Monster, Dreams, and Cultural Studies: Exploring Gang Memoir and Political Autobiography

Monster, Dreams, and Cultural

Studies: Exploring Gang Memoir

and Political AutobiographyJosephine Metcalf

Introduction

In 1995, Barack Obama published DreamsFromMy Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance.The memoir details his multicultural upbringingin Indonesia and Hawaii, his college education onthe West and East coasts of the United States, andhis work as an innercity community organizer inChicago prior to attending law school. The influ-ential New York Times book critic, MichikoKakutani, has since deemed Obama’s story “themost evocative, lyrical and candid autobiographywritten by a future president” (“From Books”).Two years earlier in 1993, the literary world hadbeen excitedly discussing Sanyika Shakur’s Mon-ster: The Autobiography of an LA Gang Member.Kakutani contended Monster “attests not only toMr. Shakur’s journalistic eye for observation, butalso to his novelistic skills as a story-teller…. Thisis a startling and galvanic book” (“Illuminating”).Written from inside prison, Monster is an accountof gangbanging with one of the infamous African-American “Crips” gangs in South Central LosAngeles (LA) during the 1980s. The memoir tellsthe story of how Shakur (born Kody Scott) earnedthe nickname “Monster” for his brutal behaviorbefore undergoing a political and personal trans-formation.Monster is noteworthy for its emphasis

on both the frisson of violent gang exploits andthe sober, salutary reflection of politicized andeducated hindsight.

Born in 1961, only two years earlier than Shak-ur, Obama grew up in the same America as thegangbanger. In 1983, as Shakur was fullyimmersed in the “Eight-Trays” Crips set, Obamawas becoming a community worker, disgustedwith the White House “where Reagan and hisminions were carrying on their dirty deeds” andconvinced that change needed to be effected atgrassroots level (133). As Shakur was becomingfamiliar with the jails and prisons of LA and Cali-fornia, Obama was volunteering to help blackyouths on the streets of Altgeld Gardens andother housing projects in the Windy City. UnlikeShakur’s more lumpen worldview, Obama’s lib-eral, yet structural critique toward healthcare,education, immigration, and cultural sensitivities(emphasized further in his 2006 collection ofessays, The Audacity of Hope), suggest that he is aproduct of the 1960s more radical moment. Oba-ma’s exploration of the social problems in Amer-ica has led him to significantly differentconclusions to Shakur who states that “separa-tion” may be a solution for the “failure of positivemulticultural existence” in the United States (382).

Despite obvious disparities between the two,there are some suggestive and fruitful parallels to

Dr. Josephine Metcalf is a teaching fellow at the University of Hull in the UK. Her book The Culture and Politics of Contemporary

Street Gang Memoirs is due for release in Spring 2012 (University Press of Mississippi).

The Journal of American Culture, 34:4© 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Monster, Dreams, and Cultural Studies � Josephine Metcalf 391

be made between the President’s own frank com-ing-of-age story and Shakur’s violent and seem-ingly sensationalized tales. Such similarities areparticularly notable in terms of the memoirs’ nar-rative structure, their emphasis on language andliteracy skills, and the politics of racial representa-tion. Both texts were released in the chaotic after-math of the 1993 LA riots; an event which, asdiscussed in Monster, revealed the difficulties andcomplexities of being a young African-Americanman in urban America. In the academic realm, thiswas a particularly poignant moment for BritishCultural Studies, with fervent debates in the fieldof race representational politics being promptedby Stuart Hall’s innovative essays “New Ethnici-ties” (1988) and “What is this ‘Black’ in BlackPopular Culture?” (1992).1 Although British Cul-tural Studies was thriving by the 1960s, this articlewill situate Monster and Dreams in some of themore recent interventions and developments inthe discipline, as well as life writing and prison lit-erature criticism in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Cultural Studies was often identified as beingsplit between “structuralism” and “culturalism.”The former references the operations of discursivepower and constraints on individuals. Indeed,structuralism literally determined the underlyingstructures that made meaning possible, exploringhow meaning was produced and reproduced bydominant ideologies within a culture. By contrast,culturalism involves looking at the practices ofeveryday people to understand how they mightcomprehend and ultimately overcome structuralconstraints. As cultural scholar James Procterexplains, structuralism is “concerned with the lin-guistic structures that underpin, enable and gov-ern meaning,” while culturalism is quite simply “aless exclusive, more democratic understanding ofculture” (40, 38). These two competing paradigmsprovide an organizing principle for this explora-tion of Monster and Dreams. Certainly, a centralcritical opposition that can be explored in thesetwo memoirs is between the subcultural, margin-alized, “organic” voicing of oppressed people onthe one hand, and on the other hand, the con-straining patterns of power that put limitations onoppressed people.

