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[ 124 ] 6 “KEEPIN’ IT REAL” Incarcerated Women’s Readings of African American Urban Fiction Megan Sweeney U rban fiction—also known as gangsta lit, street lit, ghetto fiction, and hip-hop fiction—has taken the U.S. publishing world by storm. Bearing titles such as Thugs and the Women Who Love Them and Forever a Hustler’s Wife, urban books feature African Americans who are involved in urban street crime, including drug dealing, hustling, prostitution, and murder. The genre has gained immense popularity, particularly among young black women, since the 1999 publication of Sister Souljah’s best-selling novel The Coldest Winter Ever. Its roots extend further back, however, to African American novels about ghetto life such as Iceberg Slim’s Pimp: The Story of My Life (1969) and Donald Goines’s Whoreson: The Story of a Ghetto Pimp (1972). Although urban fiction writers struggled to find publishers for their work in the late 1990s, some authors now sign six-figure contracts with major publishing houses, and urban books dominate the African American collections in large chain bookstores.1 In conducting research with seventy-four women incarcerated in Ohio and Pennsylvania, I learned that urban fiction is equally prominent in women’s prisons. The genre is particularly popular among young, lower-class black women, but it has also gained popularity among middle-class black women and white women. According to Darlene,2 a thirty-five-year-old African American woman, urban books typically feature “a pimp or killer or drug dealer,” or “just a everyday life situation: prison, baby mama drama, having a guy being a player.” Urban books often start with the protagonists’ childhood, “how they used to see their mother get beat up, or how they went to different groups and foster homes and prison,” and they sometimes involve courtroom scenes and characters’ efforts to “flee the police.” The genre has opened up a world of reading for many women who were not readers before coming to prison. As a young black woman named Ronnie explains, she “didn’t read hardly at all” but “KEEPIN’ IT REAL” [ 125 ] “was hooked” after discovering urban fiction. Now, says Ronnie, “I keep reaching out and reaching out until I find more and more. They all just been good books. They talk about real life.” Some critics argue that urban fiction glorifies crime, reinforces stereotypical images of African Americans, and crowds out far better literature by African American writers. For instance, in “Their Eyes Were Reading Smut,” a frequently cited op-ed published in the New York Times in 2006, Nick Chiles describes the proliferation of urban fiction as “these nasty books . . . pairing off back in the stockrooms like little paperback rabbits and churning out even more graphic offspring that make Ralph Ellison books cringe into a dusty corner .” From Chiles’s perspective, “serious” African American writers such as Toni Morrison, Edward P. Jones, and himself are being “surrounded and swallowed whole on the shelves” by “pornography for black women” and “books that glamorize black criminals.”3 Critics’ anxieties about urban fiction are matched by penal officials’ anxieties about the genre. Despite women’s daily requests for urban books, prison librarians in both Ohio and Pennsylvania exclude the genre because of its depictions of crime and violence. Prisoners who can afford to do so therefore ask family members and friends to order urban books for them through online catalogues such as BlackExpressions.com. If these books make it past the mailroom censor, their recipients share them with other imprisoned readers through what one woman calls the “Underground Book Railroad.” I realized the extent of prison officials’ anxieties about urban fiction while conducting group discussions with women incarcerated in Ohio. Although we had received permission to discuss a few urban books, a prison official burst in to stop one of our discussions after learning that the books were published by Triple Crown Publications, a firm founded by a former prisoner.4 The official told me to collect the books and immediately remove them from prison grounds, as if, one prisoner noted, they were “a bomb that no one can touch.” Since we were not permitted to read any additional urban books, I asked if we might have a group discussion about two particularly popular books that most of the participants had already read. A penal official insisted, however, that “there can be no discussion of the work.” Although some prisoners echo the concerns of various scholars, librarians, and penal officials in voicing disdain...

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