Parodies of Ownership

Front matter

HIP-HOP AESTHETICS AND INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY LAW

Richard L. Schur

DIGITALCULTUREBOOKS is an imprint of the University of Michigan Press and the Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library dedicated to publishing innovative and accessible work exploring new media and its impact on society, culture, and scholarly communication.

Preface

Through her camera, Martha Cooper captured much of the energy of the emerging hip-hop scene during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Cooper, a white photographer for the New York Post, gained entrance into graffiti culture and was provided an opportunity to document the birth of hip-hop.! Her photographs render the burgeoning aesthetic of early hip-hop culture, its socioeconomic context, and the youthful exuberance of the participants. Because photography is a visual medium, these pictures tend to privilege graffiti and break-dancing over deejays and emcees. Cooper’s Hip Hop Files shows graffiti artists sketching ideas on notepads, kids painting in dimly lit train yards, and trains covered with designs that require multiple cars.” She also took photographs of the Rock Steady Crew, one of the earliest and most important break-dancing groups.* Her work depicts them training, practicing, and ultimately performing. These shots also provide evidence of how New York City was suffering from neglect and decay even as these early hip-hop pioneers were laying the foundation for a new cultural aesthetic. Cooper documents, among other things, how property, cultural ownership, and materialism, in various forms, have shaped hip-hop culture. Cooper’s photography portrays graffiti artists acquiring paint and canvases by whatever means possible and documents the disintegration of the Bronx and other boroughs. It also depicts how young people sought to reclaim a form of ownership over their crumbling communities. In retrospect, these photographs highlight battles over public space, private property, and intellectual property. Although the City of New York criminalized the parvi / PREFACE ticipants, graffiti art, break-dancing, and deejays, at their best, sought to beautify a decaying urban landscape and create public spaces for post-Civil Rights era youth to enjoy the freedoms for which the Civil Rights Movement fought so gallantly.

These early elements of hip-hop culture quickly entered both mainstream and elite cultures. Break-dancing, due to MTV’s emergence and the immense popularity of Michael Jackson, found adherents across the country and in many suburban communities. Graffiti art also soon merged into the New York art scene as graffiti writers, including Lee Quinones and Fab Five Freddy, became the subject of gallery shows during the early 1980s. Jean- Michel Basquiat, who gained as much or more celebrity in the art world than in the world of hip-hop, transformed graffiti into an “elite art” and soon became associated with Andy Warhol and other New York artists. Prefiguring intellectual property law’s conflict with hip-hop, his work from the early 1980s frequently included ironic usages of copyright and trademark symbols. Richard Marshall argues that “the © is Basquiat’s stamp of approval, authority, ownership, and originality.” He further observes that “by symbolically copyrighting his SAMO sayings, Basquiat was not just identifying them as his own, but sarcastically commenting on the obsession with legitimacy, ownership, and authorship, even of his often cryptic, subversive, and antiownership phrases.”* Long before sampling became the subject of copyright disputes, hip-hop aesthetes, like Basquiat, examined who “owned” American culture and how the distribution of property and putatively color-blind property law doctrines operated to produce racial inequalities.

Hip-hop would soon expand beyond New York and the United States. Although it has relatively quickly become a key element of youth culture worldwide and a form of mass or corporate culture, its initial concerns with ownership, property, and materialism remain integral elements of hip-hop. Hip-hop culture continues to provide a running dialogue, albeit sometimes confusing, contradictory, and highly metaphorical, about the material conditions of African American life and the relationship of Black America to American society and culture. The term hip-hop aesthetics denotes how these issues shape the content and form of contemporary African American cultural texts. My examination of hip-hop aesthetics seeks to explain the relationships among post—Civil Rights era art, literature, and music and view them as interrelated phenomena. By privileging artistic and literary texts in my account, I hope to transcend the debates about hip-hop lyrics, especially their violence and sexism, and focus on the underlying aesthetic strategies that shape their production.

