Living Room Revolutions: Black and Brown Women Collecting Records, Selecting Sounds, and Making New Worlds in the 1970s Bronx and Beyond

FAIN: FEL-289221-23

Jennifer Lynn Stoever
SUNY Research Foundation, Binghamton (Binghamton, NY 13902-4400)

Research and writing leading to a book about hip hop history, showing how the record collections and home-DJ practices of Black women and Latinas in the 1970s Bronx shaped the artform’s birth, sound, and development.

This project enacts a paradigm shift in hip hop history, showing how the record collections and home-DJ selecting practices of Black women and Latinas in the 1970s Bronx dramatically shaped the artform’s birth, sound, and development. Through archival evidence, textual analysis, and a new oral history archive co-created with Bronx women, this book performs three interventions: reconceiving gender in hip hop historiography, rethinking the figure of the “mother” in popular music studies and record collecting culture, and documenting the selecting practices of Black women and Latinas. In narrating their lives and relationships to music, Bronx women reveal how they used records to create new forms of identity, motherhood, and family structures, as well as how crucial their collecting and selecting have been to major social, political, and artistic movements in the United States.