This cutting-edge account explores rap and Hiphop discourse within a trajectory of Black discourses. Looking at music videos, websites and billboards, it highlights how Black youth read the world they inhabit.

Hiphop Literacies is an exploration of the rhetorical, language and literacy practices of African Americans, with a focus on the Hiphop generation. Richardson analyses the lyrics and discourse of Hiphop, explodes myths and stereotypes about Black culture and language and shows how Hiphop language is a global ambassador of the English language and American culture. Richardson examines African American Hiphop in secondary oral contexts such as rap music, song lyrics, electronic and digital media, oral performances and cinema and brings together issues and concepts that are explored in the disciplines of folklore, ethnomusicology, sociolinguistics, discourse studies and New Literacies Studies.

'Puts Hiphop on the map of literacy studies.' -Jannis Androutsopoulos, Mannheim, Germany "Elaine Richardson's Hiphop Literacies, following on the heels of her African American Literacies, is a provocative examination of literacy practices in the context of Hiphop (as the word is written in the book). Here, literacy is defined under the broader rubric of New Literacy Studies (NLS), a paradigm sensitive to the gray areas demarcating 'orality' and 'literacy,' emphasizing instead a liberal and multivalent understanding encompassing alternative modalities (visual, sonic, and their multi-medial synergisms) and seeking to situate literacy within its social settings and cultural practices." -- Tom Greenland, Journal of Foldlore Research, January 2008