Wish to Live

Wish To Live: The Hip-hop Feminism Pedagogy Reader moves beyond the traditional understanding of the four elements of hip-hop culture - rapping, breakdancing, graffiti art, and deejaying - to articulate how hip-hop feminist scholarship can inform educational practices and spark, transform, encourage, and sustain local and global youth community activism efforts. This multi-genre and interdisciplinary reader engages performance, poetry, document analysis, playwriting, polemics, cultural critique, and autobiography to radically reimagine the political utility of hip-hop-informed social justice efforts that insist on an accountable analysis of identity and culture. Featuring scholarship from professors and graduate and undergraduate students actively involved in the work they profess, this book-s commitment to making the practice of hip-hop feminist activism practical in our everyday lives is both compelling and unapologetic.

Ruth Nicole Brown (PhD in political science, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor) is an artist-scholar and an assistant professor in the Departments of Gender and Women's Studies and Education Policy, Organization and Leadership at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of Black Girlhood Celebration: Toward a Hip-Hop Feminist Pedagogy (Peter Lang, 2009). Chamara Jewel Kwakye (PhD in educational policy studies, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) is a scholar, storyteller, and performer. She is currently a Chancellor's Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of African American Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Kwakye is currently writing a book that documents the life histories of Black women in the Academy.

Contents: Dominique C. Hill: An Unapologetic Lyric: A Warrior-s Battle for Space in Education - Tanya Kozlowski: Who Wants 2 b Hard? A Lesbian of Color Critiques the Phrase «No Homo» in Hip-Hop - Darlene Vinicky: (Progressive) Hip-Hop Cartography - Zenzele Isoke: Lighting the Fire: Hip-Hop Feminism in a Midwestern Classroom - Ruth Nicole Brown: For Oya: I Love Myself Dancing- and Then Again When I Am Boxed in and Overwhelmed - Adilia James: The Black Girl Body as a Site of Sexual Terrorism - Christina Carney: The Politics of Representation for Black Women and the Impossibility of Queering the New Jersey 4/7 - Sheri Davis-Faulkner: Camp Carrot Seed: Reflections on a Critical Pedagogic Project - Chamara Jewel Kwakye: Dr. Theresa Bayarea: Dancing to Make Freedom - Shaunita Levison: Freedom Schools and Ella Baker - Porsha Olayiwola: Performance: «My legacy of imagination is not lost.». The Almighty and Most Powerful - Loy A. Webb: I Am A Woman - Tanya Kozlowski/Irene Christine Zavarsky/Christina Armstrong: Body Cypher Love: A Remix: A Hip-Hop Feminist Project - Blair Ebony Smith: Black Girl Night Talk - Durell Callier: Acting Out: A Performative Exploration of Identity, Healing, and Wholeness - Grenita Hall: Get It Girl Moments: A Reflection on Dance and Research - Sesali Bowen: The Bad Bitch Society: Discovering Love through Writing and the New Hip-Hop - Precious McClendon: Show Yö Self - Christina Armstrong: A Conversation with Black Artemis - Lena Foote: A Mother and Daughter Talk Hip-Hop - J. Sean Callahan: Summer Vacation in B-ham, Alabama, or Southern Fried Feminism - DaYanna Crider: I Love Music! - Kristen Smith: In the Words of Others We Find Ourselves - Sheri Lewis: Youth (Young Adult) Organizing - Jessica Robinson: Can We Be for Black Girls and against Their Sexuality? - Porshe Garner: Check-In - Taylor-Imani Linear: On Being in the Service of Someone Else-s Shine - Desiree McMillion: To the Visionary - Claudine Taaffe: Portrait of a Black Girl: Seeing Is NOT Believing.