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3 BOOKS MAKING A KILLING An Introduction The publication of Monster: The Autobiography of an LA Gang Member by Sanyika Shakur in the summer of 1993 generated a huge amount of excitement in literary circles.1 Michiko Kakutani, who has a fierce reputation as a book reviewer for the New York Times, deemed it a “startling and galvanic book,” highlighting Shakur’s “ear for street language that’s as perfectly pitched as Richard Price’s, a feeling for character and status potentially as rich as Tom Wolfe’s.”2 With the publication of Monster, a new trend of gang memoirs emerged in the United States. Their content centered on contemporary street gang life in the ghettos and barrios, offering graphic tales of violent confrontation and territorial belonging. They were written by former gang members, both African American and Latino. The majority were set in Los Angeles (LA), the city that would be dubbed “the gang capital of America.”3 These memoirs formed part of a literary production trend that included journalistic and biographical accounts of gang culture as well as anthologies and memoirs by actual former gang members.4 Novel-length memoirs were the most lucrative dimension of the trend, with numerous memoirs published in the 1990s alone.5 Three of the most successful and influential of these gang memoirs form the subject of this book. Shakur’s Monster is an account of gangbanging with one of the infamous African American “Crips” gangs in South Central LA during the 1980s. The memoir tells the story of how Shakur earned the nickname “Monster” for his brutal behavior before undergoing a political and personal transformation. By 1999, Monster had sold 100,000 hardback and 150,000 paperback copies; to date there are more than 400,000 An Introduction 4 copies of Monster in print in the United States alone.6 Several months after the publication of Monster, Luis J. Rodriguez released Always Running: La Vida Loca—Gang Days in LA. Rodriguez reflects on his involvement with Mexican American gangs in East LA during the 1960s and 1970s. Like Monster, the narrative balances tales of gang conflict with a politicized conversion narrative, informed by the Chicano movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Always Running has sold over 400,000 copies with more than twenty reprints and translation into twenty-seven languages.7 A publishing representative for the memoir deemed it “one of our strongest backlist titles” and “a much beloved classic” that “continues to sell every year.”8 Monster and Always Running acted as literary prototypes for this production trend in contemporary gang memoirs, setting thematic and narrative conventions and proving their considerable commercial potential. In 2004, with more than twenty-five gang memoirs published since Monster was first released, Stanley “Tookie” Williams published Blue Rage, Black Redemption: A Memoir.9 Written by one of the co-founders of the Crips gang established in South Central LA in 1971, it offers a longer history of gang culture and conflict. Even between 1993 and the publication of Blue Rage in 2004, LA street gangs continued to thrive.10 Given a death penalty sentence in 1981, Williams converted from notorious former gang member to outspoken peace activist in the early 1990s. In 1996 he authored a series of anti-gang children’s books that resulted, quite extraordinarily , in several nominations for the Nobel Prize (in both Literature and Peace categories).11 In the year following the publication of Blue Rage, Williams’s struggle for a stay of execution and his eventual execution in December 2005 garnered a great deal of media attention. Because of this controversy Blue Rage, which was reissued posthumously, stands as a particularly topical and revealing addition to this production trend. As its title suggests—rage and redemption—this memoir, like the other two, offers a powerful narrative of conversion as well as of conflict and crime. Blue Rage proved extremely popular, especially following Williams’s execution, when sales of the memoir surged.12 The crux of this research is to examine the conflict between the competing forces of violence and pedagogy, as illustrated by the execution of Williams. The controversial execution crystallizes the polarized debates about contemporary gang memoirs, which have been variously demonized as violent and sensationalist or, by contrast, praised as offering a pedagogic and preventative anti-gang stance. Such contradictory responses are reflected in the memoirs themselves. Their narrative arc rests on [18.117.186.92] Project...

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