good kid, m.A.A.d city: Kendrick Lamar’s Autoethnographic Narrative

James B. Haile, III

Dickinson College

Autoethnography is an autobiographical genre of writing and research that displays multiple layers of consciousness. Back and forth autoethnographer’s gaze, first through an ethnographic wide angle lens, focusing outward on social and cultural aspects of their personal experience; then, they look inward exposing a vulnerable self that is moved by and may move through, refract, and resist cultural interpretations. As they zoom backward and forward, inward and outward, distinctions between the personal and cultural become blurred, sometimes beyond distinct recognition.

—C. Ellis, “Autoethnography” Personal narratives are stories about authors who view themselves as the phenomenon and write evocative narratives specifically focused on their academic, research, and personal lives. These often are the most controversial forms of autoethnography for traditional social scientists, especially if they are not accompanied by more traditional analysis and/or connections to scholarly literature. Personal narratives propose to understand a self or some aspect of a life as it intersects with a cultural context, connect to other participants as co-researchers, and invite readers to enter the author's world and to use what they learn there to reflect on, understand, and cope with their own lives. —C. Ellis, T.E. Adams, and A.P. Bochner, “Autoethnography: An Overview” When the lights shine off and it’s my turn to settle down/My main concern/Promise that you will sing about me/Promise that you will sing about me.

—Kendrick Lamar, “Sing About Me”

Abstract Kendrick Lamar, in characterizing good kid, m.A.A.d city as a “short story”, announces, in his second studio album, a public declaration: we, the listening audience, are not hearing another hip-hop album, another autobiography, but something else, we are hearing a mixture of social, cultural and the personal in what will be termed the “autoethnographic”. That is, in addition to a personal declaration, Kendrick offers us a new way to think about hip-hop as a whole, not simply as a capitalistic enterprise, nor merely as a “black news” channel, but as a distinct method for collecting data and understanding the experiences and existence of black people that can be used to understand not only urban Americans, but non-normative persons of color the world over. Along with Kendrick Lamar’s album, I will be analyzing Richard Wright’s Black Boy and his Native Son character, “Bigger Thomas” as textural transcript, which can be mined for methodological purposes. Lamar’s text, along with Wright’s “Black Boy” and Bigger Thomas, can be read beyond the(ir) individual’s narrative, but rather for its [their] collective, auto-ethnographic narrative. Utilizing autoethnographic method, this essay brings together epistemological, ontological, and ethical concerns within sociology of knowledge and phenomenology, operating as both a way of understanding reality and an expression of reality.i

Key Terms: autoethnography, autonarration, reflexivity, ethnography, sociology of knowledge, epistemology, ontology, metaphysics, black phenomenology, Richard Wright, Kendrick Lamar

