In Black Women's Health in the Age of Hip Hop and HIV/AIDS: A Narrative Remix (Ohio State University Press, 2025), Nghana Tamu Lewis offers readers a compelling conversation that lies at the intersection of Black feminist thought, public health and sociocultural analysis. At just under two hundred pages, this book takes a concentrated approach to understanding just how profound Black media—literature, television and theater created between 1996 and 2006—were at acknowledging and resisting the disproportionate toll that HIV/AIDS has taken on Black women and girls. Lewis, an attorney and professor of Africana Studies and English at Tulane University, is uniquely suited to tell this story. With her extensive interest in Black feminist literature, combined with her longstanding attention to issues related to race, culture and health, she is able to bridge fields of discourse that are often overlooked. The result is a book that feels both timely and deeply urgent—a valuable read for all those longing for a just healthcare system and, more importantly, for those unaware of the plight of Black women in America.

At its core, Black Women's Health in the Age of Hip Hop and HIV/AIDS highlights how the voices of Black female artists and writers such as Sapphire, Sister Souljah, Mara Brock Akil, Nikkole Salter and Danai Gurira were instrumental in providing expository narratives of health, sexuality and stigma during a time when mainstream HIV/AIDS discourse largely ignored the experiences of Black women. This book is framed by the rise of antiretroviral therapies in the mid-1990s, which vastly changed the trajectory of the epidemic, yet did little to address the structural racism, medical inequity, and vulnerabilities of Black women. Lewis very fittingly terms her approach to analyzing hip hop feminism and the power of Black media during this time as a "narrative remix." This signals both her methodological blending of televisual, literary and theatrical texts and how their authors are able to remix stories of risk, contagion and caregiving into art forms that reflect the lived realities of Black women. Through honing in on this particular decade, Lewis focuses her study on a transitional era when hip hop feminism was emerging as an analytic lens regarding Black women's health, and when HIV/AIDS remained deeply intertwined with stigma and silence.

"...hip hop feminism wrestles with the long history of systemic injustices to which black women have been subjected while acknowledging that black women's diverse relationships to power, based on education, sexuality, class, age, and ability, situate and inform their lived experiences." (p. 16)

One of the most notable strengths of the book is its seamless integration of theoretical framing with close readings of some of the most popular and influential cultural texts within the Black community during that decade. In Chapter Two, Lewis delves into a discussion of Sapphire's Push and Sister Souljah's The Coldest Winter Ever, where she shows how depictions of sexual exploitation and desire complicate the traditional themes often found within public health messaging. Lewis highlights how these works intentionally move away from presenting Black women as simply "at risk" subjects and reveal how women navigate trauma, sexuality and survival in ways that reject simplistic categories. Throughout the book, Lewis consistently draws connections between narrative and epidemiology, a key component that makes this body of work so distinctive and necessary. Readers see direct examples that storytelling itself can be a form of knowledge production and proliferation, one that exposes blind spots in health research and public policy—especially regarding marginalized communities.

We also see the themes in this book shine in Chapter Four when it moves beyond literature into popular culture, particularly through television. Lewis's analysis of the two highly popular and successful shows, Girlfriends and The Game, demonstrates how Black female characters on screen both conformed to and disrupted dominant ideas about health, beauty and desirability. While these shows were not explicitly about HIV/AIDS, they participated in shaping broader discourses about sexuality and wellness for Black women in the early 2000s. Through her acknowledgment of these shows as being worthy of critical attention alongside novels and plays, Lewis underscores that cultural production in all its forms are crucial to the way health narratives circulate. Chapter Three, which focuses on the work of actresses and playwrights Nikkole Salter and Danai Gurira, is another example of this, extending this argument from the television to the stage. This chapter broadened the readers' view of the Black women's diasporic experience with HIV/AIDS from a national one to a global one, showing how transnational contexts, particularly in Africa, introduce new dimensions of silence, stigma and resilience.

"By giving voice to the realities and complexities of black women's lived experiences with HIV/AIDS in both the United States and Africa, Salter and Gurira encouraged audiences to see the consequences of the neglect of black women's health in the age of hip hop and HIV/AIDS. As well, they directed audiences to understand the importance of calling out this neglect by taking actions needed to change the conditions that put black women at disproportionate risk from dying from complications related to HIV/AIDS." (p 91)

Lewis continuously engages readers in a powerful discussion surrounding the realities of Black womanhood, focusing on themes such as invisibility. For instance, she notes that by the early 2000s, Black heterosexual women represented one of the fastest growing groups living with HIV/AIDS in the United States, a fact too often obscured by media narratives centering white gay men. Lewis's juxtaposition of public health data with real cultural accounts emphasizes to readers that HIV/AIDS is not just a medical condition; it is also a social story, one that can either illuminate the populations most affected or continue to render them invisible. By doing this, Lewis expands how we as readers view the rise and historical accounts of HIV/AIDS , which have long privileged certain voices, by insisting on centralizing Black women's stories.

In summary, what makes this body of work especially compelling is its insistence that Black culture is not ornamental to health discourse but essential to it. Lewis highlights how narratives can heal, disrupt, and reimagine current social systems and experiences for Black women. This project reminds us all that breaking silence is not just about representation; it is about healing and survival. Moreover, this book serves as a powerful example that the health of Black women cannot be understood apart from the stories they tell and the stories told about them. -Jade Dickenson

Jade Dickenson is a graduate of Howard University and holds a master’s degree in Narrative Medicine from Columbia University. As an aspiring physician with interests at the intersections of health equity, cultural studies, and social justice, Dickenson is committed to amplifying the voices of marginalized communities. With experience in both clinical research and community-based health work, she is passionate about bridging the gap between medicine and the humanities to foster more compassionate models of care. She believes that storytelling is a critical tool for healing. After obtaining her medical degree, Jade hopes to be a catalyst for positive change in both local and global communities.