She’s Mad Real: Popular Culture and West Indian Girls in Brooklyn

by Oneka LaBennett

"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.

253 pages, Paperback

First published July 25, 2011

Reviews

[Laurie Summer · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an important and unique ethnographic study of adolescent, West Indian and African American girls, and how they construct identity within places and in relation to cultural messages they encounter within music, television, and work and play spaces.