Under a Bad Sign: Criminal Self-Representation in African American Popular Culture by Jonathan Munby, and: If We Must Die: From Bigger Thomas to Biggie Smalls by Aimé J. Ellis (review)

Identification is what witnesses do before a police lineup; what witnesses do with the perpetrator or victim of a crime, with the defendant or plaintiff of a trial; what one does with an image of others or oneself (as an other) in a criminal culture, a culture of criminals (criminal culture) or a culture defined by its criminality (criminal culture). Black men’s murky and fluid identifications with a criminal culture is the central theme of two commendable recent studies, Jonathan Munby’s Under a Bad Sign: Criminal Self-Representation in African American Popular Culture and the late Aimé Ellis’s If We Must Die: From Bigger Thomas to Biggie Smalls. Both authors are concerned with recovering through cultural criticism the complexity and capaciousness of black men’s negotiations with racial slavery and its afterlife, placing emphasis on how that historic struggle has permutated within the social, political, and economic conditions of late capitalist U. S., post-civil rights, post-Cold War. Both authors draw deftly from the archives of twentieth-century black popular culture, tracking the inventions, reinventions and interventions of black male creative intellectuals across the domains of literature, music, film and television from the Jim Crow era to the Obama Administration. Each is attempting, with distinct objectives and results, to adumbrate and illustrate the effects of a certain double operation in black men’s (aesthetic) practices of everyday life in a way that takes readers beyond any straightforward celebration of resistance as defiance or subversion. This is not, however, because the authors under review do not celebrate the spirit of resistance they surely find circulating in black men’s cultural productions. They are instead urging us to appreciate something more profound, more difficult and more disturbing at work in the “the complex history of African Americans’ own controversial and seemingly counterproductive investment in criminal self-representations of black identity” (2).

For Munby, the promulgation of the “badman” trope in African American culture—from the apocryphal tales of Stagolee at the turn of the twentieth century to gangsta rappers’ boasts at the turn of the twenty-first—“constitutes an ingenious way to speak truth to power” (6). That is to say, the badman does not follow the “logical” path of racial uplift and the cultivation of mimetic desire, pursuing instead an “‘ill-logic’ of criminal self-representation” that challenges the very terms of social respectability and embraces outlawry (8). Munby describes the perpetuation by black popular cultural producers of “criminal visions of themselves and their communities” as a form of “self-conscious black ‘minstrelsy’” that takes the risk of complicity head-on in order to “wrest the badman’s meaning from the enemy,” a procedure that Munby suggests is an underacknowledged component—rather than a simple negation or refusal—of the “ongoing black quest for full enfranchisement” (2, 6; emphasis in original). In short, black criminal self-representation, done well, betrays “a trickster-like capacity to turn disadvantage into something generative, to make good on the bad” (21). It is Munby’s signal contribution, on this score, to historicize this signifying capacity relative to both shifting material contexts and the formal evolution of black cultural production across the mass media.

Under a Bad Sign is comprised of five topical chapters bookended by an introduction that lays out the theoretical framework of the study, and an epilogue that provides more than a recapitulation of its central argument in its commentary on the emergence of director Antoine Fuqua from the minor leagues of hip-hop music video production to the mainstream of Hollywood filmmaking. Chapter one explores the functions of the numbers racket or policy bank in Harlem of the 1920s and ’30s through a reading of...