Narrative Structure:Conversion andMaturity

Scholarly studies of contemporary autobiogra-phy often reflect the critical concerns prevalent inCultural Studies that emerged around 20 yearsago. Under the terms of reference for so-called“cultural populism,” Cultural Studies becameeven more concerned in the late 1980s with issuesof “difference.” It had previously focused on theexperiences of the working class as a site wheresociety’s structures of domination could beexplored, particularly in British Cultural Studiesand the research that stemmed from the Centrefor Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS). Bythe 1980s, Cultural Studies in the UK similarlybegan to discuss the oppression of minoritygroups. In agreement with this, new focus on mar-ginalized people (women, gays and lesbians, racialminorities), life writing criticism turned its atten-tion to the sheer cultural and political power oflife writing.

The “culture wars” of the US in the early 1990sstemmed from these marginalized groups realiz-ing the potential power of their own agency andestablishing their own politics. Bitter politicaldebates raged over issues including feminism, gayactivism, AIDS awareness, antiracism, and multi-culturalism. These cultural conflicts were set inopposition to structuralist lines of thought,whereby structuralism showed the limited param-eters of individual agency. Cultural Studies beganto affirm the notion of “otherness,” becoming anacademic site to explore the ways in which cul-tural texts either promoted oppression (includingsexism, homophobia, and racism) or resisted andstruggled against it. This new cultural front line,with its politics of difference, encouraged criticaldiscussions about previously invisible identities.Within a memoir, the author could metamorphoseinto an alternative identity, coming out as feministor gay, for example, while placing their individualexperiences in the wider context of women’sor gay’s rights. Scholarly work on autobiogra-phy explored these new materials.2 It is not

392 The Journal of American Culture � Volume 34, Number 4 �December 2011

coincidence that Shakur’s Monster was commer-cially successful in such an environment; the cul-tural stage welcomed a minority writer “comingout” as an ex-criminal, whose experiences of thegang and incarceration could be situated in termsof prisoners’ rights more generally.

As the term “globalization” came to the fore-front of Cultural Studies in the late 1980s, literarystudies were also nurturing a new term that wouldappear regularly in contemporary discussions ofautobiography: “postcolonialism.” Similar inter-est in giving a voice to the oppressed (consistentwith a culturalist approach) that was developingin the US was happening internationally, becom-ing fertile areas for analysis. Postcolonial criticismnotes how oppressive states often discouraged oreven prevented suppressed groups from writing.The intent of postcolonial literature to resist suchoppression, and its confidence in doing so, con-forms with contemporary Cultural Studies’ fasci-nation with the ways in which marginalizedgroups voice and valorize their experiences. Post-colonial writings tackled subjects of unequalpolitical, economical, and cultural relations, aswell as ongoing processes of resistance and recon-struction; issues that are similar raised in gangmemoirs. Postcolonial literature often struggledwith questions of identity living between the old,native world, and the invasive new culture,notions that captivated postcolonial scholars, likeEdward Saı̈d and Gayatri Spivak. As culturalscholars Andrew Milner and Jeff Browitt explain,“the argument commenced not so much with acelebration of subordinate identity as with a cri-tique of the rhetoric of cultural dominance” (144).Like scholarly criticism that stemmed from thecultural wars in the US, global postcolonial criti-cism presented new intellectual questions of mar-ginal voices and hybrid identities. Scholars, suchas Justine Baillie, have examined Obama’sDreamsin relation to postcolonial theories and postcolo-nial life writing.

