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Author ORCID Identifier
N/A
AccessType
Open Access Dissertation
Document Type
dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Degree Program
Afro-American Studies
Year Degree Awarded
2017
Month Degree Awarded
May
First Advisor
James Smethurst
Second Advisor
Britt Rusert
Third Advisor
Mecca Sullivan
Subject Categories
African American Studies | American Film Studies | American Literature | American Material Culture | American Popular Culture | Cultural History | Ethnic Studies | Women's Studies
Abstract
“Stories Written on Concrete: Understanding and Re-imagining Street Lit and Culture, 1990-2007,” coalesces around stories of urbanity and coming of age at the turn of the twenty-first century. As the Hip Hop generation reflected on the social, economic, and cultural shifts of the 1980s and 1990s, they took up paper and pen to immortalize the conflicting duality of the gritty and glamorous experience of growing up on a concrete cityscape in America. I interrogate how street lit disrupts normative literary representations of black life in print. Specifically, I consider how urban fiction writes against the African American literary canon in style, subject, and publication. In the process, my work has become a cultural site of hetero-normative resistance, as it calls for the widening of acceptable black narratives. Street lit novelists, some of whom were previously drug dealers, pimps, prostitutes, gangsters, and incarcerated persons infuse their personal experiences with poverty, crime, and violence into their fantastical depictions of a shifting urban terrain. This project illuminates the other side of African American literature, provides another access point to Hip Hop cultural production, and helps to validate the kind of popular fiction that is often left out of academic discourses. The genre has existed and thrived on the margins of popular literature and the academy for thirty years. But now, street lit receives its due.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.7275/10013371.0
Recommended Citation
Saffold, Jacinta, "Stories Written On Concrete: Understanding and (Re)Imagining Street Lit and Culture, 1990-2007" (2017). Doctoral Dissertations. 974.
https://doi.org/10.7275/10013371.0
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/974
Included in
African American Studies Commons, American Film Studies Commons, American Literature Commons, American Material Culture Commons, American Popular Culture Commons, Cultural History Commons, Ethnic Studies Commons, Women's Studies Commons