Introduction: "Reading" Hip-Hop Discourse in the Twenty-First Century

A crucial subset of essays in the volume combine a literary bent with critical feminist analysis; work by Brittney Cooper, on hip-hop feminism and poetics in Sapphire's Push, Esther Jones, on agency, abuse, and sexualized violence in Rihanna's "Russian Roulette," and Treva B. Lindsey on the trope of heterosexual love in the oeuvre of Mary J. Blige, the "queen of hip-hop soul," explores how women's voices circulate in and through hip hop (and its generic counterweight, rhythm and blues), as well as how hip hop serves as a structuring epistemology for varied kinds of female subjects in the postmodern era.