One leading form of narrative expression inboth contemporary postcolonial and minoritymemoirs is the conversion trajectory. Histori-cally, conversion narratives concerned spiritual aswell as material growth dating back to Benjamin

Franklin, in which the subject tended to be insearch of a transformed or redeemed self.3 Simi-larly, contemporary conversion narratives involvesubjugated people, frequently young, starting asoppressed and ignorant, and coming into aware-ness and empowerment. The conversion narrativeis thus used to exercise what life writing theoristPaul Eakin deems the “expressive freedom” thatwas previously denied to members of oppressedand silenced groups (5). More specifically, thenarrative form of conversion is the popular stylefor oppressed groups, such as prisoners, as exhib-ited among contemporary American prison narra-tives that stemmed from the 1960s and 1970s.Contemporary prison literature has been identi-fied by leading prison literature scholar H. BruceFranklin as a body of work commencing with thepublication of The Autobiography of Malcolm X(236). Prison narratives are a specific example ofthe conversion arc and it is a style common toMonsterwhose author was writing while incarcer-ated. Contemporary prison narratives certainlyserve as an important precedent to street gangmemoirs like Monster, with Shakur appropriatingand adapting life writing and prison narrative con-ventions, pioneered by authors such as MalcolmX and James Carr.

Prison memoirs from the 1960s and 1970s oftendetail the narrators’ lives before and after theirincarceration. Similarly, Monster does not merelyconcentrate on the author’s experiences of prison,but also life before criminality and after his prisonconversion. Prison scholars, like Brian Jarvisargue that The Autobiography of Malcolm X iden-tifies X’s imprisonment as his formative experi-ence, while cultural scholar, Robin Kelleybelieves that it is X’s preprison years that are themost crucial (Jarvis 107; Kelley, Race Rebels 163).Kelley contends that although The Autobiographyof Malcolm X is often viewed as a prison narra-tive, whereby conversion occurs while incarcer-ated, the importance of his text lies outside prison.For Kelley, it is the early, illicit stories X offersthat are “not a detour but an essential element onhis road to radicalization” (Race Rebels 163). Kel-ley’s interpretation of the conversion narrative offersan important twist on the traditional scholarship


surrounding such trajectories. InMonster, it couldbe argued that Shakur’s violent young gangbang-ing days warrant detailed attention, for they framehis journey through punishment and on to politi-cal enlightenment, making his ultimate renuncia-tion of violence even more powerful. Literaturescholar, David Brumble, who scrutinizes Monsterin terms of classic tribal warrior cultures, similarlybelieves that Shakur’s preprison years are themost generative: “Kody feels that these storiesdefine him, give his measure, and allow us tounderstand his fame” (159).

Autobiography theory has traditionallyfocused upon thematics, but Brumble explores theformal structures and linguistic detail of Monsterin depth. His emphasis on style reflects recenttrends in autobiography criticism that have alsoshifted in focus from theme to form. The autobi-ography scholar, Herbert Leibowitz, argues thatit is in fact, literary style and technique rather thancontent that forms the crucial interpretive link tounderstanding an autobiography (3). Similarly, inhis cultural study of gangsta rap, Kelley is con-cerned with style and form more than the content.As he contends, “What counts more than thestory is the storytelling” (Yo’ Mama’s 37). Thestylistic features of Monster in terms of its narra-tive structure, help the reader to understand theauthor’s social, political, and cultural messages(regarding nonviolence and escaping the gang).

In Monster, Shakur is “totally absorbed by thewritten word of Malcolm X” (229). Similarly,Obama responds to Malcolm X’s memoir, whichthe future President states “seemed to offer some-thing different” (86). However, Dreams declaresthat this lure is specific to the way in which X’s“repeated acts of self-creation spoke to me” (86).Although Obama’s memoir is not a conventionalprison conversion narrative in terms of making atransition from criminal to reformed andredeemed character, scholars and book reviewershave both noted that his memoir demonstrateselements of a bildungsroman (Allen; Eijun). TheGerman word “bildungsroman” literally trans-lates as “a formation novel”; a story where changeis extremely important, usually focusing on thepsychological and moral growth of the protagonist

from youth to adulthood. It is often described as a“coming-of-age” novel, for someone who is look-ing for answers and experience. Obama too,explores his struggles as a young man to come toterms with, and understand and accept, social per-ceptions of his multiracial heritage. He launchesinto an autobiographical quest to understand hisroots, from Barry, the school student to Barack,the community organizer. In a bildungsroman,the goal is maturity, in much the same way as thegoal in gang memoirs in terms of progressing outof the gang.

