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

Oneka LaBennett, She's Mad Real: Popular Culture and West Indian Girls in Brooklyn. New York: New York University Press, 2011. 253 pp. Oneka LaBennett's She's Mad Real is an exploration of identity formation among West Indian and African American teenage girls, with an emphasis on the consumer and leisure spheres in which they participate on a daily basis. These forms of participation consist of such practices as watching television, talking on cell phones, and listening to hip-hop. In viewing these practices as strategic rather than as simply something from which passive pleasure derives, LaBennett argues that consumption and leisure are dynamic sites in which marginalized black teens continuously produce and contest their identities. The "complex and contradictory negotiations" (40) that comprise the ways they make sense of themselves in American society call for both a "youth culture-centered approach to West Indian transnationalism" (11) and, as importantly, recognition of leisure and consumption as significant examples of agency-in this case, female agency in particular. The phrase "mad real" in this book's title is part of the lingo of contemporary youth culture that refers to cultural and other forms of authenticity. Among the young women in this study, foremost in their constructions of black femininity is an engagement with ideas about authentic blackness- "real Black people" (4)-which is in dialogue with, and often oppositional to contradictory mainstream media representations, for example, young women's shifting valuation of the representation of femininity among such dissimilar female artists as Beyonce and Mary J. Blige, or in their assessments of mass culture's commodification of black women's bodies such as in former supermodel Tyra Banks' reality television show, America's Next Top Model. In LaBennett's analysis, "realness" is particularly problematic for West Indian youth, who have two interlocutors vis-a-vis authenticity: host and home cultures. At the same time, this book joins the current move in diaspora studies to rethink the categorical distinction between "immigrant" and "native," pointing out that among West Indians and African Americans this division is made imprecise both by intermarriage and by the fact that identity formation is a two-way process involving ethnic traditions from both sides. For example, this is evidenced by "the increasingly blurred lines between hip-hop and West Indian dancehall music" (32). LaBennett offers a pivotal critique as she takes issue with national (US) and global imagery of black teenage girls, in which they are predominantly represented in negative terms: as being at risk for pregnancy, obesity, and sexually transmitted diseases, or as helpless casualties of violence and poverty (3). She wishes to excavate examples of positive forms of agency, in order to reveal and contradict the biases in these prefigured assumptions. Biases about victimhood and delinquency as well as their consequences (intended or otherwise), reduce the complexity of experience to binary oppositions based on "good" and "bad" outcomes. In the process, such biases evaluate the (allegedly) intrinsic worth of particular communities or groups as being greater or lesser than others. Examination of these issues within the framework of consumption takes on particular currency in light of the recent so-called "shopping riots" in the United Kingdom. In both the UK and the US, a good deal of media coverage focusing on the problems of "the culture of consumerism" and "individualism" linked violence and consumption to "teenage gangsters" and "delinquent youth." LaBennett's argument counteracts these representations. Rather than being "combat" or "predatory" consumers whose alleged aggressive acquisitiveness results in destructive transgressions of the social and moral order, youth like those among whom LaBennett worked self-reflexively strive to create authentic selves within a culture of consumption and leisure quite different, and certainly more self-affirming, in its meaning and expression than contemporary conventional wisdom often represents it. …