Urban Fiction

Abstract

Also known as urban lit, street lit, street fiction, gangsta lit, hip-hop fiction, ghetto lit, and hood lit, urban fiction is a subgenre of contemporary African American literature and emerged in the late 1990s. Omar Tyree’s Flyy Girl (Tyree 1997, cited under Important Primary Sources), Teri Woods’s True to the Game (Woods 1998, cited under Important Primary Sources), and Sister Souljah’s The Coldest Winter Ever (Souljah 1999, cited under Important Primary Sources) are considered the inaugural novels for the amazing flood of urban fiction titles that followed. Typical characteristics are the settings in African American socioeconomically deprived, urban neighborhoods, action-driven plots that focus on the often brutal fight for survival in the underground economy, and the usage of urban vernacular. Nonstandard grammar and curse words are used not only in dialogue, but also in the narrative text. The titles of the books often point to the urban underground; see, for example, Illegal Ambitions, Deadly Secrets, Corrupt City Saga, Natural Born Hustler, and Payback Ain’t Enough. Book covers often feature photographic images of young women in sexualized poses. The majority of the authors either grew up in such urban neighborhoods or they are familiar with these settings because of their work with the community, as has been the case with author Sister Souljah. Some authors have their own experiences with jail. Victoria M. Stringer, for example, wrote her semi-autobiographical novel, Let That Be the Reason (which she self-published in 2001) while serving a seven-year prison term (Stringer 2009, cited under Important Primary Sources). Publishing history for this genre is somewhat of a phenomenon; most of the authors share an initial frustration about repeated rejections by mainstream publishers before turning to self-publishing. These authors all have tales of selling their books in barbershops and beauty parlors, with street vendors, in church basements, or out of their car trunks. Some of these authors were so successful that they started their own publishing companies and signed on other authors. Vicky Stringer’s Triple Crown Publications, for example, sold about 300,000 paperbacks by fourteen different authors in just sixteen months. The same mainstream publishers who initially had rejected the manuscripts as “too ghetto,” offered now very lucrative contracts to urban fiction authors because they realized the potential for commercial gains. Today, ironically, they celebrate the genre as a wonderful way to reach the young urban men and women who did not read before. While academic discourse, at first, largely ignored the new genre as it was considered pulp fiction, commentators have begun, in recent years, to pay some attention. Nevertheless, opinions about the quality and the value of the literature remain highly divided.