Hello everyone:This week we have a writing assignment, a film and discussion. Please read the instructions carefully for each part of the assignment. You only need to have the article posted and summa

Hauser, G. A., & Benoit-Barné, C. (2002). Re ﬂections on rhetoric, deliberative democracy, civil society, and trust. Rhetoric & Public A ﬀairs ,5, 261 –275. doi: 10.1353/rap.2002.0029 Kock, C., & Villadsen, L. S. (2012). Introduction: Citizenship as a rhetorical practice. In C. Kock & L. S. Villadsen

(Eds.), Rhetorical citizenship and public deliberation (pp. 1 –10). University Park, PA: Penn State University Press. Lyon, A. (2013). Deliberative acts: Democracy, rhetoric, and rights . University Park, PA: Penn State University Press.

Noddings, N. (2013). Education and democracy in the 21st century . New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Tracy, K. (2010). Challenges of ordinary democracy: A case study in deliberation and dissent . University Park, PA: Penn State University Press.

Ueno, M. (2016). Democratic education and the public sphere: Towards John Dewey ’s theory of aesthetic experience . New York, NY: Routledge.

Aisha S. Durham, Home with Hip Hop Feminism: Performances in Communication and Culture .

New York, NY: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 2014. 180 pp. $149.95 (hardcover); $39.95

(softcover).

The lived-experiences of African American women are often discussed without the incorporation or

acknowledgment of their perspective. Such discussions and narrow portrayals of African American

women contribute to the hypervisibility and hyper-invisibility that they experience within their

community —speci ﬁcally, within hip hop culture and mainstream U.S. society. In Home with Hip

Hop Feminism: Performances in Communication and Culture , Aisha S. Durham explores her position

as the “researcher/ed ”(p. 39) by reframing how hip hop culture is perceived in terms of class,

gender, race, and sexuality. Invoking her experiences and the experiences of African American

women who live in the place that she calls home, Durham says “[I] present a range of stories that

make up the ways I recall, (re)member, and represent hip hop feminism as it is in conversation with

feminist studies, hip hop studies, and media and cultural studies ”(p. 13). Featuring the voices and

stories of African American women, Durham relies on interpretive interactionism to “describe when

bodies and texts meet, which is evidenced by writing and methodological approaches such as

ethnography, creative interviewing, semiotics, poetry, participant observation, life story, performance

texts, and self-story construction ”(p. 13), all of which are included and organized into three parts of

the book. Totaling seven chapters, she interweaves discussions of how representations of African

American women and their bodies perpetuate certain stereotypical images and sexual scripts that are

described within and outside the hip hop community.

Moving beyond the discipline of communication, Durham speci ﬁcally extends black feminist

discussions by attending to how the intersectionality of race, gender, class, and sexuality a ﬀect the

experiences of African American women. To reclaim and reframe the representation of black women

Durham acknowledges the shortcomings of certain disciplines and epistemologies. In particular, she

demonstrates how feminism, which privileges whiteness, contributes to the tendency to discuss black

women without acknowledging their voice. Using an epistemology of hip hop feminism, Durham

draws on notions of the embodied experience to recognize how ethnographic narratives contribute

to the experiences of African American women (see Audre Lorde ’sSister Outsider and Zora Neale

Hurston ’sTheir Eyes Were Watching God ). Thus, she joins the scholarly conversation of how

performance and ethnography are signi ﬁcant to understanding the lived experiences of those —in

this case, African American women —who do not have a valued or heard voice within texts.

In addition to drawing on black feminist and hip hop feminist scholarship, she refers to

communication scholars such as Denzin ( 2003 ), and Ellis and Bochner ( 2000 ), who use autoethno-

graphy, or narrative ethnography, to focus on researchers ’self-re ﬂexivity. Using those perspectives

and methods to organize her book, Durham bridges the body, text, and lived experience to discuss

issues related to representations of African American women. As Denzin ( 2003 ) stated,

“Performance and their lived representations reside in the center of lived experience. We cannot

study experience directly. We study it through and in its performative representations ”(p. 12).

