices. Richardson’s overarching goals, as she states in the preface, are 1) “to locate rap/Hiphop discourse…within a trajectory of Black discourses, relating them to the lived experiences of Black people,” in particular Hiphop’s dialogue with and opposition to “dominant discourses and semiotic systems” (xvi), and 2) to examine Hiphop’s dispersal and emergence in secondary oral contexts, including electronic and digital media technologies such as video games, music videos, internet chat rooms, and telecommunications devices that depend on writing and print. With these objectives in place, Richardson presents a series of case studies focusing on variant issues and subject areas.

Chapter 1 places Hiphop squarely in the round holes of African American Vernacular Discourse, itself an extension of the Black Diaspora; Richardson frames these language practices as a principal site for the negotiation of identity, for the opposition of culture and capital, and as a platform for sustaining strategies of survival and resistance--“a creative response to absence and desire and a site of epistemological development” (9). After cursorily unpacking African linguistic usages (call-and-response, tonal semantics, semantic inversion, mimicry, signifyin’, narrativizing, toasting, boasting/braggadocio, image-making, and punning), she points to the Southern rap group OutKast’s song/video “The Whole World” for clarification, arguing that the rappers effectively “(dis)invent” received cultural typecasts of “bad niggaz” and trickster/conjurers, recreate them in their own image, and in the process fashion autonomous identities through inspired deconstruction.

The subsequent scenario compares Jamaican Dancehallas with American Hiphoppas, combing secondary oral cultures (e.g., telephone, radio, television, and electronic devices) to compile lists of shared terms and instances of “language crossing” (i.e., the use of an etic language or style for conscious effect). In addition to establishing a shared lexicon, Richardson contextualizes specific examples of usage, including lexical, phonological, reduplication, semantic inversion, sacred/secular, and proverbs, all patent influences of a common West African heritage. Her emphasis here is on sameness and overlap, based on the connecting limbs of the genetic and cultural family tree and on a shared history of oppression. Interestingly, Richardson engages in a good bit of signifyin’ herself, weaving in vernacular (dis)spellings that challenge the scholarly readership to reconsider their own stereotypical approaches.

Gender issues are explored in the following chapter. The first section is an analysis of Black femalehiphophood as depicted in Sister Souljah’s The Coldest Winter Ever, a hood novel wherein Winter, a street-smart “bad bitch,” emerges as the voice of authority and the dominant body (in both the figurative and corporal senses of the term) of knowledge in comparison to the higher-“educated” social worker who presumes to “help” her. In the second section, Richardson grounds her analysis in a transcribed conversation with three teenagers, engaging them in a feedback interview that reveals their nuanced perspectives on and understandings of media stereotypes--on the one hand, rejecting blatant capitalistic glosses and, on the other, partially succumbing to the facile seduction of the propaganda. Who, she seems to ask, is selling what to whom?

Another aspect of feminism, the myth of Jezebel, is investigated in chapter 4. Richardson cites transcripts from the perjury trial of rap star Lil’ Kim (played by her real-life alter ego Kimberly Jones) to show instances of verbal sparring and deflection, raising the larger question of what, exactly, is “lying” in this context. If, as she suggests, this trial is a metaphorical microcosm of “Black Woman vs. the United States of America” and if, as she claims, racism ultimately trumps sexism in the Black community, then Jones is not the immoral Jezebel the government would like to portray her as, but rather a heroic figure using all of the literary dexterity at her command to protect her cultural autonomy in the face of hegemonic oppression. Clearly this is a personal and political issue for Richardson; statements like, “Needless to say, the sista has come up the rough side of the mountain” (59) and “To a degree greater than that of many Anglo American males and females, we [i.e. Black women] are socialized to realize ourselves as racial and sexual objects and as the embodiment of immorality” (65) show her in the role of representin’, telling the “naked truf,” embodying those very literacy strategies and practices of which she writes.

The next case study--and perhaps the most intriguing one--focuses on German Hiphop practices as gleaned from on-line chat-rooms. Referencing terminology and theories from Smitherman (2000: narrativizing, braggadocio, playin’ the dozens, signifyin’ and intertextuality/sampling), Morgan (2001, 2002: semantic extension and inversion, grammaticalization, phonological variation, and subversive spelling), Alim (2004: borrowed/adapted/translated literacies in regional and global contexts), and Myers-Scotton (2002: Matrix Language Frame theory) and utilizing translations made by native speakers, Richardson shows many specific instances of Hiphop literacy practices borrowed and appropriated by German youths. As provocative as these examples are, arguing convincingly for the pervasive global influence of Hiphop and, furthermore, suggesting why these aesthetic approaches were adopted and adapted by Germans, the chapter does not go far enough in terms of situating the ethnography within German culture: how are they reading these texts, and what makes these appropriations authentic in their new diasporic contexts?

A final vignette discusses Hiphop imagery as depicted in the Def Jam Vendetta video game. Here Richardson is critical of what she sees as classist and racist stereotypes promulgated by the rhetoric, grammar, and visual style of the game. Immersing herself in the fieldwork, she discovers, to her surprise, limited agency within the restrictive structure of the play, an agency enhanced when she applies her own rapping “skillz” in direct verbal assault.

Works Cited:

Alim, H. S. “Hip Hop Nation Language.” Language in the USA: Themes for the Twenty-first Century, edited by E. Finegan and J. Rickford. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Morgan, M. Language, Discourse and Power in African American Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Morgan, M. “Nuthin but a G Thang’: Grammar and Language Ideology in Hiphop Identity.” Sociocultural and Historical Contexts of African American English, edited by S. Lanehart. Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 2001.

Myers-Scotton, C. Contact Linguistics: Bilingual Encounters and Grammatical Outcomes. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Smitherman, G. Black Talk: words and Phrases from the Hood to the Amen Corner, revised edition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000.

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[Review length: 1108 words • Review posted on January 9, 2008]