Epistemological Models: Ethnography and Autoethnography Dominant modes of knowledge formation and knowledge consumption in the history of Western intellectual life have been situated around a knowing subject and that which is the object or receiver of that knowledge. In short, our language reflected Aristotle’s claim of philosophical inquiry in that it must, and always, contained a subject and a predicate: that which is known and that which is known about it. In the 1980s, though, the weary of this formula was expressed in the post-modern move away from master narratives and ‘mastery’ over things in general and towards a more dialectic relationality—in philosophy we see the emergence of phenomenology; in linguistics, deconstruction; in sociology, ethnography and participant observation. Nevertheless, these approaches still contained the ingredients of the old, but simply rearranged them. The epistemological model of knowledge—the knower and that which can be known—remained; the addition to these different approaches was merely reassessing the nature of the relationship between knower and known.ii Running parallel to this critique and intellectual development was a counter-narrative of black and brown persons in the West. With the emergence of anti-colonial and post-colonial studies, black sociology, and black philosophy we began to see a radical departure from the knower/known model, and the introduction of ontology into the formula. The question, “who is the knower?” And, “how does ‘who’ the knower is effect the kind of knowledge produced or consumed?” came front and center. While Western intellectualism had attempted to address these questions in the form of self-critique, asking questions such as “how the "facts" and "truths" scientists "found" were inextricably tied to the vocabularies and paradigms the scientists used to represent them”iii they nevertheless failed, for the most part, to come to terms with the ontological question—their question was more concerned with the knower in the abstract person, and not as the cultural person. In black thought, the question became, “how does a scientist’s ‘whiteness’ affect the sorts of questions asked, and the sorts of knowledge sought and consumed?” The ontological question became the ontological shift, and epistemology became equally an ontological endeavor. What are the epistemological and anthropological (ontological) assumptions that go into how we understand reality, how we organize it into facts, and how we operate a schematism to judge these facts? Sociology of knowledge questions our epistemological and anthropological assumptions in coming to terms with understanding reality and judging the ‘truth’ of reality. With the advent of ‘traditional’ sociology—we have to remember, ‘tradition’ simply means that which does not include a discussion of ‘race’ or ‘raced’ theorists, like Du Bois—the study of urban development and the understanding of ‘race’ within the larger social structure of society has been understood, largely, through the lens of problems or social concerns. Black sociology, though, sought to offer a different accounting of this research agenda and a critique of this epistemological and ontological narrative in what constitutes ‘facts’ and the ‘truth’ of these facts.iv

John H. Stanfield notes of this ontological basis for conceptual schemas of traditional sociological analysis when he writes

The distortion of racial minority experiences divergent from those of Euro-Americans is taken for granted in social science methodologies as well as in modes of conceptualization. Ways of seeing and knowing in the social sciences are ethnoculturally based. As in the case of conceptualization, social scientists have generalized the application of methodological techniques with no sensitivity to ethnocultural diversity. For instance, logical positivism, the social sciences, dictates methods of inquiry which cannot handle contradictions and situational variance. The utility of the logical positivism paradigm in addressing human diversity issues is thus an empirical question and not a given fact of science.v

Stanfield here is pointing to the epistemological biases of Euro-American social science as “embedded in the cultural background of social scientists.”vi But, he also challenges minority social scientist, especially black sociologist, to be more than merely ‘outraged’ by this mischaracterization of themselves and their experiences; he challenges to present an ‘impartial’ methodological lens through which to understand themselves. Ignoring perhaps an implicit bias of insisting on “impartiality” as not only a possibility, but also a necessity of social science research—a demand of traditional social science—Stanfield’s criticism stands. Margaret Hunter goes as far as to say that the assumptions imbedded within research itself necessarily locates our epistemological claims within the realm of ontology. That is, “racism and power are not outside of the process at all…they affect nearly every aspect of how researchers conduct their research from the choice of research questions to the interpretation of their data.”vii Moreover, she notes that, ”[E]pistemologies do not exist outside of the people who construct and use them…[E]pistemologies are situated within political, historical, and economic contexts that can provide power and legitimacy to their knowledge claims.”viii In other words, the stories we tell come to have a more pressing significance for intellectual formulation. Narration and self-narration became, in black thought, a source and site for knowledge, where in the Western paradigm it was held largely in contradistinction to ‘real’ knowledge forms. Re-centering and re-thinking both forms and sources (forms as sources) of knowledge, anti-colonial, post-colonial, and African American literature re-figured the practice of collecting ‘data’ and understanding ‘data’ in its relations to the knowledge we may garner about the life and living conditions of black people in their worlds. In this re-formulation, the source of knowledge became value-laden ontological ‘realities’ rather than value-free epistemic ‘truths’.ix In the stories we tell, as anecdotal or as research, epistemology is ontologically ‘fit’, that is, circumscribed as the limits of such ‘truths’.x The stories we tell, even as ‘research’, carry within them certain ontological claims about the nature of the world, its meaning and significance.

