Women Rapping Revolution Authors Kellie Hay and Rebekah Farrugia

The book “Women Rapping Revolution: Hip Hop Community Building in Detroit” is described as an attempt to illuminate the important role that women have played in mobilizing a grassroots response to political and social pressures at the heart of the city’s ongoing renewal and development. Detroit, MIchigan, has long been recognized as a center of musical innovation and social change.

Authors Rebekah Farrugia, Professor of Media Studies in the Department of Communication, Journalism, and Public Relations and Kellie Hay  Professor of Cultural Studies in the Department of Communication, Journalism, and Public Relations, both at Oakland University located in Rochester, Michigan, spent seven years in the community with The Foundation, a Detroit-based women-centered hip hop collective.

Their fieldwork in writing this book shows us how crucial it is for us to engage with outside cultures with a strong level of cultural competency and authenticity. The Detroit hip-hop women trailblazers they speak and build relationships with give us glimpses of Black womanhood and ways Black women are dismantling the hip-hop gender status quo. Kellie and Rebekah also share how this journey has challenged and evolved their own perceptions of feminism, especially in the realm of academia. Overall, such a really fascinating, multi-layered conversation.

They say they were not trying to take anything away from or appropriate the culture but, only with the permission and direction of the collective, to document something so it doesn’t go away and morph into something else.