Performance is a thread throughout Durham ’s book and is invoked through autoethnography,

350 BOOK REVIEWS textual experience, which is“the interaction, the relationship that activates what we call ‘text,’ and it

is the interpretations that gives it life, ”(p. 61) and poetic transcription, all of which are present in the

three parts of Home with Hip Hop Feminism.

Part One brings together the representations of African American female bodies and the lived

experiences of African American women through Durham ’s recalling of memories about the 2006

documentary Beyond Beats & Rhymes , which examines the problems of sexism, masculinity, homo-

phobia, and violence in hip hop music. Durham attempts to “reauthor the masculine-centered hip

hop story from the perspective of an African American woman ”(p. 25). She recalls being an African

American woman in the hip hop generation by conducting interviews with black women in Diggs

Park. In addition, she “reconstruct[s] [her] life script from the ones reported in the newspaper ”(p.

41) by oﬀering a performance piece that includes quotes from news media reports. The following is a

small excerpt from her version of life in Diggs Park:

Cocaine in Diggs Town. Within Two years,

Brown was thinking

of dropping out

of school and making a career

of drug dealing. Brown is now

17, a high school freshman trying to turn

his life around. He has walked away

from drugs this week

Dorothy Brown cried

again

for her son,

Robert (p. 43)

With the incorporation of performance pieces that blend Durham’ s perspective of life in Diggs Park

with the media ’s perception of the neighborhood, she explores how she “as the researcher/ed —was

represented during the prime time of [her] life ”(p. 42). Continuing the theme of performance

“ which abandons chronology and notions of objectivity ”(p. 42), Durham also includes biographical

poems and autoethnographic scripts of the lived experiences of black women. An example of

recalling the homegirl is her bio-poem “Between Us ”:

I got two braids, a dozen neon bangles and a pair of plastic pink

jellies jumping across the hot concrete cracks behind

Dee-Dee doing damage

to old Cadillac passers-by appraising P.Y.T.s [pretty young things] in

denim shorts hiking up

to the down

town

Granby Plaza. (p. 53)

Acting as the researched/er, Durham oﬀers various depictions of black women and speciﬁ cally

herself that are not solely from the gaze of the supposed objective outsider or researcher.

In Part Two, Durham shifts from the experience of ordinary African American women to

those of the spectacular bodies that are represented by singer and actress Beyoncé and singer,

rapper, actress, and talk-show host Queen Latifah. The performances of these two women shift

the focus from the ordinary to the spectacular and contribute to the reader ’s understanding of

how particular dominant images (e.g., mammy and freak) are perpetuated and enacted. Through

this exploration, Durham shows how “media are formidable pedagogical tools for teaching

audiences about their distinct social worlds ”(p. 69). Durham ’s use of these two female ﬁgures

who are constantly in the media is an e ﬀective move because it shows how media representations

SOUTHERN COMMUNICATION JOURNAL 351 of African American women promote and maintain certain messages and images that“uphold

white supremacy ”(p. 70). She explores how the roles of Queen Latifah, in the movies Bringing

Down the House andChicago maintain racialized discourses and representations of African

American women as being the “un/desirable ”(p. 79) mammy or hot mama. Following this

analysis, Durham uses two sexual scripts, the freak and the lady, to examine Beyoncé ’smusic

video “Single Ladies. ”Through an examination of Beyoncé ’s body, she addresses how gender

politics a ﬀects the everyday performances of African American womanhood and the experiences

of African American women who populate Diggs Park. The last part of the book, “Representin ’

the Homegirl, ”oﬀ ers poetic performances of the women from Diggs Park to reframe the images

of African American women and provides (re)deﬁ nitions of terms that are related directly to

African American bodies that pervade the hip hop community. To represent the homegirl

Durham suggests:

[T]he use of the poetic by performers such as Jessica Care Moore, Toni Blackman, Sarah Jones, Angie

Beatty, and Ruth Nicole Brown de ﬁne the contours, the working contradictions, and the complexities of a

hip hop feminist project by shaping how we can “represent ”experience and by modeling how we might

imagine deploying the poetic to make meaningful interventions in those places we call home. (p. 106)

Examples of how experiences are represented through poetic performance include “Everyday Day:

Renisha and Nicole, ”which highlight the “nonstop routine for the young mothers ”(p. 103).

