Loss Leader For a Day

It's a foggy morning and I'm stuck at home waiting for delivery of my new washer and dryer. Seems like as good a time as any to talk about Gang Leader for a Day, which I just finished last night. While I applaud Venkatesh's bravery in entering the Robert Taylor Homes to begin with, and his dedication to his fieldwork, and the openness that allowed him to befriend residents of the housing project, the whole book mainly felt self-serving and self-aggrandizing. Here he is, posing on the cover, in a leather coat, standing in the ghetto. Isn't he a cool dude? He's no academic. He's rogue, yo!

Open the cover and then you have the text itself. Why was this published? The fieldwork he describes took place nearly 20 years ago, in a community that has been disbursed (or erradicated, depending on how you look at it). It's not about the actual fieldwork, anyway. This isnt a monograph, it's a memoir, about what a badass grad student he was. The text doesn't satisfy as memoir or autobiography, though, because even though it's ultimately about Venkatesh and not the gang member, it lacks the generic structure of memoir: I begin, I ascend, I lose my way and mess up, I am redeemed. He does realize at some point that he's using these subjects for his own ends, true, but whatever redemption he looked for was certainly lost by trotting these same people out these years later to use as fodder for popular non-fiction.

I understand that this gets at the heart of the dilemna faced not only by anthropologists and sociologists but also documentarians of all stripes: how does my observing change the observed, and how do I ultimately create a document that's not somehow about me? This text ultimately feels confused on this issue. It's about JT and the Black Kings, sort of, it's about being a grad student at U of C, sort of, it's about the lessons of ghetto life and about Ivy life, sort of. Mainly, it's about voyeurism - his fascination with a life unlike the suburban Southern California world of his childhood, and the fascination with the lives of the other that this book's publisher knows that the educated, white, upper middle-class buyer of the text shares with the author.

In other words, I'm implicated too. Gang Leader for a Day isn't the subject; we are.