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The publication in 1993 of Sanyika Shakur’s Monster: The Autobiography of an L.A. Gang Member 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 subculture. This book focuses on three of these memoirs — Shakur’s; Luis J. Rodriguez’s Running: La Vida Loca: Gang Days in L.A.; and Stanley “Tookie” Williams’s Rage, Black Redemption — as key representatives of the gang autobiography. It examines the conflict among violence, thrilling sensationalism, and the authorial desire to instruct and warn competing within these works. The narrative arcs of the memoirs themselves rest on the process of conversion from brutal, young gang bangers to nonviolent, enlightened citizens. The author analyzes the emergence, production, marketing, and reception of gang memoirs. Through interviews with Rodriguez, Shakur, and Barbara Cottman Becnel (Williams’s editor), she reveals both the writing and publishing processes. This book analyzes key narrative conventions, specifically how diction, dialogue, and narrative arcs shape the works. It also explores how the memoirs are consumed. This interdisciplinary study — fusing literary criticism, sociology, ethnography, reader-response study, and editorial theory — brings scholarly attention to a popular, much-discussed, but understudied modern expression.

This book is the product of five years of field research with progressive activists associated with the School for Indian Languages and Cultures (SILC), South Asian Americans Leading Together (SAALT), the feminist dance collective Post Natyam, and the grassroots feminist political organization South Asian Sisters. It explores how traditional cultural forms may be critically appropriated by marginalized groups and used as rhetorical tools to promote deliberation and debate, spur understanding and connection, broaden political engagement, and advance particular social identities. Within this framework, the author examines how these performance activists advocate a political commitment to both justice and care, and to both deliberative discussion and deeper understanding. To consider how this might happen in diasporic performance contexts, she weaves together two lines of thinking. One grows from feminist theory and draws upon a core literature concerning the ethics of care. The other comes from rhetoric, philosophy, and political science literature on recognition and acknowledgment. This dual approach is used to reflect upon South Asian American women’s performances that address pressing social problems related to gender inequality, immigration rights, ethnic stereotyping, hate crimes, and religious violence. Case study chapters address the relatively unknown history of South Asian American rhetorical performances from the early 1800s to the present. Avant-garde feminist performances by the Post Natyam dance collective appropriate women’s folk practices, and Hindu goddess figures make rhetorical claims about hate crimes against South Asian Americans after 9/11.

Travel with La Guiannée in Ste. Genevieve, Missouri and Prairie du Rocher, Illinois to glimpse the Franco-American cultural identity in these two Midwestern communities that have continued for over 250 years and even have survived language loss due in part to socio-political pressures. Cultural identity presents itself in many forms, not just language, and appears as festivals and traditional celebrations, which take on a more profound and visible role when language loss occurs. On New Year’s Eve, the guionneurs, those who participate in the celebration, disguise themselves in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century costume and travel throughout their community, singing and wishing New Year’s greetings to other members of the community. This celebration, like others, such as the Cajun Mardi Gras in Louisiana, Mumming in Ireland and Newfoundland, and the Carnaval de Binche, belong to a category of begging quest festivals that have existed since the Medieval Age. These festivals may also be adaptations or evolutions of pre-Christian pagan rituals. Part one creates an historical context of the development of the French mentality and cultural identity as well as an historical context of La Guiannée in order to compare and understand the contemporary identity and celebration. Part two analyzes the celebration to create an affirmation of community by using liminal theories proposed by Victor Turner, who states that during such rites or rituals, individuals undergo a transformation to reveal cultural information to others. Part three discusses cultural continuity and its relationship to language to reveal contemporary expressions of the Franco-American identity.