We come to realize that epistemology and ontology overlap, even in our most abstract theories. The method(s) we choose—that is, utilize—to frame and understand a phenomenon and/or a problem is expressive of/illuminates an intellectual tradition and position as well as an ontological trajectory, articulating a method for developing knowledge and the truth of an experience, and of an existence. What is at stake, then, is not simply a method of analysis, but also a larger debate concerning historical legacy and intellectual genealogy. We have to ask ourselves, “What metaphysical, ontological, epistemological, and anthropological positions are you endorsing in our choice of methodological analysis?” “What historic trajectory is being summoned forth/conjured, world opened up with and in such a seemingly benign gesture of objectivity?” Autoethnography, here, stands as a distinct method that Stanfield has called for as it alters and challenges predominant traditional modes of understanding subjectivity and the subject, shifting the paradigm from the individual will in terms of self-legislative autonomyxi to collectivity and shared narrativity. Autoethnography not only challenges traditional notions of subjectivity and the subject, but also that of the nature of thought and reflexivity—and what it means to think reflexively—making it equally an epistemological and ontological affair. For Bruce and Cate Curtis, the “unifying theme” of the autoethnographical

[A]pproach is twofold: autobiography and reflexivity. The researcher’s autobiography or, more often, a fragment of personal narrative provides both data collection and data analysis in the research process. This process is reflexive in that it requires an interrogation of the self. Reflexivity is the process of being self-reflective.xii

But any interrogation into the self is also an interrogation of the process by which we come to know the self, the method and the frame of the interrogation itself—this process requires an interrogation into the meaning of our approach to data and our own intellectual and the ontological heritage of our chose approach. As such, autoethnographic reflection is not the same as phenomenological introspection or the “insight” of positivist sociological analysis.xiii Rather, autoethnographic “reflection” entails necessarily expanding beyond one’s own boarders not merely in terms of basic bodily exchanges on the physiological level, but in terms of an exchange on the socio-cultural level, which, in turn, feeds into and affects what phenomenologist call the “physiological” level and what positivist sociologist term the “culturally” real level. Autoethnography brings together these two levels, narrativity acting as the exchange/crossing point between them.xiv Yet, one does not simply self-narrate, but narrates a larger ontological truth, one that requires insight and research into group and individual dynamics, which one does not acquire merely in observational mode of collection, nor in merely participating as an ‘outsider’ to the living truth of a people, but can only be gathered

in the living element. In both its data collection and its analysis, autoethnography differs epistemically from ethnography. While ethnography has utilized certain epistemic assumptions not only concerning knowledge (and what knowledge is), it has also sought to determine the ways in which one can know something, that is, prove something ‘true’, but also sought to limit the range of this knowledge. Ethnography sought to translate participant ‘observations’ into knowledge; in this way, it was an improvement on the historical trend of pure observation, of the Cartesian and Husserlian phenomenological variety in which one could glean metaphysical principles from merely noticing ontic reality [by merely watching], stating that there was something problematic about participation for ‘knowledge’. Autoethnography, then, extends this claim to its necessary end: pure experience, that is, pure participation in what amounts to one’s own life should yield more fundamental truths of an experience, even more true than that of merely ‘participating’. Wayne tells us so much in “Let the Beat Build,” when he notes, “and I know just going to it could never amount to going through it” suggesting that merely approaching reality [even in participation] could never raise to the level of actual experience. Autoethnography is a not merely an individual’s story nor a collective accounting, but is located within the in-between of the social and the individual; in the exchange between personal experience and cultural pattern—autoethnogtaphy is where the personal and social exchange. Yet, autoethnography is not without its problems. Mitch Allen argues that an autoethnographer must,

[l]ook at experience analytically. Otherwise [you're] telling [your] story—and that's nice—but people do that on Oprah [a U.S.-based television program] every day. Why is your story more valid than anyone else's? What makes your story more valid is that you are a researcher. You have a set of theoretical and methodological tools and a research literature to use. That's your advantage. If you can't frame it around these tools and literature and just frame it as 'my story,' then why or how should I privilege your story over anyone else's I see 25 times a day on TV? (personal interview, May 4, 2006)xv

