Nearly 4 years ago I wrote “From Gossip Girl to Ghetto Girls: What are We Teaching our Daughters” and I think that my thinking has changed or crystallized in terms of my thinking around Hood Lit/Hood Fiction/Urban Fiction.
Given the fact that there are different kinds of Black people, shouldn’t different kinds of stories be told? In 2006 I wrote “How Zora Neal Hurston Had a Fight with Urban Fiction and Lost“. To be honest the post is awful, it hurts my eyes, there are too many colors, and during one of the transition periods I lost many commas so the text looks wonky.
But I like the post because it represents my thinking at a particular time period.
Lately I have been thinking that hood lit has a right to exist as an end in of it self.
Why? Well, to say that it isn’t good or positive fails to consider that writing like art, is subjective.
I think these stories deserve to be told, or perhaps I am thinking that it isn’t my place to say that they shouldn’t. That may be better.
Now this does not mean that I don’t have a critique of the market and the ways in which major publishers pick and choose which books have a larger platform, attractive placing in Barnes and Noble or Amazon. Or with the rise of hood lit
But, I think that the bottom line is that if I think that there are different Black communities then I must also accept that those different communities have a variety of stories to tell.
So what do you think?
Did “hood lit” change the game for the negative?
Who has a right to say which “Black stories” should or shouldn’t be told?
I used to work at a library that had a HUGE urban fiction section. And it was well utilized. I read some of the books, and while I found them entertaining, I didn’t think they were very good/uplifting/etc.
HOWEVER, I just thought about when I was a kid I loved reading science fiction and fantasy with characters that seemed African-American like me. (Of course in sci-fi/fantasy often a term like African-American doesn’t mean anything because Africa and America don’t exist but I digress.) Maybe it’s the same kind of thing, where people want to see characters like themselves in print.
At the end of the day, I’m happy people are reading.
@Ashley,
Maybe it’s the same kind of thing, where people want to see characters like themselves in print.
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Yas. I thought of this and the conversation around Girls, the HBO show and I thought, well, who gets to say that some stories don’t deserve to be told?
However, I am mindful of the role that the market plays.