The Culture and Politics of Contemporary Street Gang Memoirs

Chapter Two: Homeboys Between Hard Covers: Scholarly Approaches to the Study of Gang Memoirs

43 HOMEBOYS BETWEEN HARD COVERS Scholarly Approaches to the Study of Gang Memoirs This book will examine the emergence of these memoirs as a popular cultural phenomenon and a commercial production trend while also considering their complex textual politics in terms of both theme and form.1 Furthermore, I intend to explore how gang memoirs are constructed in the media and interpreted by audiences. In an attempt to understand the many aspects of these under-studied memoirs, this book takes an interdisciplinary approach. The theoretical frameworks which have informed my research can be divided into three (sometimes overlapping) areas: scholarly debates in the field of autobiography theory (form, narration, identity ); debates in the field of the cultural studies of race (representational politics); and, scholarship on both media reception and reader response. In broad terms, the main field of this project is cultural studies. This chapter will reflect on some of the early but still relevant work in this discipline and will also encompass recent interventions and developments. The discipline of cultural studies is often identified as being split between structuralism (operations of discursive power and constraints on individuals ) and culturalism (looking at the practices of everyday people to understand how they might comprehend and ultimately overcome structural constraints). Structuralism, according to cultural scholar James Procter, is “concerned with the linguistic structures that underpin, enable and govern meaning,” while culturalism is quite simply “a less exclusive, more democratic understanding of culture.”2 The structuralist/culturalist divide has already been identified in gangsta culture, including gangsta rap and ghetto action films.3 On the one Chapter Two Scholarly Approaches to the Study of Gang Memoirs 44 hand gangsta can be deemed groundbreaking, even revolutionary; on the other, such culture can be critiqued as co-opted and commercial. Rap, for example, can be seen to give voice to and therefore empower the marginalized , or conversely as exploiting black criminal stereotypes for profit. These competing paradigms that underpin the discipline of cultural studies are both in evidence in this study and provide an organizing principle for this chapter. Culturalism is a more obvious fit with this project because these are, at least in ostensible terms, memoirs of the oppressed and the subcultural. However, the structuralist constraints of the memoirs—of their emergence, genre, and media reception—are also very much in evidence in contrast to the culturalist, grassroots dimensions of the books. Autobiography theory is naturally central to this study into gang memoirs . In particular the contemporary turn toward the marginalized forms a valuable part of my conceptual approach to the gang memoirs. Though scholarly work exploring memoirs as a literary form is vast, I will highlight the specific formal dimensions of memoirs (narrative personas, identities, and trajectories) that are imperative for studying Mexican and African American autobiography. Many diverse theories of autobiography help to assist this project due to the experiential versus formal nature of gang memoirs. Memoirs by definition are essentially based on practical experience, and most of the scholarly studies of these memoirs have been empirical (that is, sociological) rather than formal (textual). Yet I contend that the formal features and dimensions of these particular memoirs are equally crucial and that consequently there is a need to acknowledge a variety of theoretical approaches. Contemporary autobiography theorists note that autobiography is everywhere.4 Modern-day developments such as the internet and email mean that private lives are conducted in public spaces. Prison autobiographical writings can now be found on the internet (consider Stanley Williams’s website), in magazines, radio and television shows, rap lyrics, and advertisements.5 New topics for autobiography scholarship have also included reasons for lying, controversially suggesting that all autobiographers are unreliable narrators simply because all humans are naturally liars.6 According to Timothy Dow Adams, the audience reads with the assumption that the complete truth is not feasible and thus lying in autobiography is rendered impossible.7 Furthermore, there have been ethical dilemmas in contemporary autobiography criticism. As Paul Eakin asks, are memoirs now offering too many graphic details?8 Recent life writing offers these new materials for analysis, but Laura Marcus argues that, in Scholarly Approaches to the Study of Gang Memoirs 45 fact, contemporary theory is similar to older criticism regardless of content . According to Marcus, both old and new schools of thought maintain that autobiography is an unstable genre because of the complicated relationships between...