What makes autoethnography different than simply “telling a story” for Allen is that the story-teller themselves is aware that they are, in fact, telling a story, and not just telling a story to tell one, but to convey fact about their living, one that can be translated beyond their experience. They are, for Allen, “researchers” in that they are armed with their story in addition to methodological tools and research literature. The phenomenological concern, here, though, is the extent to which these methods emerge out of one’s own story or if they are terteriary to the story itself; if these methods emerge from the literature itself, as someone else’s encountered approach to their manner of living. This epistemic problem becomes more glaring with inter-cultural communication: do we develop a method and a literature indigenous to our experiences, or are we to import these from the outside sources of knowledge?

Autoethnography, though, intentionally blurs the lines between the story and the storyteller to highlight that the story does not belong to one person alone, and is not solely one person’s unique encounter in/with reality. Rather, this experience is situated in such a way that a myriad of perspectives work together to constitute its ‘truth’. Taken from a myriad of perspectives, then, not just one person can work independently to determine meaning. As such, the meaning of an experience is communal, and, thus can be told by any one person, and when told by one person is the representation of the whole. Autoethnography, thus, locates the truth of an experience, in its epistemological form, in the phenomenological experience of an experience as being-with as opposed to an individuated unique experience. Nevertheless, this is not to account for an undivided reality of ‘group think’. Rather, it is to locate the ‘truth’ of reality from within the purview of a shared reality: In short, this means is that the source and site of knowledge is not an individuated subject, but a situated one. Autoethnography, Autonarration and the Literary Self What we discover is that within African American literature and figurative performance, in this case, hip-hop we see a very rich tradition of autoethnography as a way of story-telling, but also a way of establishing truth-value. That is to say, as a phenomenological process concerned with the nature of experience and the telling of that experience in way evocative of the experience itself and the recorder of that experience, we see a tradition that seeks to establish its truth outside of traditional verification processes within phenomenology (itself). And, while the process itself, as a phenomenological study is not exclusive as a set of practices—as the sociological analysis so far has demonstrated, it is unique that story-telling an existentially significant practice of world-formation, but also of world-extension into a possible future. This may lie in the phenomenological assumption that the most difficult story one can tell is one’s own story; and, that, despite the tradition’s claim to know oneself best, what may be the case that necessitates the autoethnopgraphic as the closest approximation of truth is that what might seem closest is furthest away, and that a bracketing out may only lead us further astray from the truth that one may only need to look closer in to what surrounds. In what follows, I will analyze two examples of such autoethnographic method for constituting world and truth, and for sustaining this truth and world into a possible future: one from a classic work in African American literature; the other from a contemporary work in African American genre of hip-hop.

* * * In his most recent studio album good kid, m.A.A.d city Kendrick blurs the lines of his own story and those of others, often taking up their voice-in-his-own making their story his-as-theirs creating a cacophony of subjectivities and meanings. We, the

