“Maybe I’ll Be a Poet, Rapper”: Hip-Hop Feminism and Literary Aesthetics in Push

Abstract

This article argues that Push is properly read within the tradition of hip-hop feminist literature and aesthetics. The novel’s invocation of hip hop as the cultural backdrop of protagonist Precious’s coming-of-age intervenes in black literary aesthetics in two ways. First, the novel is the first in the tradition of African American women’s literature to offer a protagonist whose primary self-articulation is understood through hip hop, rather than jazz or the blues. Thus I argue that this text both takes up the cultural project of making space for hip-hop music begun in Toni Morrison’s Jazz and acts as a critique of the way that Morrison invokes (or rather doesn’t invoke) hip-hop culture a decade later in Love . Second, however, I contend that this text intervenes in male-centered genealogies of hip-hop aesthetics, arguing for a different set of cultural narratives through which female hip-hop protagonists understand themselves—ultimately that history includes the hip-hop practice of sampling from black women novelists like Alice Walker and Toni Morrison and soul singers like Aretha Franklin. Through the invocation of this black feminist past, Precious begins to articulate her own nascent hip-hop feminist consciousness. Thus, I argue that Push acts as a bridge text between more traditional canonical African American women’s novels by Walker and Morrison and more recent hip-hop, urban, or street novels like those by Sistah Souljah, Nikki Turner, Wahida Clark, and others.

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