Conveying the regular and repetitive nature of the lives of Renisha and Nicole, the poetic begins:

Get up in the morning

Take my mom to work

Take my brother to summer school

Take my sister to camp

Go back home and go to sleep

Wake up, take a shower

Pick up my brother bring him home. (p. 107)

By including the voices and real lived experiences of black women, Durham oﬀers an alternative

perspective and representation of “an otherwise stigmatized population misrepresented in both

entertainment and news media ”(p. 103).

Durham provides scholars another way to grapple with how communication, and speci ﬁcally how

autoethnography, can be used to explore stigmatized communities. However, one of the book ’s

limitations is its chapter on “Poetic Transcription as Performance Ethnography.” As detailed above,

the personal stories that are incorporated to provide an alternative view of a stereotyped and

stigmatized group are necessary; however, the reader has to wait until the conclusion to realize the

immediate signi ﬁcance of this chapter. We learn that “privileging the researcher/ed body and poetry

enacted narrative breaks in what counts as scholarly research. All research is story” (p. 127).

Although, I agree and deeply support this methodological approach, I believe stating this in the

earlier chapter would have helped readers to understand Durham ’s contribution to uniquely

“ representin’” the women discussed in this book. To leave the poetic transcription without explana-

tion makes the text feel fragmented due to the in-depth analysis engaged in the previous chapters.

This book also oﬀers a perspective on how communication impacts the perceptions of particular

groups and how these insights are communicated through the media. Though this may seem obvious

to some, by incorporating poetic transcription, poetic performance, and biographical poems,

Durham uses language and di ﬀerent styles of writing to point to di ﬀerent views of black women

in Diggs Park that are not captured or highlighted by the media. Grounding the book with hip hop

feminism allowed the reader to gain a sense of the researcher ’s identity and how her identity is

connected to those that she was researching. Durham says, “Writing about home, then, has meant

recon ﬁguring my body (of knowledge) in spaces where I might be overlooked, misperceived, or

352 BOOK REVIEWS unrecognized ”(p. 125). Thus, her methodological approach gives the reader insight to her personal

development and how it contributed to her and our understanding of groups that are

misunderstood.

Durham ’s book is written in a manner that can reach audiences outside of academic scholarship.

The accessibility of the work is demonstrated through the invocation of well-known African

American women and the narrative style of writing that is present with describing the lived

experiences of African American women. This book gives insight into the lives that are studied

but often voiceless in the actual research. Therefore, Durham provides communication scholars with

an example of how to incorporate the voices of the researched and the researcher in a way that

appropriately re ﬂects the lives that researchers choose to study and observe. Communication

scholars that are interested in using narrative and autoethnography can use this book as a reference

to understand what it would look like to blend the experiences of the self and others. Durham

reminds scholars to recall, remember, and represent the researched and the researcher.

Danielle Hodge

College of Media, Communication, and Information, University of Colorado Boulder,

Boulder, Colorado, USA

[email protected]

References

Denzin, N. (2003). Performance ethnography: Critical pedagogy and the politics of culture . Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Ellis, C., & Bochner, A. (2000). Autoethnography, personal narrative, re ﬂexivity: Researcher as subject. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (pp. 733 –768). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Hurston, Z. N. (1937). Their eyes were watching God . Philadelphia, PA: J. B. Lippincott.

Lorde, A. (1984). Sister outsider: Essays and speeches . Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press.

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