The Culture and Politics of Contemporary Street Gang Memoirs

The publication of Sanyika Shakur's Monster: The Autobiography of an L.A. Gang Membe r in 1993 generated a huge amount of excitement in literary circles— New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani deemed it a “shocking and galvanic book”—and set off a new publishing trend of gang memoirs in the 1990s. The memoirs showcased tales of violent confrontation and territorial belonging but also offered many of the first journalistic and autobiographical accounts of the much-mythologized gang subcultur