“Slavery’s Consequences Still Affect Us”
Sister Souljah’s No Disrespect, Black Women’s Literary Traditions and Contemporary Hip Hop Activism
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/jwpm.36676Keywords:
Hip Hop Studies, autobiography, black feminism, activism, Sister Souljah, United StatesAbstract
Sister Souljah is arguably one of the most important female “raptivists” in the United States. Published in 1994, her autobiography No Disrespect narrates the artist’s rise from poverty to become one of the most prolific writers, educators and activists in the 1990s. Yet critics tend to overlook the autobiography’s strong emphasis on activism, especially how it is embedded in larger Afro-diasporic female literary traditions. No Disrespect re-writes earlier traditions of black women’s writing, visual culture and social activism in order to educate a younger generation on the ongoing need to promote racial justice. The autobiography is located in the larger context of what Paul Gilroy has called the Black Atlantic by situating it not only in American, but also in African cultural traditions. I join Reiland Rabaka and others in moving forward the field of hip hop studies by establishing more cultural, literary and visual continuities between late twentieth-century hip hop culture and earlier literary forms of Afro-diasporic expression, such as poetry and autobiography. In tracing Sister Souljah’s oeuvre to the beginnings of African American women’s literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it is the aim of the article to contribute a new perspective to the origins of hip hop culture and activism beyond the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
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Decker, Jeffrey Louis. 1993. “The State of Rap: Time and Place in Hip Hop Nationalism”. Social Text 34: 53–84. https://doi.org/10.2307/466354
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Dunn, Stephane. 2007. “A Hip Hop, Afro-Feminist Aesthetic of Love: Sister Souljah’s The Coldest Winter Ever”. Langston Hughes Review 21: 39–71.
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Souljah Books. 2016a. (November 10, 06:31). “racism is not an attitude, an emotion or a mood”. https://twitter.com/SouljahBooks/status/796721910742663169 (accessed 8 March 2017).
—2016b. (November 10, 06:42). “must be a respect for scholarship”. https://twitter.com/SouljahBooks/status/796724783090167808 (accessed 8 March 2017).
—2016c. (November 10, 07:15). “if u don’t want to work within the system”. https://twitter.com/SouljahBooks/status/796733049681612800 (accessed 8 March 2017).
—2016d. (November 10, 07:37). “was she going to save us”. https://twitter.com/SouljahBooks/status/796738525853007872 (accessed 8 March 2017).
Souljah, Sister. 1992. 360 Degrees of Power. Epic Records. Compact disc.
—1994. No Disrespect. New York: Times Books.
—1996. No Disrespect. New York: Vintage Books.
—2005 [1999]. The Coldest Winter Ever: A Novel. New York: Washington Square Press.
—2008. Midnight: A Gangster Love Story. New York: Atria.
—2011. Midnight and the Meaning of Love. New York: Pocket Books.
—2013. A Deeper Love Inside: The Porsche Santiaga Story. New York: Atria.
—2015a. “Biography”. http://www.sistersouljah.com/biography/ (accessed 8 March 2017).
—2015b. A Moment of Silence: Midnight III. New York: Atria.
Taub, Amanda. 2016. “Behind the Tumult, ‘White Fragility’”. New York Times. International Weekly (11 November): 1, 4.
Wamba, Philippe. 1995. “Souljah on Ice”. Transition 67: 138–49. https://doi.org/10.2307/2935263
Wheatley, Phillis. 1773. Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. https://archive.org/details/poemsonvarioussu00whea (accessed 8 March 2017).
Alim, H. Samy. 2009. “Creating ‘An Empire Within an Empire’: Critical Hip Hop Language Pedagogies and the Role of Sociolinguistics”. In Global Linguistic Flows: Hip Hop Cultures, Youth Identities, and the Politics of Language, edited by Samy H. Alim, Awad Ibrahim and Alastair Pennycook, 213–30. New York: Routledge.
Benson, Michon A. 2007. “From the Ride’n’Tie to Ryde-or-Die: A Pedagogy of Survival in Black Youth Popular Cultural Forms”. (doctoral dissertation). https://scholarship.rice.edu/handle/1911/22263 (accessed 8 March 2017).
Bradford, Sarah H. 1869. Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman. https://archive.org/details/scenesinlifeofha1869brad (accessed 8 March 2017).
Bunch-Lyons, Beverly A. 2000. “A Novel Approach: Using Fiction by African American Women to Teach Black Women’s History”. Journal of American History 86/4: 1700–708. https://doi.org/10.2307/2567585
Casmier-Paz, Lynn A. 2003. “Slave Narratives and the Rhetoric of Author Portraiture”. New Literary History 34/1: 91–116. https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2003.0003
D’Addario, Daniel. 2015. “Sister Souljah’s New Moment”. Time. http://time.com/4108879/sister-souljah-hillary-clinton-midnight/ (accessed 8 March 2017).
Decker, Jeffrey Louis. 1993. “The State of Rap: Time and Place in Hip Hop Nationalism”. Social Text 34: 53–84. https://doi.org/10.2307/466354
Du Bois, W. E. B. 1903. The Souls of Black Folk. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/408/408–h/408–h.htm (accessed 8 March 2017).
