[ecrea] New Book Announcement - The Mark of Criminality: Rhetoric, Race, and Gangsta Rap in the War-on-Crime Era

In The Mark of Criminality: Rhetoric, Race, and Gangsta Rap in the 
War-on-Crime Era, Bryan J. McCann argues that gangsta rap should be 
viewed as more than a damaging reinforcement of an era’s worst racial 
stereotypes. Rather, he positions the works of key gangsta rap artists, 
as well as the controversies their work produced, squarely within the 
law-and-order politics and popular culture of the 1980s and 1990s to 
reveal a profoundly complex period in American history when the meanings 
of crime and criminality were incredibly unstable.

At the center of this era—when politicians sought to prove their 
“tough-on-crime” credentials—was the mark of criminality, a set of 
discourses that labeled members of predominantly poor, urban, and 
minority communities as threats to the social order. Through their use 
of the mark of criminality, public figures implemented extremely harsh 
penal polices that have helped make the United States the world’s 
leading jailer of its adult population.

At the same time when politicians like Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, 
and Bill Clinton and television shows such as COPS and America’s Most 
Wanted perpetuated images of gang and drug-filled ghettos, gangsta rap 
burst out of the hip-hop nation, emanating mainly from the predominantly 
black neighborhoods of South Central Los Angeles. Groups like NWA and 
solo artists (including Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, and Tupac Shakur) became 
millionaires by marketing the very discourses political and cultural 
leaders used to justify their war on crime. For these artists, the mark 
of criminality was a source of power, credibility, and revenue. By 
understanding gangsta rap as a potent, if deeply imperfect, enactment of 
the mark of criminality, we can better understand how crime is always a 
site of struggle over meaning. Furthermore, by underscoring the nimble 
rhetorical character of criminality, we can learn lessons that may 
inform efforts to challenge our nation’s failed policies of mass 
incarceration.

Available via University of Alabama Press website: http://bit.ly/2qkcepO


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