The bildungsroman structure is crucial in guid-ing the reader toward the essence of Dreams. Thechildhood and young adult years are important todescribe, for they help to explicate why Obamastruggles later in life to negotiate his mixed racialheritage. As detailed in the introduction: “Whathas found its way onto these pages is a record of apersonal, interior journey – a boy’s search for hisfather, and through that search a workable mean-ing for his life as a black American” (xvi). ScholarSenaha Eijun asserts that the turning point forObama comes when he transfers to ColumbiaUniversity in 1981, and receives a letter from hisfather asking him to visit Kenya and stating heneeds to “know where you belong” (Eijun 216;Obama 114). Like Monster, Dreams engages witha conversion format (albeit a bildungsroman-style) to explore the deeply American notion ofself-creation. Both memoirs warrant scholarlyattention on account of their formal and aestheticdimensions; a specific narrative trajectory isdeployed in the political autobiography, as in thegang memoir, to probe issues of identity, and con-struct an ultimately mature and confident sense ofself.

Self-education: The PoliticsofWriting and Literacy

Although it is interesting to consider the over-all structure of the minority conversion narrative(whether a prison memoir or a postcolonial bil-dungsroman), it is moreover important to address


the politics of writing and of literacy itself thatenabled the production of these literary texts byincarcerated and/or oppressed African-Americanyoung men. Like their earlier prison counterparts,contemporary street gang memoirs become a cele-bration of the ability to write under subjugationand overcome seemingly insurmountable odds(like incarceration) to publish. Likewise, Obama’snarrative crystallizes and acts as representative ofthe age-old struggle of the marginalized subjectgaining autonomy, identity, and maturity throughthe actual act of reading and writing in an envi-ronment where such skills are frequently proble-matized. Both authors are contending with asociety in which racism is rampant, although oneis dealing with issues of prejudice from the state,including a biased penal system, and the otherwith discrimination from a middle-class educa-tion. Since its inception as a slave narrative,African-American life writing has been used as ameans of asserting individual identity andaddressing socio-political realities of the blackexperience. Both Shakur and Obama participatein longstanding expressive traditions of oppressedgroups, focusing on issues of language and learn-ing that stem from marginalization.

By the 1980s, as prison writings were beingsuppressed by the prison authorities in accordancewith President Reagan’s increasingly punitive atti-tude, contemporary prison scholars became morefascinated with the significant feat of writingitself. While autobiography criticism often sup-ported the notion of the free agency of the indi-vidual (through the act of writing), prisonliterature suggested that individual experience wasin fact always politically and culturally con-strained. Prison scholars, such as Auli Ek, BellGale Chevigny, Jarvis, and Franklin, all highlightthe suppressive legislation of the 1980s thatrestricted prison writing, resulting in authors“smuggling out manuscripts” to publishers (Ek55). Such injunctions prompt immediate compari-sons with the situation of slave narrators, forwhom learning to read and write was an illegalact. The first political gesture of slaves within theAnglo-American literary tradition was often seento be the very act of writing in view of such

illegality (Gates 65). Moreover, the act of writing,in humanist tradition, demarcated the ultimatesign of difference between animal and human.Writing became a potent means of resistance oreven “a weapon” for both slave and prison narra-tors (Genet, in Jackson 18). Certainly, prison lit-erature scholars repeatedly return to a historicaland cultural significance of slave narratives whendiscussing contemporary prison literature (Frank-lin 234; Jarvis 113). There is a huge amount ofpolitical power in literacy for slave narrators aswell as prison authors.

Formal education is the traditional portal foracquiring language and literacy competency, skillswhich are deemed a structural prerequisite forsurvival and success in mainstream Americansociety. Yet in Monster, educational institutionsare depicted as a site of conflict, whereby the rightto language and literacy must be forcibly negoti-ated, suggesting that this marginalized young manhas fought an uphill battle to acquire the skills tonarrativize his experiences. In the opening pagesof the memoir, Shakur is suspended from elemen-tary school for throwing a gang sign during a classphotograph (4). From here onwards, school playsa minor role in the narrative. The brief referencesexplain that Shakur sporadically attended to sat-isfy his probation officer, while his motherscreams that the purpose for attendance is “Tolearn, dammit, to learn!” (70). He states that“being ignorant, is to me the equivalent of beingdead,” but shows indifference to high school stat-ing “Academics just couldn’t hold my attention”(117, 71). He implies the blame for his disinterestand thus educational failures lie with the systemitself. By the 1980s, when Shakur should havebeen in school, with Reagan’s budget slashed,fewer African-American youths than ever wereattending schools.