Dunn, Stephane. 2007. “A Hip Hop, Afro-Feminist Aesthetic of Love: Sister Souljah’s The Coldest Winter Ever”. Langston Hughes Review 21: 39–71.
Fisch, Audrey A. 2007. “Introduction”. In The Cambridge Companion to the African American Slave Narrative, edited by Audrey A. Fisch, 1–7. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521850193.001
Gilbert, Olive. 1850. Narrative of Sojourner Truth: A Northern Slave, Emancipated from Bodily Servitude by the State of New York, in 1828: With a Portrait. https://archive.org/details/narrativeofsojou1850gilb (accessed 8 March 2017).
Gilroy, Paul. 1996. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso.
Gosa, Travis L. 2015. “The Fifth Element: Knowledge”. In The Cambridge Companion to Hip Hop, edited by Justin Williams, 56–70. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139775298.007
Hall, Stuart. 1997. Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. London: Sage.
Hill Collins, Patricia. 2000. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, 2nd edn. New York: Routledge.
hooks, bell. 1992. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press.
—1994. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge.
Hudson-Weems, Clenora. 2004. Africana Womanist Literary Theory: A Sequel to Africana Womanism: Reclaiming Ourselves. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.
Jacobs, Harriet. 1861. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. https://archive.org/details/01172152.4717.emory.edu (accessed 8 March 2017).
Jenkins, Henry. 2006. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press.
Lipsitz, George. 2006. The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics, rev. edn. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Marshall, Brenda DeVore and Molly A. Mayhead. 2008. Telling Political Lives: The Rhetorical Autobiographies of Women Leaders in the United States. Plymouth: Lexington Books. http://digitalcommons.linfield.edu/linfauth/9 (accessed 6 June 2016).
Martin, Jonathan. 2016. “Young Blacks Voice Skepticism on Hillary Clinton, Worrying Democrats”. New York Times, 4 September. https://tinyurl.com/nytimes-2016-09-05 (accessed 8 March 2017).
McKay, Nellie Y. 1998. “The Narrative Self: Race, Politics, and Culture in Black American Women’s Autobiography”. In Women, Autobiography: A Reader, edited by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, 96–107. Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press.
O’Neale, Sondra A. 2017. “Phillis Wheatley”. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/phillis-wheatley (accessed 8 March 2017).
Pittman, Corretta. 2007. “Black Women Writers and the Trouble with Ethos: Harriet Jacobs, Billie Holiday, and Sister Souljah”. Rhetoric Society Quarterly 37/1: 43–70. https://doi.org/10.1080/02773940600860074
Rabaka, Reiland. 2011. Hip Hop’s Inheritance: From the Harlem Renaissance to the Hip Hop Feminist Movement. Lanham, MD: Lexington.
Sernett, Milton C. 2007. Harriet Tubman: Myth, Memory, and History. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822390275
Souljah Books. 2016a. (November 10, 06:31). “racism is not an attitude, an emotion or a mood”. https://twitter.com/SouljahBooks/status/796721910742663169 (accessed 8 March 2017).
—2016b. (November 10, 06:42). “must be a respect for scholarship”. https://twitter.com/SouljahBooks/status/796724783090167808 (accessed 8 March 2017).
—2016c. (November 10, 07:15). “if u don’t want to work within the system”. https://twitter.com/SouljahBooks/status/796733049681612800 (accessed 8 March 2017).
—2016d. (November 10, 07:37). “was she going to save us”. https://twitter.com/SouljahBooks/status/796738525853007872 (accessed 8 March 2017).
Souljah, Sister. 1992. 360 Degrees of Power. Epic Records. Compact disc.
—1994. No Disrespect. New York: Times Books.
—1996. No Disrespect. New York: Vintage Books.
—2005 [1999]. The Coldest Winter Ever: A Novel. New York: Washington Square Press.
—2008. Midnight: A Gangster Love Story. New York: Atria.
—2011. Midnight and the Meaning of Love. New York: Pocket Books.
—2013. A Deeper Love Inside: The Porsche Santiaga Story. New York: Atria.
—2015a. “Biography”. http://www.sistersouljah.com/biography/ (accessed 8 March 2017).
—2015b. A Moment of Silence: Midnight III. New York: Atria.
Taub, Amanda. 2016. “Behind the Tumult, ‘White Fragility’”. New York Times. International Weekly (11 November): 1, 4.
Wamba, Philippe. 1995. “Souljah on Ice”. Transition 67: 138–49. https://doi.org/10.2307/2935263
Wheatley, Phillis. 1773. Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. https://archive.org/details/poemsonvarioussu00whea (accessed 8 March 2017).
Published
2018-06-08
Issue
Section
Articles
How to Cite
Nitzsche, S. A. (2018). “Slavery’s Consequences Still Affect Us”: Sister Souljah’s No Disrespect, Black Women’s Literary Traditions and Contemporary Hip Hop Activism. Journal of World Popular Music, 5(1), 108-121. https://doi.org/10.1558/jwpm.36676
