"In a fresh and excitingly iconoclastic account, Angela S. Williams' Hip Hop Harem carves out a new generative space in the scholarship on Hip Hop and Rap music. This succinct but highly illuminating and readable book tells the story of the extraordinarily rich and vital production of feminist Hip Hop by young women from North Africa and the Middle East. Hip Hop Harem highlights their diasporic subjectivities and their surprisingly worldly experiences of the West and of the MENA regions. Particularly impressive is Dr. Williams' fluent grasp of the latest techniques of digital discourse ethnography. In foregrounding the rich life experiences of MENA female artists as represented in their music video productions, Dr. Williams confronts the epistemic blindness with which Western orientalist scholars have too long viewed the agency of MENA women in their scholarly discourse.

She maintains that MENA female Hip Hop artists are cosmopolitans! In turn, she places at the forefront of cultural and policy debates the matter of the aesthetic production of MENA women and their thoroughgoing transnational reach and relevance."--Cameron McCarthy, University Scholar, Former Director of Global Studies in Education, University of Illinois.