Hip Hop Harem: Women, Rap and Representation in the Middle East

Although hip hop culture has widely been acknowledged as a global cultural movement, little attention has been given to women’s participation in hip hop culture in various parts of the world or how this participation interacts with and impacts the lives of other women. Hip Hop Harem is the first book solely dedicated to female rap artists in the Middle East and North Africa region. Throughout the book, Angela S. Williams explores the work of seven prominent rappers from the region. Through the lens of hip hop feminism, she seeks to express how the artists’ work affects female audience members who relate to themes of self-determination and liberation within their own lives. The popular imagery of the harem is flipped, turned on its head in likely hip hop fashion, as the artists speak back to voices of male dominance and a power structure that has sought to define them and the region.

Table of Contents:
Preface – Acknowledgments – Introduction: Overturning the Harem – MENA Women and the Hip Hop Aesthetic – Discourse Ethnography: Reading Across the Texts of Popular Culture and Lived Experiences – Rapping for a Change: Profiles of MENA Women Rappers – Kash Donya (I Wish the World …): Visions of Agency and Liberation – MENA Hip Hop Feminism: Towards a Transnational Girlhood/Womanhood Perspective – Index.

About the Author :
Angela S. Williams earned her PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she is the Associate Director at the Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies.

Review :
“Hip Hop Harem is a very interesting and important book. The book not only deepens our understanding of Hip Hop aesthetics of resistance, but it also de-Orientalizes the Middle East as it brings the voices of MENA women rappers to the center. It boldly challenges Orientalism and deconstructs the stereotypical representation of Middle Eastern women. Angela S. Williams truly fills ‘the void of representative work’ on MENA women, as she manipulates theories of Hip Hop feminism to show how these women rappers represent ‘an oppositional consciousness.’ This study is significant because it offers a fresh perspective on women’s agency and women as cultural actors. Unlike representations of women from the Middle East as objects of study or women who ‘need saving,’ the book engages in the de-Orientalization process by shedding light on knowledge production and representation of Middle Eastern women, and increases the accessibility of women’s voices from the region. I will definitely use the book in my class.”—Dr. Maha El Said, Professor of English Literature and American Studies, Chair of the Department of English Language and Literature, Cairo University “In a fresh and excitingly iconoclastic account, Angela S. Williams’ Hip Hop Harem carves out a new generative space in the scholarship on Hip Hop and Rap music. This succinct but highly illuminating and readable book tells the story of the extraordinarily rich and vital production of feminist Hip Hop by young women from North Africa and the Middle East. Hip Hop Harem highlights their diasporic subjectivities and their surprisingly worldly experiences of the West and of the MENA regions. Particularly impressive is Dr. Williams’ fluent grasp of the latest techniques of digital discourse ethnography. In foregrounding the rich life experiences of MENA female artists as represented in their music video productions, Dr. Williams confronts the epistemic blindness with which Western orientalist scholars have too long viewed the agency of MENA women in their scholarly discourse. She maintains that MENA female Hip Hop artists are cosmopolitans! In turn, she places at the forefront of cultural and policy debates the matter of the aesthetic production of MENA women and their thoroughgoing transnational reach and relevance.”—Cameron McCarthy, University Scholar, Former Director of Global Studies in Education, University of Illinois