She's Mad Real (Paperback)

Oneka LaBennett

ISBN 10: 0814752489 / ISBN 13: 9780814752487

Published by New York University Press, New York, 2011

About this Item

Paperback. Overwhelmingly, Black teenage girls are negatively represented in national and global popular discourses, either as being "at risk" for teenage pregnancy, obesity, or sexually transmitted diseases, or as helpless victims of inner city poverty and violence. Such popular representations are pervasive and often portray Black adolescents' consumer and leisure culture as corruptive, uncivilized, and pathological. In She's Mad Real, Oneka LaBennett draws on over a decade of researching teenage West Indian girls in the Flatbush and Crown Heights sections of Brooklyn to argue that Black youth are in fact strategic consumers of popular culture and through this consumption they assert far more agency in defining race, ethnicity, and gender than academic and popular discourses tend to acknowledge. Importantly, LaBennett also studies West Indian girls' consumer and leisure culture within public spaces in order to analyze how teens like China are marginalized and policed as they attempt to carve out places for themselves within New York's contested terrains. Challenges the believe that West Indian American girls are but assert agency in defining race through strategic consumption of popular culture Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.

Seller Inventory # 9780814752487

Bibliographic Details

• Title: She's Mad Real (Paperback)
• Publisher: New York University Press, New York
• Publication Date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0814752489
• ISBN 13: 9780814752487
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: new

About this title

Synopsis

"She's mad real. She don't front for nobody. If you listen to her music you learn stuff about her life and how she struggled to get where she is. She's not just singing about how she's out at the club."
New York high school student China on R&B singer Mary J. Blige

Overwhelmingly, Black teenage girls are negatively represented in national and global popular discourses, either as being "at risk" for teenage pregnancy, obesity, or sexually transmitted diseases, or as helpless victims of inner city poverty and violence. Such popular representations are pervasive and often portray Black adolescents' consumer and leisure culture as corruptive, uncivilized, and pathological.
In She's Mad Real, Oneka LaBennett draws on over a decade of researching teenage West Indian girls in the Flatbush and Crown Heights sections of Brooklyn to argue that Black youth are in fact strategic consumers of popular culture and through this consumption they assert far more agency in defining race, ethnicity, and gender than academic and popular discourses tend to acknowledge. Importantly, LaBennett also studies West Indian girls' consumer and leisure culture within public spaces in order to analyze how teens like China are marginalized and policed as they attempt to carve out places for themselves within New York's contested terrains.

About the Author

Oneka LaBennett is Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity and Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Southern California. She’s the author of She’s Mad Real: Popular Culture and West Indian Girls in Brooklyn and co-editor of Racial Formation in the Twenty-First Century.