audience, spy into the process of his self-interrogating, -analysis, and –understanding. We notice that throughout Lamar splices his own personal narrative with that of others, as well as popular movie clips, voice messages, giving the impression that his language alone is not enough to express his experiences, but requires a myriad of narratives and aural forms of accounting, taken together with his own, to explain himself and his story. For Lamar, it is precisely the ubiquitousness of the story itself that contains its power. The fact that it could be and most likely is a story shared by thousands, if not millions, is where we find our intellectual method. He utilization of the impersonal or ambiguous pronouns “she” and “he” and the ambiguous set of familial relations between these pronouns creates a level of anonymity and reversibility/transferability between the characters as well as himself in relations to these stories. In his song, “Sing about me”, Lamar seamlessly transitions from a man’s voice to a woman’s in a conversation around and about a certain form of street life, shown from both perspectives, yet filtered through Lamar’s own voice making it neither theirs nor his, but somehow between them. The song references itself forward in the question of whether or not his story will be retold when he dies—not necessarily as his own, but as a story within the narrative of folk-life—but it also references itself, backwards, to his previous album, Section.80, in which spoke of a girl, Keisha, in the song, “Keisha’s Song: her pain” from his first studio album Section.80. In this song Kendrick tells the story of a young black girl in between coming of age and living within a world, which he terms, “an orphanage” called the ghetto ruined by her inability to negotiate the two, falling prey to the world. This song is concerned with ambivalence and balancing personal development with social cues and political and economic pressures. Lamar’s track is reminiscent of Tupac’s “Brenda’s got a baby,” in this respect, a similarity Lamar acknowledges in his album.

Kendrick forwards a method of telling or re-telling other’s stories, but also acknowledges the problem of this method—what if those whose stories we tell or re-tell do not want their stories to be retold? What becomes of our method, then? In this “Sing about me” referencing back, Lamar notes that his authority to tell Keisha’s story was challenged by her brother—in whom the authority transfers by conventional thinking as her brother. Lamar notes that her brother did not want her story to be told/re-told, especially by Kendrick and without his sister’s or his permission.

My sister died in vain, but what point are you trying to gain/If you can’t fit the pumps I walk in?/I’ll wait/Your rebuttal is too late/And if you have an album date, just make sure I’m not in the song/Cause I didn’t need the attention, bring enough of that on my own

Lamar acknowledges the skepticism of whether simply ‘telling’ another’s story can help them with their life, can actually do anything in a tangible world where the concern is “on the grind for this cake/I’mma get it or die trying” he responds to this critique thusly:

[y]our sister’s situation was the one that pulled me in a direction to speak of something that’s realer than the TV screen/By any means, wasn’t trying to offend or come between her personal life/I was like “it need to be told”/Cursing the life of 20 generations after her soul/Exactly what’d happen if I ain’t continued rapping or steady being distracted by money, drugs, and four-fives/I count lives on these songs/Look at the weak and cry, and pray one day you’ll be strong, fighting for your rights, even when you’re wrong/And hope that at least one of you sing about me when I’m gone/Now am I worth it? Did I put enough work in?xvi

At the end of the track Lamar openly wonders if “his” story will be carried forward; if “he”, as artist, has contributed enough to the total narrative, to be “himself” re-told, re-incorporated into a collective future. “I hope that at least one of you sing about me when I’m gone…”

If taken as an individuated phenomenon, telling another’s story would amount to if not epistemic fraud, at least a transgression of trust in that one could question the ‘right’ of another to tell a story that is not ‘theirs’. But, traditional individuated notions of the self carry within them the epistemic claim of ‘ownership’ and ‘rights’ based theory. This, though, is not to claim that what are termed or thought to be ‘outsiders’ could or should have access to stories that are not of their own kind, but that, taken to an extreme, traditional epistemological and ontological notions of ‘subjectivity’ and the ‘subject’ interact at the level of truth and truth telling such that even when stories are of one’s own experience, yet do not belong properly to the individualized self, they somehow still can be told, as community knowledge or transferrable experience. What is more, for Kendrick the impulse and the necessity of telling, or re-telling the stories of others as much as his, as his own. Lamar, though, in stressing the necessity of re-telling stories, that they must, in fact, be told to be relived is similar to Richard Wright’s Black Boy and his depiction of Bigger Thomas in Native Son.xvii Richard Wright’s Black Boy is a recording of childhood and youth; and while it is often referred to as an ‘autobiography’ it is not an one, at least in the tradition sense of one’s man’s story—given excess or defect of one’s man’s interpretation of his ‘life’. Wright’s book, though, is anything but an individual’s narrative, no matter how that narrative is construed. Black Boy is not his childhood, not his youth, but one of childhood and of youth. It is the openness of the title itself, Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth, which generates a kind of case-study, but one that is not done strictly on the level of ‘type’ development, but an internal truth-texture present in many of Wright’s ‘fiction’. The novel operates what Lamar notes of his own album: a way to document the lives of others, to “count lives…on these songs/fighting for your rights, even when you’re wrong”. Timothy Adams in an essay, “I Believe Him, though I know He lies” argues that Black Boy is both “an especially truthful account of the black experience in America, even though the protagonist’s story often does not ring true…”xviii And, this is the seeming mystery of Wright’s novel: it shows itself as not showing itself—that is, is shows itself it total only by showing itself in part. Instead, Adams situates Wright’s Black Boy within “lying as genre and metaphor”; rather than understanding