Preface / vii

Another purpose of this book is to try to make some sense of the confused debate about property, property rights, and materialism in the post-Civil Rights era. Law, economics, cultural studies, and the arts all lay claim to these words, and no one book could synthesize all these usages. Scholars have most frequently viewed this conflict as pitting hip-hop music, especially with its reliance on sampling, against copyright law’s understanding of fair use. In part because this is well-worn territory, and because I thought this narrow focus has unintentionally omitted some key elements of the story, I have broadened the conflict to examine a wider range of visual and textual production and to provide an occasion to speculate in a more philosophical tone (as opposed to a doctrinal one) about the purposes and effects of intellectual property law. As I hope this book makes clear throughout, intellectual property law is not the sole or primary influence shaping contemporary African American cultural production. Rather, it has become one of the key contemporary battlegrounds for a wide range of social, cultural, economic, and political questions.

In its effort to synthesize the vibrant conversations around intellectual property? and hip-hop aesthetics,° this book, engaging in a thought experiment of sorts, asks what insights could be gleaned if we viewed hip-hop aesthetics and African American cultural history, more generally, through the lens of intellectual property law (with occasional slippages into property law) and if we imagined what intellectual property law might look like if it tried to use copyright and trademark regulations to create a more just circulation of racialized texts. Obviously, these questions are artificial ones, because neither legal nor cultural texts can be so neatly isolated. The “real world” is infinitely more complex. That being fully admitted, this thought experiment helps sheds light on how the mind-sets or worldviews promoted by hip-hop and intellectual property law conflict at a conceptual or theoretical level and further the contemporary racial divide.

‘To examine this interface between hip-hop aesthetics and intellectual property law, I rely heavily on critical race theory and Latino/a critical theory.’ These models have helped me imagine how a color-blind area of law, intellectual property law, might be transformed into a discursive space where race-conscious remedies might be developed and a more just popular culture nurtured. In a nutshell, the overall structure of this book follows what I would term a critical race theory methodology, which seeks to examine the historical, popular, and cultural origins of today’s debate about intellectual property and then proceeds to offer a number of case studies in which legal doctrine is applied to specific texts. The conclusion then tries viii / PREFACE to suggest how each discipline or field might be affected by this conflict between hip-hop aesthetics and intellectual property law. Because this project attempts to synthesize the work of so many scholars from numerous fields, I regret that it has been impossible to recognize every scholarly contribution to this book without destroying the flow of the text and the central argument developed herein.

The book begins in chapter 1 by examining the historical debate within the African American community about the role of property and materialism in shaping a social justice agenda. The second chapter shifts to an examination of African American popular culture and its relation to the development of critical race theory. I consider how Henry Louis Gates’s influential description of vernacular and artistic practices within the African American community relies on assumptions that run directly counter to intellectual property law’s assumptions about creativity. The third chapter draws on Anna Deavere Smith’s Twilight—Los Angeles, 1992 to map out the characteristics of hip-hop aesthetics and provide an overview of contemporary aesthetic strategies, highlighting how those strategies have resulted in legal conflict or led to the threat of legal conflict. Chapter 4 applies the hip-hop aesthetic to Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Adrian Piper’s Vanilla Nightmare series. Neither Morrison nor Piper is part of the hip-hop generation, but this chapter tries to show how the structure and themes of their work, especially their focus on the meaning of ownership, constitute a bridge between Civil Rights generation strategies for social justice and hip-hop era approaches. Chapter 5 examines copyright and trademark law’s approach to fair use by engaging in a close reading of Colson Whitehead’s John Henry Days and Michael Ray Charles’s Forever Free series. The penultimate chapter considers the possibility of social transformation and what intellectual property law terms “transformative use” by exploring Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone and the artwork of Fred Wilson. The book concludes by suggesting possible directions for future scholarship in African American literature, African American art history, intellectual property law, critical race theory, and hip-hop studies.

By examining hip-hop as an aesthetic structure that underlies a range of genres, this book can provide a fuller critique of contemporary social and cultural relations. Parodies of Ownership ultimately concludes that intellectual property law doctrine has contained and neutralized the critical impulse of hip-hop aesthetics even if contemporary African American writing and art have flourished. Despite attempting to transform how intellectual property law distributes ownership rights for ideas, expressions, and texts,

Preface / ix courts have been unwilling to modify copyright law even when practitioners of hip-hop aesthetics, such as Alice Randall, win their cases. The widespread popularity of hip-hop aesthetics has challenged but not transformed intellectual property law.