In Monster, the prison provides a distinctiveinformal education, replacing a previously defunctschool education, supplying much needed readingand writing skills that enable one to write a bookdespite the difficult circumstances. Prison permitsdevelopment of reading and writing proficiencyfor as Shakur explains, “In those days my writingand reading skills were bad” (68). As a result of


these skills, combined with other contributoryfactors, such as a political and historical educationleading to self-awareness, prison becomes the siteat which Shakur’s conversion takes place. Inprison, specifically, he finds a linguistic alternativeto his gangsta vernacular and lifestyle. On thestreets, guns had previously been the tools ofcommunication, but once incarcerated, he isintroduced to Malcolm X and other “brotherswho could kill with words” and words now dis-place guns (228–29). Language and literacy skillsundertake a symbolical role, serving as a figurativealternative to guns. Language and literacy are pre-sented as sufficiently powerful to spark theauthor’s conversion, to the extent that Shakurcarefully analyses the effect of words, explicitlyaddressing their sheer strength and spiritual nat-ure. As Shakur details when reading works byMalcolm X: “I felt the words seeping deeper intome, their power coursing through my body,giving me the strength to push on. I was changing,I felt it” (223).

Although Obama has never experienced prisonas a site of informal education, his memoirs indi-cate that he too, is acutely aware of the literalpower of language and the written word. InDreams, the President speaks of being hypnotizedwhen he first read The Autobiography of MalcolmX. Among other praise for Malcolm X, Obama isdrawn in by “the blunt poetry of his words” (86).Like Shakur, Obama can fight for recognitionwith language and literacy skills. In Dreams,Obama acknowledges that he has become “hun-gry for words,” he remembers his father visitinghis childhood school and captivating his class-mates with his tales, and ponders the power of hisfather’s words “to transform” (105–06). Obamadeliberates how he himself “needs to find the rightwords… with the right words everything couldchange” (106).

Dreams repeatedly returns to Obama’s hard-won experiences of an unconventional education.At the local school in Indonesia, he faces theteachers’ bamboo switches, while also being awo-ken at 4am daily to supplement his schooling withlessons from a US correspondence course (36).Once back in Hawaii, although he admits that the

prep school he attended was prestigious, he strug-gles to negotiate his position as an outsider. He isone of only two African-American students andhis African heritage prompts colonial stereotyp-ing: “A redheaded girl asked to touch my hair andseemed hurt when I refused. A ruddy-faced boyasked me if my father ate people” (58, 60).Obama’s education demonstrates the difficultiesand opportunities of growing up in multiculturalAmerica, his memoir exudes quintessentiallyAmerican dimensions, capturing both the night-mare and the dream of America. Like Shakur,Obama’s self-education through extensive readingtakes place outside of the typical classroom, hid-ing away reading library books: “there I would sitand wrestle with words” (85). He reads “Baldwin,Ellison, Hughes, Wright, DuBois” in his owntime, trying to understand or reconcile the doublebind of living by the “white man’s rules” (85).

Thus, in both Monster and Dreams, a lack ofconventional education opens up space for per-sonal trajectories of informal education. BothShakur and Obama demonstrate personal strengthand the ability to overcome, against the odds, thisadversity. Through using unconventional andimprovised resources, the authors can gain statusand ultimately write their own life stories. Whilethese accounts of overcoming difficult odds offercertain traditional US narrative pleasures of self-reliance and rugged individualism, through thedifficult and unpredictable journeys told in thesememoirs, it also exposes the faultlines andinequalities of living in contemporary America.The generic expectations in US culture—and inmemoirs themselves—of mobility and uplift arefollowed by true-life or actual dimensions that arefar less teleological, creating tensions.