and ‘reading’ Wright as dishonest, Adams understands Wright’s “tendency to intermix fiction and facts” as related to his “personal literary history and the Afro-American literary tradition…”xix That is, the “usual distinctions between author and persona” are dissolved, echoing Charles Johnson’s assertions that “our lives are inherently metaphysical…”xx

The things that influenced my conduct as a Negro did not have to happened= to me directly; I needed only to hear of them to feel their full effects in the deepest layers of my consciousness.xxi

Richard Wright himself recognized and embraced the auto-ethnographic [counting lives in his text/lies as genre and metaphor] between the individual and the community within Black Boy (a tension internal to the narrative within itself, but external to the auto-ethnographic model of the text itself]—as evidenced the above quote. He is concerned, in the novel, with how these stories connect, how they are speak to, for, and through one another, to discover how information passed from one household to another, information that, in itself, did not seem to belong to anyone person, did not seem to happen to anyone person, yet, each knew the story, each believed the story; Wright, was, in a sense, interested in the proto-question of environmental imbibing in which an experience does belongs to all, happens to all; and, he in a sense, wrote a story for all, the story of all. Wright was concerned with how dialogue—like that between young men, innocuous as it might seem, “talk [that] would weave, roll, surge, spurt, veer, swell, having no specific direction, touching vast areas of life, expressing the tentative impulses of childhood,” could contain “[t]he culture of one black household”; and, how “one black household was thus transmitted to another black household, and folk tradition…handed down from group to group.”xxii Lastly, Adams reminds us that when approaching the novel as text, we, the reader, must, ourselves, “strive to be like the narrator of Black Boy, must keep what is happening at as particular moment and the entire history…--the content and the context—together in his or her mind.”xxiii Much like in Black Boy, Wright utilizes both content and context in Native Son to incorporate multiple voices; yet in the case of Native Son, the incorporation is explicitly clear as a literary method in the construction of lead character, Bigger Thomas. In this character, instead of transmitting the entire narrative of youth and childhood through an individual’s “autobiographical” sketch, Wright traces it through the character study of a single man as ur-collective. In the introduction to Native Son, “How Bigger Was Born,” Wright notes of the construction of the novel, and gestures towards the necessity of such a character that did not have a straightforward path, but emerged to Wright to be written.

I AM NOT so pretentious as to imagine that it is possible for me to account completely for my own book, Native Son. The more closely the author thinks of why he wrote, the more he comes to regard his imagination as a kind of

self-generating cement which glued his facts together, and his emotions as a kind of dark and obscure designer of those facts. Always there is something that is just beyond the tip of the tongue that could explain it all. Usually, he ends up by discussing something far afield, an act which incites skepticism and suspicion in those anxious for a straight-out explanation.xxiv

As such, the novel itself, like that of Black Boy, was a construction of both elements of Wright’s own experiences and those that he witnessed and heard about in others’. He writes,

The birth of Bigger Thomas goes back to my childhood, and there was not just one Bigger, but many of them, more than I could count and more than you suspect…If I had known only one Bigger I would not have written Native Son.xxv