Because this book regularly shifts among four academic disciplines (literature, art, law, and music) that do not always share premises or methods, I must acknowledge a few of my working assumptions in writing this book:

1. While this study describes how hip-hop has influenced contemporary African American literary and artistic production, it is clear that hip-hop is not solely an African American phenomenon. At its origins, hip-hop blended multiple ethnic traditions in its aesthetic and continues to do so today, especially as its popularity in Europe, Africa, and Asia attests. However, I have limited my study to hip-hop’s effect on African American art and literature in order to keep the project a manageable one and to maintain a fairly unified focus throughout.

2. While much contemporary African American cultural production fits within the hip-hop paradigm, it would be a mistake to apply the model to all people with a certain skin tone. Rather, this books identifies the central elements of hip-hop, translates them to a number of aesthetic realms, and demonstrates how a range of creative endeavors within African American culture share a common methodology or approach.’ Not all books by African American writers will fit within this paradigm, nor will every piece of art by African American artists. For example, this book does not examine “street lit,” despite its recent popularity and its focus on hip-hop-related content, because these books tend not to display the aesthetic strategies discussed herein.

3. Hip-hop’s journey through the legal system has been well-documented and analyzed, especially as it relates to the “fair-use” doctrine, by numerous hip-hop and intellectual property law scholars. While this book examines the fair-use doctrine and applies it to contemporary African American cultural production, it spends most of its critical energy examining the abstract or philosophical meaning of intellectual property, rather than engaging in doctrinal analysis. The doctrinal analysis of fair use’s application to hip-hop has largely been accomplished, and the most pressing issues in intellectual property law scholarship, from a lawyer’s point of view, have moved onto new terrain. Rather, this book is concerned with a different set of questions. Who “owns” the American cultural imagination and possesses the ability to rework and reconstruct it? What kinds of ownx / PREFACE ership rights can be asserted through art, music, literature, and law, especially by historically marginalized people? Do textual producers draw on particular aesthetic or cultural traditions when they assert their ownership claims, no matter whether they are making copyright, trademark, or even patent claims? Although this book frequently relies on dominant legal analysis as a point of comparison, I am even more interested in explaining the cultural and philosophical significance of the gap between intellectual property law and hip-hop aesthetics. I have chosen “intellectual property law” as the key theoretical focus, despite the book’s emphasis on copyright, because it is a more general term and offers a more appropriate analog for understanding what Rayvon Fouché terms “black vernacular technological creativity,” forming the basis for the hip-hop aesthetic during the post- Civil Rights era.’

4. I rely on the term property to denote a range of meanings: self-ownership; a claim of ownership; a tangible good; the laws regulating the ownership of tangible goods, land, or texts; and property rhetoric/talk. Within the context of African American historical experience and cultural criticism, one definition frequently blurs into the others, and literary, musical, and visual references to any one aspect of property frequently constitute metaphors for the other definitions of property. This slippage, I would argue, is intentional within African American cultural criticism because it is designed to destabilize or challenge legal discourse. It also serves to question the existing distribution of property and property rights. To respect this tradition, I have adopted this metaphorical usage of property.

5. As a heuristic device, I argue that contemporary African American criticism reflects a shift from civil rights to property rights. For many lawyers, this is a distinction without a difference because property rights are civil rights too. I nonetheless use this language because property rights, by and large, rely on the logic of alienability, where one’s interest can be bartered or traded away. Civil rights approaches, by contrast, tend to assume that one’s rights to due process and equal protection cannot be alienated or given up as a part of negotiation or contract. (Again, I realize that lawyers more familiar with the nuances of property and civil rights law might disagree with this broad characterization.) Because of hip-hop’s materialism and its emphasis on commodified forms of identity, I believe that examining the shift from a rhetoric of inalienability (civil rights) to one of alienability (property rights) and its legal ramifications is absolutely essential for any understanding of contemporary African American cultural production and its critique of dominant legal discourse.

Preface / xi

6. Although I do see differences between the Civil Rights and the hip-hop generations, I also see many linkages.'° If their parents generally saw the Civil Rights Movement as a romantic struggle to overcome racial injustice, then hip-hop children tend to view the earlier generation’s accomplishments and their effects more ambiguously and ironically. My assumption, as a cultural historian, is not that these attitudes are incommensurate and unrelated. Rather, the purpose of this book is to trace out how and why the hip-hop generation has turned from romantic optimism to a more ironic attitude. The recent election of Barack Obama suggests that these two generations do share values and goals and that the cynicism and irony of the post—Civil Rights era may be transforming into a new cultural narrative or sensibility.