Such notions of self-help (learning to readand write by oneself, or at least advancing one’sskills) are particularly fascinating in Monster, forsuch positive themes are set in contrast with thetraditional gangsta penchant for contentioussubjects, such as extreme violence (as seen insome gangsta rap and ghetto films). Yet, in bothcases, the memoirists are acting in culturalist(humanist) traditions in which individual effortcan shape history. The reader is captivated by


the authors’ commitment to agency through theacts of conversion, self-education, and writing.The production of cultural texts under subjuga-tion suggests a culturalist victory. Yet the mem-oirists are simultaneously being continuouslychallenged and undermined by structuralistframes; the stereotyping that surrounds gangauthors, or young black authors, more generally,sour any signs of a clear culturalist cause forcelebration.

Black Cultural Studies:Representing Race andEthnicity

Structuralism played a crucial role in the repre-sentative debates of contemporary Black CulturalStudies, a field which is indebted to the work ofStuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, and other scholars at theCCCS. Black Cultural Studies has been the mostproductive area for discussing the politics of racialrepresentations. When using Cultural Studies as aframework for analyzing Monster and Dreams, itis valuable to consider Hall’s research into the rolethat the mass media play in racial representations.Hall tended to view structuralism as superior toculturalism, favoring theoretical analysis overempirical approaches such as audience studies.What was at stake for Hall was the “culturalpower” of the media—the power to define thingsand to give something meaning. He thus con-ducted close textual readings using semiotics, thecommunicative power of the system of signswithin a text, paying particular attention to issuesof representation.

Hall’s essay “New Ethnicities” (1988) debatedthe shifting politics of racial identity at this time.It explores how the British media “normalize”black culture, presenting it as inferior and mar-ginal. The black experience is often absent, orwhen it does appear, stereotyped. The crux of theessay lies in what Hall sees as a shift from this“struggle over the relations of representation to apolitics of representation itself” (“New Ethnicities”

91). The “relations” revealed the binaryapproaches to critiquing racialist representations,relations normally cast as less complex than poli-tics of representation. For instance, when a “bad”black image is replaced with a “good” one thepositive image still shows complicit racism byassuming all black people are either “good” or allthe “same.” Hall argued that the simplistic natureof representational debates was no longer ade-quate. Instead, the “politics of representation”involved “looking behind the relations of individ-ual media representations and self-representationsof blackness in order to explore the wider struc-tures and deeper determinants” that shape popu-lar culture (Quinn 17).

“New Ethnicities” exacerbated the tensionbetween existing debates over representation as aprocess of artistic depiction and representation asa form of delegation; for example, making a docu-mentary film to explain life “as it really is” oralternatively speaking on behalf of the black com-munity (Procter 126). Following “New Ethnici-ties,” Hall remained preoccupied with culturalrepresentations and their signifying practices(those practices, including the production andreading of texts). In a further crucial essay, “Whatis this ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture?” Hallrevised the ideas from “New Ethnicities” for anAmerican audience (21–33). In the second work,Hall argued that the simplistic nature of thedebates surrounding black popular culture wereno longer sufficient. He maintained that the sim-plistic binaries (“high and low; resistance versusincorporation; authentic versus inauthentic; expe-riential versus formal”) that had previously beenused to map out black culture were no longerappropriate (“What is this ‘Black’” 26). Accordingto Hall, such binaries are “a crude and reduction-ist” way of establishing meaning and representingrace (Representation 235).

Gang scholars, such as Malcolm Klein andMartin Jankowski, reveal the sensationalizedand stereotyped attitude of the printed press andentertainment media toward gangs themselves,particularly in the late 1980s and in early 1990swhen gang membership was soaring (Jankowski284–309; Klein 40). Monster provides fuel for


racial profiling in Shakur’s deployment of hisgang moniker. “Monster” is a classic archetype ofa criminal and the author revels in such tagging.After “stomping” a victim, the police informbystanders that the person responsible for thiswas “a monster,” reflecting the sensationalizeduse of the “gang member as monster” idiom inpolice and media coverage of street gangs in thelate 1980s and early 1990s (Fremon 9; Shakur 13).Although “monster” is applied in the memoir bywhite law enforcement, the young Shakur readilyembraces the label as his Eight-Tray signature.The name becomes synonymous with fear,encouraging associations between blackness andcriminality, as well as prompting peer respect andestablishing an individual identity within thegang. The moniker tale is crucial for setting theviolent tone that pervades the entire narrative. Allsubsequent violent images are centered on Shak-ur’s role as a monster for, under his new alias, hemust “consistently be more vicious and live up tothe name” (12). Shakur dangerously subscribes to,rather than resists, the popular image of blackman as criminal that could reflect badly on thewider black community.

