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

Abstract

Introduction In 1995, Barack Obama published Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance. The memoir details his multicultural upbringing in Indonesia and Hawaii, his college education on West and East coasts of United States, and his work as an innercity community organizer in Chicago prior to attending law school. The influential York Times critic, Michiko Kakutani, has since deemed Obama's story the most evocative, lyrical and candid autobiography written by a future president (From Books). Two years earlier in 1993, literary world had been excitedly discussing Sanyika Shakur's Monster: The Autobiography of an LA Gang Member. Kakutani contended attests not only to Mr. Shakur's journalistic eye for observation, but also to his novelistic skills as a story-teller.... This is a startling and galvanic book (Illuminating). Written from inside prison, is an account of gangbanging with one of infamous AfricanAmerican gangs in South Central Los Angeles (LA) during 1980s. The memoir tells story of how Shakur (born Kody Scott) earned nickname Monster for his brutal behavior before undergoing a political and personal transformation. is noteworthy for its emphasis on both frisson of violent gang exploits and sober, salutary reflection of politicized and educated hindsight. Born in 1961, only two years earlier than Shakur, Obama grew up in same America as gangbanger. In 1983, as Shakur was fully immersed in Eight-Trays Crips set, Obama was becoming a community worker, disgusted with White House where Reagan and his minions were carrying on their dirty deeds and convinced that change needed to be effected at grassroots level (133). As Shakur was becoming familiar with jails and prisons of LA and California, Obama was volunteering to help black youths on streets of Altgeld Gardens and other housing projects in Windy City. Unlike Shakur's more lumpen worldview, Obama's liberal, yet structural critique toward healthcare, education, immigration, and cultural sensitivities (emphasized further in his 2006 collection of essays, The Audacity of Hope), suggest that he is a product of 1960s more radical moment. Obama's exploration of social problems in America has led him to significantly different conclusions to Shakur who states that separation may be a solution for failure of positive multicultural existence in United States (382). Despite obvious disparities between two, there are some suggestive and fruitful parallels to be made between President's own frank coming-of-age story and Shakur's violent and seemingly sensationalized tales. Such similarities are particularly notable in terms of memoirs' narrative structure, their emphasis on language and literacy skills, and politics of racial representation. Both texts were released in chaotic aftermath of 1993 LA riots; an event which, as discussed in Monster, revealed difficulties and complexities of being a young African-American man in urban America. In academic realm, this was a particularly poignant moment for British Cultural Studies, with fervent debates in field of race representational politics being prompted by Stuart Hall's innovative essays New Ethnicities (1988) and What is this 'Black' in Black Popular Culture? (1992).1 Although British Cultural Studies was thriving by 1960s, this article will situate and Dreams in some of more recent interventions and developments in discipline, as well as life writing and prison literature criticism in late 1980s and early 1990s. Cultural Studies was often identified as being split between and culturalism. The former references operations of discursive power and constraints on individuals. Indeed, structuralism literally determined underlying structures that made meaning possible, exploring how meaning was produced and reproduced by dominant ideologies within a culture. …