Acknowledgments

Without the wisdom, encouragement, and guidance of family, friends, and colleagues, this book would not exist. The journey that culminated with this book began because Zan Skolnick, my father-in-law, nudged me to look into Toni Morrison’s testimony in the copyright case about Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone. That initial research received a warm welcome from Norm Yetman, then an editor of American Studies, and an audience at a Mid-American American Studies Association (MAASA) conference in St. Louis. Ted Vaggalis served as a regular sounding board for my ideas and was kind enough to read a rough draft of the entire manuscript. His comments and suggestions vastly improved the final version. Ken Egan, Charlie Ess, and Cheryl Ragar encouraged and helped mentor me through the process of publishing a book. Jaqueline Tygart, art librarian extraordinaire, assisted me in tracking down images and catalogs. Diane Ziegler and Marie ‘Tracy provided amazing administrative support during the last few years. I am deeply grateful that Michael Ray Charles, Huey Copeland, and David Sanjek granted my requests for phone interviews. Those conversations helped propel the project forward. Richard Delgado was a superb resource, and I appreciate his enthusiasm for the book at a time when I doubted that I would ever complete it. Julie Cohen offered numerous suggestions for improving the sections on intellectual property. Students in my African American literature and African American cultural studies classes helped hone and improve many of the ideas contained in this book. I am blessed by being a part of a supportive department. Jeanie Allen, Huexiv / ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ping Chin, Charlie Ess, Michael Hill, Erin Kenny, Sean ‘Terry, and Ted Vaggalis are simply wonderful colleagues and make going to work each day a pleasure. Tony Clark, Lisa Esposito, Teresa Hornsby, David Katzman, Lovalerie King, Cheryl Lester, Elizabeth Paddock, Chris Panza, Greg Renoff, Ann Schofield, Sherrie Tucker, and Saundra Weddle all regularly asked about the book’s progress and offered moral support. I would also like to express my appreciation of everyone associated with the University of Michigan Press, especially the blind reviewers whose comments guided my revisions.

I must acknowledge the tremendous imagination of the writers, musicians, and artists discussed herein. Their work, along with that of many other contemporary African American cultural workers, was an inspiration and provided a wealth of material to analyze and discuss. I hope that this book does justice to their artistry and encourages others to delve deeper into their work. Although I only know them through their writing, Rosemary Coombe, Henry Louis Gates, Nelson George, Norman Kelley, Lawrence Lessig, Kembrew McLeod, Mark Anthony Neal, Tricia Rose, Joseph Schloss, and Siva Vaidhyanathan provided the intellectual inspiration for this book. I would like to thank them for writing books that inspired me.

Last but not least, family and friends encouraged me throughout the journey of writing this book. Victor Schur, Eileen Schur, Blossom Skolnick, and Zan Skolnick are the best parents and in-laws a person could ask for. Roberta Schur, Elyse Tish, Gary Skolnick, Harriet Krauthamer, Ellen Mednick, Scott Tandy, Diane Smason, and Josh Flanders have been wonderfully supportive. I also want to thank my children, Ruth, Ari, and Max, for indulging my absentmindedness when I was lost in thought about this project. Most of all, I would like to thank Linda Skolnick. She supported this project from the beginning, agonized with me over it, and lent her considerable intellect to the challenges it presented.

Contents

From Chattel to Intellectual Property: Legal Foundations of African American Cultural Critique

Claiming Ownership in the Post—Civil Rights Era “Fair Use” and the Circulation of Racialized Texts “Transformative Uses”: Parody and Memory

From Invisibility to Erasure? The Consequences of Hip-Hop Aesthetics

Chapter I

From Chattel to Intellectual Property: Legal Foundations of African American Cultural Critique

Copyright and intellectual property are the real estate of the pares —Dexter Scott King, Growing Up King

Many critics charge that the King family has neglected King’s social and moral legacy in favor of exploiting for themselves his commercial appeal.

