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The late Tupac Shakur, one of the most notorious rappers in the history of rap music, partly by his mother Afeni's raising him in an environment conducive to a revolutionary education and partly through his education in the political landscape of the American inner city, has come to represent not just a subaltern, historically-situated narrative through the aural reception and recitation of his rap lyrics. His poetic corpus also represents a complex network of textual communication comprised of generations of street literature. This paper looks at the relationships between textuality, literacy, typographic design, and racial identity. In looking at the alternative literature of the Black Panthers, the Nation of Islam, and the street literature of the gangsta rap subcultures,1 I will trace a trajectory that demonstrates, contrary to common assumptions, not a uniformity based upon a shared dialectic in terms of a perceived black/white binary, but a complex network of relations rife with external obstacles, and internal contradictions and dissent. The relations represent a nuanced network defined in many respects as being in opposition to the racial/cultural other, and in other respects by a larger call to shared humanity.
THE PHILOSOPHICAL UNDERPINNINGS OF BLACK AMERICAN LITERACY
When dealing with African American revolutionary literature of the late twentieth century, one must understand that the experience of literature for African Americans is and has been quite different from that of Americans of other ethnic and racial backgrounds. As with each culture, this literary experience should be viewed as being inextricably tied to the history of its respective people. That stated, given that the black American literary experience has been one shaped by slavery, and then, subsequently, the legacy of Southern white supremacy in both federal and civic legislation, African American literary history has often been singled out for its deficiencies. Some literacy scholars, however, have portrayed the history as having significant accomplishment considering the conditions from which it had to emerge. In his 1987 book The Legacies of Literacy, for instance, Harvey J. Graff observed that 'for blacks, the legacies of literacy were often meagre in confronting the massive obstacles to advancement and integration. In facing those barriers, rooted in prejudice, discrimination, and racism, black literacy achievement remains impressive'.2 Additionally, Graff offered the compelling suggestion that although...