Of the binary oppositions that troubled Hall,the discourse of authentic versus inauthentic is themost pertinent herein. Monster very muchinvoked the powerful discourse of authenticity(the authentic voicing of the street), only to haveit further imposed on the text in the media recep-tion. In many book reviews of Monster and presscoverage of its author following the memoir’srelease, commentators regularly flipped this bin-ary and deemed Monster an inauthentic, co-optedvoice of the streets. The journalists and readers ofvarious print media publications complained thata violent gangbanger was being marketed as an“authentic” voice of the black experience ratherthan considering stories that displayed positiveactions by African Americans (Gelfand). Forinstance, a Harvard-educated waiter by the nameof Leonce Gaiter fought a bitter battle of wordswith Shakur, played out in the pages of LA’s Buzzmagazine. Gaiter raged that his own reality wasthe most pertinent: “This is the voice of the blackexperience” (25–26). Although there are clearly

troubling questions of endorsing an incarceratedblack man as a “normal” situation, there is simul-taneously some irony that such readings are stillworking within the simplified binary logic thatcame under critical attack from Hall. Gaiter andother critics were capitulating to the naive andone-dimensional frames by merely replacing theblack criminal with its polar opposite, theHarvard-educated.

The work of Hall was very influential in con-temporary US Black Cultural Studies, whichcontinued and evolved the research that had orig-inally stemmed from the CCCS. The binariespresented by Hall have certainly been deployedin press/media discussions of gangsta rap andfilm (Quinn 19). Pop culture critics in Americahave explored the burden routinely placed onblack artists to fight against limiting or damagingblack representations. Gangsta culture, likeprison literature, is an excellent source for study-ing the discourse of stereotyped “otherness” inAmerican society and has been addressed by cul-tural scholars, Todd Boyd and bell hooks amongothers. Boyd has praised black artists and texts,such as Monster, for their discourse of authentic-ity, voicing the marginalized (132–33). Mean-while, hooks worries that gangsta culture furthersstereotypes (the lazy and insolent slave, the crim-inal) that African Americans have for so longstruggled against (in so doing, reinforcing a whitesupremacist capitalist patriarchy). Gangsta cul-ture provides excellent materials to apply toHall’s conceptual ideas over both the reproduc-tion of popular images (black men as criminals)and the ways in those stereotypes and marginal-ized representations are either resisted or rein-forced, whether by the subjects themselves ortheir reception.

Obama is far removed from Shakur acquiringhis moniker through his horrific acts of violence.Yet, there are plenty of rich points of comparisonbetween Monster and Dreams along the lines ofracial typecasting. Like Shakur, Obama is keenlyaware of “the limited number of options my dis-posal” (Obama 79; Shakur 252). Playing basket-ball as a young man, Obama knows he is “livingout a caricature of black male adolescence” and feels


uncomfortable when a shopper in a supermarketguilelessly asks if he plays the sport (79, 82). Thegangbanger and the athlete are both common cul-tural characterizations of the contemporaryyoung black man and serve to feed Hall’s trepida-tion over the binary logic of “good” and “bad”depictions of race. Yet, the position of these twomen as authors can function to dismantle theinverted portrayals of positive–negative. Asdetailed earlier, both of them consciously drawattention to the very act of reading and writingitself. As writers, they can present stories of crimi-nal activities and sporting prowess (and in sodoing probe and challenge these portrayals), whileconcurrently presenting an alternative, widerrange of representations.