—Michael Eric Dyson, I May Not Get There with You

The U.S. Postal Service has issued over 150 stamps of African Americans. From Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman to Malcolm X and Charlie Parker, the images of African American leaders, musicians, athletes, scientists, and business leaders have been captured on stamps of all sizes and denominations. The watershed year for this representational emphasis is 1980. Between 1940 and 1980, about twenty African Americans appeared on postage stamps. In the last quarter-century, nearly seven times that number of African Americans have appeared on postage stamps and postcards. Despite the continued existence of racial hierarchy and white supremacist thought in American life, what does this sudden explosion of images from African American history mean? How does this shift in

American popular visual culture demand a rereading of the very tradition of African American cultural criticism these stamps seek to represent? How does the “materialization” of this tradition of dissent alter the very meaning of the original messages for contemporary readers? Does this commodification of such figures reveal absences, gaps, or new ways of reading and understanding these canonized figures?

The hip-hop and Post-Soul generations (who came of age after the March on Washington, but before the rise of commercialized hip-hop) encountered the great leaders of African American history not only within their homes and churches but within American popular culture as well. Unlike earlier generations, who learned about the accomplishments of Douglass, Jacobs, Cooper, Washington, and Du Bois primarily within the confines of the African American community, more recent generations have encountered the canonized versions of King and Malcolm X, alongside the African American community’s memories. If their parents and grandparents knew their words, the hip-hop generation is just as likely to recognize the images of Martin and Malcolm as their ideas. On the one hand, this increased visibility demonstrates a shift in American culture because most people consider it “normal” to recognize African American heroes. On the other hand, more images within American visual culture do not necessarily translate into a broader-based commitment to end racism or white supremacy. Ironically, the civic recognition of King and others has persuaded many whites that racism is a thing of the past. The increased visibility of African American leaders may also cause the hip-hop generation to grow cynical about Civil Rights Movement heroes because the apparent widespread acceptance of their efforts has not helped to realize their visions of freedom and equality for African Americans.

From the hip-hop generation’s viewpoint, the translation of the Civil Rights Movement into stamps or other commodities creates an ambiguity about the movement itself. Coupled with the general ironic attitude toward politicians, athletes, and Hollywood stars, this has led to widespread cynicism about social activists and activism. For example, the main character of Barbershop (Eddie, played by Cedric the Entertainer) calls Martin Luther King a “ho” because of his adulterous behavior and states that “Rosa Parks ain’t do nothin’ but sit her black ass down.” These comments (and the ones critical of Jesse Jackson as well) reflect disenchantment with the Civil Rights Movement, its tactics, and its vision because the movement and its main figures have become unquestionable, especially as white leaders from across the political spectrum genuflect at the past while increasingly ignoring the continued legacy of racial hierarchy in American culture.!

This chapter provides an intentionally revisionist account of African American cultural criticism. My goal here is to trace the origins of the hip-hop generation’s approach to property law and why materialism and propertizing one’s identity, at least on the surface, appear to be more appealing than social activism for many young African Americans. Building on the work of many hip-hop commentators who have examined, criticized, and defended hip-hop’s materialism, I seek to place hip-hop’s attitude toward property in a historical context. My purpose is not to rehearse the arguments made so ably by Derrick Alridge, Regina Austin, Yvonne Bynoe, Jeff Chang, Nelson George, Robin Kelley, James Peterson, Ted Swedenburg, S. Craig Watkins, and Kristine Wright on this topic. Rather, I hope to find a broader historical explanation for this “return” to property rights and contextualize it as part of the ebb and flow of African American cultural criticism. Todd Boyd has begun this project by articulating the dawning self-consciousness among the hip-hop generation.” Regina Blackburn has also initiated the project of revising African American cultural history through the lens offered by hip-hop.’ This chapter, in essence, is equal parts archaeology, genealogy, and hermeneutics. Using the material practices and frequent materialism of hip-hop as a primary analytic, I reread the classic texts of African American studies to help them speak to the challenges of the post—Civil Rights era.