In contradistinction to the sociological ‘ideal type’, Wright presented the ‘Bigger type’xxvi as a real living-order of the world itself rather than a moving-picture ‘idea structure’xxvii. As Wright himself acknowledged in the above quote, there was not just one Bigger Thomas; in fact, there were at least five Bigger Thomases.xxviii Here Wright’s construction of Bigger Thomas echoes Alvesson, Hardy, and Harley’s understandings of what constitutes reflexive autoethnographic writings. They note four “dimensions and practices” of autoethnographic writing, the first of which we will note here at length. In both cases, as Black Boy and as Bigger Thomas, Wright is not merely having an imaginative romp within the narrative of others, nor creatively reimagining his own past through others, but something, perhaps, more complex than that; a complexity concerning ‘truth’ itself as what can be held within an utterance, can be held within a genre—an admission:

Reflexivity as multiple-perspective practices: All writers are confronted with a multitude of paradigms, theories, and perspectives that claim explanation. The reflexive writer uses this contestation or tension between perspectives as a resource. Specifically, the reflexive writer may look for what is shared and overlooked by the perspectives, what is stated or left unstated.xxix

As we are relieved of the duty of truth—or at least of the sort of truth endemic to ‘knowing’—we are also relieved of the duty of ‘finding truth’ in a novel, a text, or a life; and are given way to the experience of the novel as a whole, and the ‘truth’ of that novel within the experience it performs. Conclusion: Autoethnographic Phenomenological Implications Kendrick, like Wright, offers autoethnography as their method and helps to situate his as a new mode of phenomenological introspection. Extending beyond the

boundaries of observing reality, and to the idea of defining it, autoethnography moves beyond epistemology—in terms of what is known and how it is known—to ontology and metaphysics—that is, in terms of what is. With this move, autoethnography introduces an ontologically driven episteme, where ‘truth’ is predicated upon the social practices of people. As such, autoethnography forwards culturally relevant information about the world, its meaning, and how the world itself is formed. In utilizing Kendrick Lamar and Richard Wright as case studies for such an approach, we also are making a specific proclamation in hopes to what may be a new method of inquiry for philosophical and sociological analysis.

Thinking of autoethnography as both bridge and tunnel dialoguing between past, present, and future challenges us to understand conceptual, intellectual genealogies in understanding contemporary life. This becomes important for the study of black people because one can no longer simply overlook black conceptual genealogies for a more cohesive ‘humanism’ or post-raciality, but locates understanding within, not simply ‘race and racism,’ but how people have placed and understood themselves within larger iterative and figurative worlds.

Specifically we are challenged to look for information (and truth) from multiple sources and to look beyond seeming contradictions, for the ‘truths’ that underlie their ‘contradictions’. Lamar’s album brings together, in conversation, these multiple voices into a coherent narrative of explanation, a move sociological and philosophical disciplines can directly benefit from. Duncan writes,

Although ethnographic and autoethnographic reports are presented in the form of personal narratives, this research tradition does more than just tell stories. It provides reports that are scholarly and justifiable interpretations based on multiple sources of evidence. This means autoethnographic accounts do not consist solely of the researcher’s opinions but are also supported by other data that can confirm or triangulate those opinions.xxx

We are challenged to find a method for collecting and organizing ‘data’, for both living as well as for past and future lives, but also an understanding such ‘data’ that are presented within a living understanding. We can hear reflections of Nikki Giovanni’s “Alabama Poem”: if trees could talk wonder what they’d say met an old man on the road late after noon hat pulled over to shade his eyes jacket slumped over his shoulders told me “girl! My hands seen more than all them books they got

at tuskegee” smiled at me half waved his hand walked on down the dusty road met an old woman with a corncob pipe sitting and rocking on a spring evening “sista” she called me “let me tell you—my feet seen more than yo eyes ever gonna read” smiled at her and kept on moving gave it a thought and went back to the porch “I say gal” she called down “you a student at the institute? better come here and study these feet i’m gonna cut a bunion off soon’s I gets up” i looked at her she laughed at me if trees would talk wonder what they’d tell mexxxi Notes

