The Culture And Politics Of Contemporary Street Gang Memoirs

The publication of Sanyika Shakur's Monster: The Autobiography of an L.A. Gang Member in 1993 generated a huge amount of excitement in literary circles—New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani deemed it a “shocking and galvanic book”—and set off a new publishing trend of gang memoirs in the 1990s. The memoirs showcased tales of violent confrontation and territorial belonging but also offered many of the first journalistic and autobiographical accounts of the much-mythologized gang subculture. In The Culture and Politics of Contemporary Street Gang Memoirs, Josephine Metcalf focuses on three of these memoirs—Shakur’s Monster; Luis J. Rodriguez’s Always Running: La Vida Loca: Gang Days in L.A.; and Stanley “Tookie” Williams’s Blue Rage, Black Redemption—as key representatives of the gang autobiography. Metcalf examines the conflict among violence, thrilling sensationalism, and the authorial desire to instruct and warn competing within these works. The narrative arcs of the memoirs themselves rest on the process of conversion from brutal, young gang bangers to nonviolent, enlightened citizens. Metcalf analyzes the emergence, production, marketing, and reception of gang memoirs. Through interviews with Rodriguez, Shakur, and Barbara Cottman Becnel (Williams’s editor), Metcalf reveals both the writing and publishing processes. This book analyzes key narrative conventions, specifically how diction, dialogue, and narrative arcs shape the works. The book also explores how these memoirs are consumed. This interdisciplinary study—fusing literary criticism, sociology, ethnography, reader-response study, and editorial theory—brings scholarly attention to a popular, much-discussed, but understudied modern expression.

This collection of essays critically engages with factors relating to black urban life and cultural representation in the post-civil rights era, using Ice-T and his myriad roles as musician, actor, writer, celebrity, and industrialist as a vehicle through which to interpret and understand the African American experience. Over the past three decades, African Americans have faced a number of new challenges brought about by changes in the political, economic and social structure of America. Furthermore, this vastly changed social landscape has produced a number of resonant pop-cultural trends that have proved to be both innovative and admired on the one hand, and contentious and divisive on the other. Ice-T’s iconic and multifarious career maps these shifts. This is the first book that, taken as a whole, looks at a black cultural icon's manipulation of (or manipulation by?) so many different forms simultaneously. The result is a fascinating series of tensions arising from Ice-T’s ability to inhabit conflicting pop-cultural roles including: ’hardcore’ gangsta rapper and dedicated philanthropist; author of controversial song Cop Killer and network television cop; self-proclaimed ’pimp’ and reality television house husband. As the essays in this collection detail, Ice-T’s chameleonic public image consistently tests the accepted parameters of black cultural production, and in doing so illuminates the contradictions of a society erroneously dubbed ’post-racial’.

This book considers the largely under-recognised contribution that young writers have made to life writing genres such as memoir, letter writing and diaries, as well as their innovative use of independent and social media. The authors argue that these contributions have been historically silenced, subsumed within other literary genres, culturally marginalised or co-opted for political ends. Furthermore, the book considers how life narrative is an important means for youth agency and cultural participation. By engaging in private and public modes of self-representation, young people have contested public discourses around the representation of youth, including media, health and welfare, and legal discourses, and found means for re-engaging and re-appropriating self-images and representations. Locating their research within broader theoretical debates from childhood and youth studies: youth creative practice and associated cultural implications; youth citizenship and autonomy; the rights of the child; generations and power relationships, Poletti and Douglas also position their inquiry within life narrative scholarship and wider discussions of self-representation from the margins, representations of conflict and trauma, and theories of ethical scholarship.