Although Obama and Shakur’s roles as authorspotentially stimulate new representationaldebates, there is evidence that the publishingindustry has failed to move beyond the puerileand one-dimensional stereotypes. Hall firmlycontends that the politics of representation is “astruggle over meaning which continues and isunfinished” and these typecasting battles remainin evidence in the literary world (Representation277). Dreams details the Manhattan publisherwho suggested that Obama could not hold up hispersonal experiences and story as being somehowrepresentative of the black American experiencebecause he did not come from an underprivilegedbackground (xvi). Some paradox that Obama wasencouraged to write his life story once he becamethe first black president of Harvard Law Review,yet that is not sufficiently attention-grabbing formany (vii). In the early 1990s, prompted in partby the release of Monster, a number of authorsand literary critics angrily addressed the problem-atic question of the publishing world being drawntoward aggressive black male imagery (Barras;Staples). For example, an article in theWashingtonPost in 1994 addressed the contemporary climateof the publishing industry and its treatment ofAfrican Americans, raising accusations of exploi-tation (French). The journalist criticized publish-ers for being most interested in texts, such asMonster and former gang member NathanMcCall’s Makes Me Wanna Holler. The article

expressed disappointment that publishers con-tinue to correlate black writers with tales of crimi-nality.

Conclusions

As a contemporary street gang memoir, Mon-ster predictably incorporates aggressive imageryand is arguably commercially profitable partlybecause of the gangsta propensity for violence.However, gangsta violence is not Monster’s onlyappeal. The book is simultaneously concernedwith the conversion tract. While the violent com-ponent centers upon short-term gratuitous plea-sure, the conversion is a pedagogical aspect thatrelates to discipline, forbearance, and long-termgoals. The power of this memoir lies in its com-pelling combination of violence and conversion.These two constituent elements run parallel andin many ways service one another. The tensionbetween violence and pedagogy is often reflectedin the narrative conflict between the young gang-banger and wiser, redeemed man. It is this veryfriction which rendersMonster, so intriguing.

The themes of self-improvement, aspiration,education, and empowerment of minorities thatrun throughout Monster are very much capturedby Obama’s own story that he himself hasrecounted and constructed through a conversion-style memoir. Obama has learned about unequalpower relations from the ground level and dem-onstrates a hard-won experience that comes toinform value frameworks and attitudes. His mem-oir moreover regularly returns to charged issuesof identity politics, renewal, redemption, and cre-ating status for the marginalized. Like the gangmemoirist, he maps notions of self-invention andempowerment in polyglot America. The hope inhis autobiographical story captures the best ofAmerica (the possibilities for rebirth and renewal)which is arguably one of the key marketable andmeaningful features ofMonster.

This article has considered the longstandingdivide in Cultural Studies between culturalismand structuralism and used it as a way into


examining Monster and Dreams. Proceeding fromthe subject matter about memoirs of the marginal-ized, this article almost necessarily takes a moreculturalist approach. Nonetheless, the authors areexploring their own identity and agency withinconditions of structural constraint and hence, it isdifficult to ignore structural frameworks. Indeed,the analysis of stereotyped representations ofgang members as murderous or “monstrous”thugs presented in the news and printed medialend themselves to structuralist lines of thought.Culturalism is seemingly a more obvious “fit”with these two texts because these are, at least inostensible terms, memoirs of the oppressed andthe subcultural with clear grassroots dimensions.However, structural constraints are also verymuch in evidence in the memoirs of the textsthemselves and their reception.

Notes

1. This article takes inspiration from Eithne Quinn’s study ofgangsta rap which notes a similar time frame between the growth ofWest coast gangsta rap and budding debates in the field of Black Cul-tural Studies. See Quinn, Nuthin’ But A “G” Thang: The Cultureand Commerce of Gangsta Rap (New York: Columbia UniversityPress, 2005): 17.

2. For instance, see the critical work on Audre Lorde’s memoirZami (London: Persephone, 1982), which detailed her life as a blacklesbian, including: Barbara DiBernard, “Zami: A Portrait of an Artistas a Black Lesbian,” The Kenyon Review 13.4 (Fall 1991): 195–213;Erin Carlston, “Zami and the Politics of Plural Identity,” in SusanWolfe and Julia Penelope (eds.), Sexual Practice/Textual Theory: Les-bian Cultural Criticism (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1993): 226–36.

3. Life writing scholars have noted that “transformation under-girds the American experience.” See Gail Jardine, “To be Black,Male, and Conscious: Race, Rage, and Manhood in America,”American Quarterly 48.2 (1996): 385–93 (386).

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Documents

Monster, Dreams, and Cultural Studies: Exploring Gang Memoir and Political Autobiography