Contemporary African American Literature: The Living Canon

5. Street Literature and the Mode of Spectacular Writing: Popular Fiction between Sensationalism, Education, Politics, and Entertainment

five street Literature and the mode of speCtaCuLar writing: popuLar fiCtion between sensationaLism, eduCation, poLitiCs, and entertainment Kristina Gr a aff During the past decade a new form of black popular fiction emerged in the nation’s inner-urban areas—spaces that the publishing industry and bookdistributionnetworksneverimaginedwouldbecommerciallyviable. known as street literature or urban Fiction, the novels are ofen written by first-time authors—some of them former or current prisoners— and deal with street violence, prison experiences, and the drug business, especially the crack trade since the 1980s. Mainly circulated through the practices of self-publishing and street vending, these books reach a broad audience, particularly in black working-class communities, and have forced major publishers and book outlets to take notice. since the genre’s commercialization, large presses also aim to attract nonurban and nonblack audiences.1 although exact sales numbers are difficult to determine, bestseller lists of the Afican American Literature Book Club (aalBc), Essence Magazine and the african american book announcement website, Books of Soul, indicate that street literature is currently one of the most widely read subgenres of african american fiction.2 street literature can indeed be read in the tradition of authors such as Donald goines or iceberg slim, whose novels from the late 1960s and 1970s are known as “pulp” or “ghetto realistic fiction.”3 like street literature , novels in this subgenre were mostly set in urban low-income neighborhoods and portrayed the inescapable fates of black hustlers, gangsters, 113 114 · Kr istina Gr a a ff or drug addicts through the use of graphically explicit street slang.4 primarily , however, street literature grew out of a hip hop culture, sharing with rap music not only language styles but also, since the 1980s, the narrative location of “the hood” and topics such as black mass incarceration , police violence, and postindustrial inner-urban decay. The two cultural expressions are also comparable in generating a wide variety of entrepreneurial practices that, in the case of street literature, range from the formation of small independent publishing and printing companies to street vending stands. like certain aspects of hip hop culture, popular urban novels have been the subject of controversy, due in particular to graphic cover art and explicit language. This chapter elaborates on such explicitness by linking it to the novels’ dramatic content, structure, and style in order to illustrate how street literature can be read beyond a simple good/bad binary. utilizing the concept of “spectacular writing,” which comprises the novels’ visibility, immediacy, and externalization of conflicts, i show how works of street literature are instead characterized by multiple interpretational layers that serve simultaneously sensationalist , didactic, political, and entertaining functions. the Controversy around street Literature Despite the genre’s economic success, street literature remains controversial . one of the advocates for street literature is author and former editor-in-chief of Vibe magazine Danyel smith, who praises street literature authors for raising sensitive issues—such as crime and drugs, or the impact of incarceration on many black communities—and for daring to tell these stories “boldly, without nuance, and with pride.”5 For smith, street literature’s venture lies in its confrontational expressivitythat “put[s] it all out there—the stuff many african americans spend their lives trying to get past, move away from, or talk about only among themselves.”6 she opposes controlling access to the literary scene, an “unless-you-canact -proper-don’t-come-outside dictum,”7 and instead pleads for a side-byside relationship between street literature and black “literary” fiction. her call for the coexistence of popular street literature with more “literary” titles, however, is criticized harshly by author and journalist nick chiles, who fears that works like his own cannot compete with Str eet Liter atur e a nd the Mode of Spectacula r W r iting · 115 “these purveyors of crassness.”8 chiles disapproves of street literature for its “glorification and exploitation of sex, violence, greed—the worst aspects of our nature, the things that we all must fight to tame, rather than to celebrate.”9 he also objects to the fact that visual appropriation emanating from street literature, with “lurid book jackets displaying all forms of brown flesh,”10 would represent the majority images within the african american literature sections of many bookstore chains. notably , both camps base their judgments on the novels’ outward and externalized forms of expression, by either valuing the bold storytelling and “busty...