In this edited collection, Gioia Woods and her contributors bring together histories, biographies, close readings, and theories about the literary and cultural Left in the American West—as it is distinct from the more often-theorized literary left in major eastern metropolitan centers. Left in the West expands our understanding of what constitutes the literary left in the U.S. by including writers, artists, and movements not typically considered within the traditional context of the literary left. In doing so, it provides a new understanding of the region’s place among global and political ideologies. From the early 19th century to the present, a remarkably complex and varied body of literary and cultural production has emerged out of progressive social movements. While the literary left in the West shared many interests with other regional expressions—labor, class, anti-fascism, and anti-imperialism, the influence of Manifest Destiny—the distinct history of settler colonialism in western territories caused western leftists to develop concerns unique to the region. Chapters in the volume provide an impressive range of analysis, covering artists and movements from suffragist writers to bohemian Californian photographers, from civil rights activists to popular folk musicians, from Latinx memoirists to Native American experimental writers, to name just a few. The unique consideration of the West as a socio-political region establishes a framework for political critique that moves beyond class consequences, anti-fascism, and civil liberties, and into distinct Western concerns such as Native American sovereignty, environmental exploitation, and the legacies of settler colonialism. What emerges is a deeper understanding of the region and its unique people, places, and concerns.

This volume explores violent perpetration in diverse forms from an interdisciplinary and transnational perspective. From National Socialist perpetration in the museum, through post-terrorist life writing to embodied performances of perpetration in cosplay, the collection draws upon a series of historical and geographical case studies, seen through the lens of a variety of texts, with a particular focus on the locus of the museum as a technology of sense making. In addition to its authored chapters, the volume includes three contributed interviews which offer a practice-led perspective on the topic. Through its wide-ranging approach to violence, the volume draws attention to the contested and gendered nature of what is constructed as ‘perpetration’. With a focus on perpetrator subjectivity or the ‘perpetrator self’, it proposes that we approach perpetration as a form of ‘doing’; and a ‘doing’ that is bound up with the ‘doing’ of one’s gendered identity more broadly. The work will be of great interest to students and scholars working on violence and perpetration in the fields of History, Literary Studies, Area Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, Museum Studies, Cultural Studies, International Relations and Political Science.

1992 was a pivotal moment in African American history, with the Rodney King riots providing palpable evidence of racialized police brutality, media stereotyping of African Americans, and institutional discrimination. Following the twentieth anniversary of the Los Angeles uprising, this time period allows reflection on the shifting state of race in America, considering these stark realities as well as the election of the country's first black president, a growing African American middle class, and the black authors and artists significantly contributing to America's cultural output. Divided into six sections, (The African American Criminal in Culture and Media; Slave Voices and Bodies in Poetry and Plays; Representing African American Gender and Sexuality in Pop-Culture and Society; Black Cultural Production in Music and Dance; Obama and the Politics of Race; and Ongoing Realities and the Meaning of 'Blackness') this book is an engaging collection of chapters, varied in critical content and theoretical standpoints, linked by their intellectual stimulation and fascination with African American life, and questioning how and to what extent American culture and society is 'past' race. The chapters are united by an intertwined sense of progression and regression which addresses the diverse dynamics of continuity and change that have defined shifts in the African American experience over the past twenty years.

The Rise of a Street General provides a unique and fascinating look into a gang members journey to rise to the top. Starting with his initiation into the gang in 1975, this story chronicles his wars with rival gangs and his years spent in the LA County Jail. It gives a look into the organized Crip movement within the California prison system during the 1980s. It witnesses the rise and fall of two Crip superpower organizations that dominated the system for a short period. The Rise of a Street General brings you to the present-day state of affairs within the Black/African gang culture and the effects of gang psychosis and self-imposed cretinism. It separates myths from reality and facts from propaganda and dispels misconception and stigmas. For the first time ever, heres a book written by a gang member from a military and political perspective. This book also provides a psychological look into a gang members thought process as he pursues his gang career and his exit strategy from the gang, as well as his concept for peace and reducing gang violence. This is an extraordinary and remarkable book. No other gang member this far has written a book so vividly, insightfully, and informatively, sure to leave a lasting impression on its readers. This book is destined to be a classic. The Rise of a Street General is a must-read book.

Urban Politics: The Political Culture of Gangs is a juxtaposition of street gang organizations and government theory and organization. It is a civil philosophy reference book that examines street gang behavior and culture in an unconventional way. It assesses political phenomenon such as: social contracts, the media, political parties, city council structures, budgeting, and other forms of political conduct, within a street gang organization context. Urban Politics offers a unique perspective into gang culture that challenges the reader to view street gang organizations from the inside with a creative slant. Urban Politics is a fascinating, yet horrifying insight into the underground culture of street gang organizations.