Romance, Hip-Hop Feminism, and Black Love: From Theory to Praxis

Here's the description from the introduction to this special issue of JPRS:

Julie E Moody-Freeman’s essay “Romance, Hip-Hop Feminism, and Black Love: From Theory to Praxis” closes out the issue by examining Gwyneth Bolton’s 2010 romance novel Make It Last Forever through Black Feminist frameworks. Moody-Freeman argues that the novel is an expansion of Bolton’s Black feminist work, Check It While I Wreck It: Black Womanhood, Hip-Hop Culture, and the Public Sphere, written as academic Gwendolyn Pough, in which she argues that Black feminist criticism should “come down from its ivory tower” to engage how feminism and rap simultaneously challenge sexism and discuss how the Hip-Hop generation talks about Black love and pleasure. Therefore, the essay closely analyzes the novel using Hip-Hop feminisms’ articulation of “Pleasure Politics,” and uncovers the rhetorical devices at play in the romance novel’s narrative that advocate for Black women’s sex positivity, humor, sass, and pleasure. Additionally, the essay shows how the novel revises conventional notions of Black masculinity as violent and unloving, and it identifies the pedagogical implications of using the romance novel in a classroom to engage in discussions Black people’s lived reality with anti-Black racism, policing, and violence.