Stephen Best has recently argued that slave law in the nineteenth century laid the foundation for the contemporary propertization of life via intellectual property law.* In this chapter, I seek to extend his account and show how African American culture has increasingly placed property law at the center of cultural criticism. Rather than providing a definitive reading of any one text or period, I am trying to stitch together remnants of historical memory and develop a narrative to explain recent shifts in African American cultural production. This new/old narrative breaks up African American intellectual history into three periods based on the main question the period posed for property law. The first period (1780-1880) asked who could own property. While there was a range of writings, sermons, and speeches during this period, I am specifically interested in how some of the most famous slave narratives addressed this question about the subject in property law. The second period (1880-1964) begins with the enactment of Jim Crow laws and caused African Americans to struggle with the question of where could African Americans own property and the spatial logic of property law. These questions about the geography of race can be found in the debates between Du Bois and Washington and between Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. The last period (1964 to the present) represents the beginnings of a new era in which the question becomes who owns the imaginary domain out of which African Americans form cultural identity. In this section, I explore the lawsuit between Rosa Parks and Outkast. The post-Civil Rights era has been marked by multiculturalism and identity politics. The legal battle over Parks’s name suggests how the ownership over the symbols and metaphors of American and African American life has become a central issue in African American cultural criticism. My rereading of African American history through the lens of property implies both continuity and change between generations or historical periods.’ While admittedly painting with a broad historical brush, my goal here is to provide a historical context for hip-hop aesthetics and its attitude about property.

Slave Narratives

Slave narratives depict the monstrous cruelty of slavery, enabling formerly enslaved African Americans to write themselves into American culture and providing a forum for demonstrating how slavery tainted the entire country with immorality. According to Robert Stepto, “The strident, moral voice of the former slave recounting, exposing, appealing, apostrophizing, and above all remembering is the single most impressive feature of a slave narrative.”® These highly crafted narratives allowed certain talented writers, like Frederick Douglass, to assume a high level of authorial control in spite of the many generic restrictions and engage in social, cultural, and political criticism.’ Hazel Carby notes that “in the slave narratives written by black women the authors placed in the foreground their active roles as historical agents.”!° Carby’s study also demonstrates that African American women used the slave narrative both to assert control over racial and gender stereotypes and to create, via writing, a more authentic self. Henry Louis Gates argues that because slave narratives frequently were honed and perfected on the speaking podium prior to being written down, the texts incorporate both authorial intent and audience response.'! Gates contends that from the beginning, slave narratives constituted revisionist accounts of African American history. Hip-hop’s rereading of slave narratives thus merely serves as the latest iteration of revisionist criticism.

Hip-hop’s rereading of slavery and slave life is perhaps no more shocking than Booker T. Washington, who downplayed the hardships of slavery to promote the value of labor, but it nonetheless clashes with more established views and fosters tensions between generations of African Americans.!? Near the conclusion of Jake Lamar’s The Last Integrationist (1996), Emma Person, one of the main characters, states quite bluntly that “what the slave wants is not freedom, but a slave of his own.” Through Emma Person, Lamar argues that freedom is not the main goal of the slave— property ownership is. If Lamar alone had articulated such a position about slavery, it might be idiosyncratic to highlight it here. However, Edward P. Jones won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his novel The Known World (2003), where he presents a complex portrait of antebellum life that includes a former slave becoming a slave owner himself. In Jones’s fictional account, Henry Townsend, a freed slave and plantation owner, quickly adapts and adopts the attitudes toward property held by whites of the period. In the visual arts, the MacArthur Foundation presented Kara Walker with a prestigious “genius” grant for her black cut-paper silhouettes that resurrect forgotten images of African Americans from the South. Walker has been criticized for producing work that so closely resembles forms and images designed originally to demean and oppress African Americans. Because Walker’s silhouettes tell complex stories, Thelma Golden once commented to Walker, “I imagine that there must be 500 pages of some sort of parody of a slave narrative lurking in your studio.”!*

Do these fairly well-received instances of contemporary artists and writers rewriting slave life suggest how hip-hop is revising our understanding of slavery? Annette Dixon writes: “Adopting the antiquated medium of the silhouette, Walker turns it into a power tool with which she evokes the system of slavery, exploring themes of exploitation, accommodation, and complicity in the institution of slavery on the part of both the powerful and the oppressed.”!° Novels about slavery written in the transition period between the Civil Rights era and the full-blown emergence of hip-hop aesthetics in the late 1980s, such as Ernest J. Gaines’s The Autobiography of Miss Fane Pittman (1971), Gayl Jones’s Corregidora (1975), and Sherley Ann Williams’s Dessa Rose (1986), retain a much more reverent attitude toward those who were enslaved and clearly criticize every aspect of racism from that era. More recent images and novels present a much more ambiguous image of slave life and the goals and hopes of enslaved African Americans. By analyzing a few select passages from three of the more important slave narratives, I will bring attention to several moments in these texts that critics have tended to overlook but that are likely to gain in importance as a result of the hip-hop challenge to African American cultural criticism.