i There is an acknowledgment that as a black theorist there is a dual obligation to not only criticize the dominant or traditional modes of thinking—and what is discovered in that thought—but also offering new ways of thinking, and, in such thought, discovering new forms of existence. This latter challenge and obligation is not one white theorists often find themselves with. ii http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/1589/3095 iii KUHN, 1996; RORTY, 1982; Quine, year. iv Death of White Sociology v John H. Stanfield. Black Reflective Sociology: Epistemology, Theory, and Methodology, 20. vi John H. Stanfield. Black Reflective Sociology: Epistemology, Theory, and Methodology, 17. vii 119. viii 120. ix Bocher, 1994. http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/1589/3095 x Margaret Hunter notes in her 2004 essay, that epistemology as a “way of knowing” is not free from ontological assumptions and influences. Rather, these assumptions and influences, which she understands in terms of “racism and power are not outside of the process at all…they affect nearly every aspect of how researchers conduct their research from the choice of research questions to the interpretation of their data.”119. xi Cartesian and Kantian influence over positivistic philosophic and social scientific research.

xii 265. xiii Phenomenological introspection—Descartes; positivist ‘insight’—usage of logical principles to vet truth claims. xiv Autoethnograph, though, differs from philosophical methods of introspection (as in the case of Descartes’ Meditations), autobiography (as in the case of Rousseau’s Confessions), or psedonyms (as in the case of Kierkegaard). Rather, autoethnography gathers together multivarious perspectives together around a central concept of shared experience. xv http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/1589/3095 xvi “Sing About Me.” good kid, m.A.A.d city xvii Relate Kendrick Lamar’s song, “With the Homies” is to Richard Wright’s novella Rite of Passage as two examples of different modes of autoethnography, bridging together disparate elements of narrative quality xviii Lying as Genre and Metaphor, 302 xix “Lying as Genre and Metaphor” (304) xx Being and Race, 32. xxi Ibid, 305. Reprinted from xxii Black Boy, 91-92. xxiii Lying as Genre and Metaphor, 311. xxiv “how bigger was born,” xxv “how bigger was born,” viii-ix. xxvi ‘How Native Son was Born’, 111. xxviiTo a certain extent Bigger Thomas can be looked at as an ideal-type construction of black living in the South—a merging together of several lives over several generation to develop a consistent, yet moving-picture of a set of “diffuse, discrete, more or less present and occasionally absent concrete individual phenomena.” (Weber). Yet, for what is being discussed here concerning the phenomenological understanding of truth, Weber’s notion of said type as analytical construct reifies positivist, or, at least too closely construed ethnographic or traditional phenomenological models of truth that can only be gotten through a traditional view of subjectivity or phenomenology. Here, with Wright, though, it is important to note that Bigger was not an analytic structure, but an ur-type through which truth itself moves—truth is not told by an individual, or an analytic concept of an individual, but told through a phenomenologically expanded individual-as-collective-type, a la, a Bigger Thomas type. xxviii What is present here, it is important to note, is Wright’s early understanding and articulation of the ‘Bigger Type’. Though he originally understood the Bigger Type within the frame of American life, the Bigger Type was to expand to include various classes (proletariat), time (contemporary and Pre-revolutionary),and national identities (Russian proletariat). I am limiting the Bigger Type, here, to the first iteration, not as a way of distancing Wright from this development, but as a way of short-hand highlighting what each type has in common; as a way of highlighting the philosophical, literary, and sociological import of such a type for understanding how truth unfolds within the living dynamic without the need for analytic models. xxix Social Research: A Practical Introduction, 268. xxx Social Research: A Practical Introduction, 271. xxxi Nikki Giovanni, “Alabama Poem”