There is a continuum of criticism which seeks to explore representations of African American experience via the interrogation of cross- and multi-genre interactions. Among its foremost contemporary and historical practitioners are Robin D. G. Kelley, Houston A. Baker, Murray Forman, Eithne Quinn and S. Craig Watkins, and it is into this tradition that Jonathan Munby, in the work's introduction, seeks to place Under a Bad Sign: Criminal Self-Representation in African American Popular Culture. Munby's own particular focus is trained upon “the way different periods of the twentieth century are related in their use and abuse of the black badman across a wider range of interrelated media.” This broad temporal and generic frame is among the great strengths of the book, lending it a comprehensive critical sweep across a range of forms and periods. Among the tasks that Munby has set himself, to show “how past and present [political] struggles bear a strategic resemblance to each other” is ably realized through this interdisciplinary approach (5). The book's title comes from the title track of Albert King's 1967 album Born under a Bad Sign, a song which, for Munby, “is typical of a tricksterlike capacity to turn disadvantage into something generative, to make good on the bad” (21).

The critical impetus behind this book is to raise what are, to Munby's mind, fundamental “questions about the attribution of moral and political purpose to impoverished forms of cultural production” (9). Again, this motivation is one which is shared by scholars of African American cultural representations across a range of disciplines, from George Lipsitz to Tricia Rose. Munby argues that the figure of the “badman” has evolved and been remade throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries, and that in working towards a comprehensive understanding of said figure across a range of genres we may better understand both those texts in which the trope is used and perhaps the shared experiences which those texts may claim to represent. Compellingly, it is proposed that the development of the figure of the “badman,” “trickster,” or “gangsta” cannot be understood as linear, but actually represents within its evolution some of the politically paradoxical nature of the figure himself. The central role of the criminal figure in African American popular culture is argued, and shown, to “continually [engage] with the violent and coercive force of racial subordination” (181). Although Munby does not shy from the often politically incorrect tendencies of some contemporary and historical representations, his point is that the seeming pervasiveness of the criminal or “trickster” figure in African American culture can be understood as demonstrating the trope's “emancipative political potential” (4). This book is a response to those who take the position that any laudatory or positive portrayal of a criminal existence in popular culture is necessarily artistically moribund at best, and destructive at worst. Rather, Munby establishes how “African American criminal self-representation continues its ‘ill-logical’ work in exposing the ongoing racialized contingencies of power” (180–81).

This is done through a series of comprehensive examinations across a range of texts and media, with the analysis of popular culture to come founded in the first chapter's examination of the role played by gambling generally, and the “numbers racket” specifically, in 1920s Harlem. For Munby, participation in and prosperity from games of chance represented a particularly black understanding of how to function in the contemporary economic practice. The source material for this argument is found through an examination of early twentieth-century African American texts, by Claude McKay, Arthur Huff Fauset, Rudolph Fisher (receiving novel and welcome attention here) and others. The recognition of the central role of “fortune,” then, is shown to inform a variety of disparate yet related representations. Under a Bad Sign moves through an examination of black criminal self-representation in “the realm and era of the talking race film,” in which Munby makes much of the necessary economic “independence” of black cinema given the conditions of its production, and uses the work of Oscar Micheaux and Ralph Cooper as the frame for his analysis (11). The following, third, chapter examines how “African American writers – in the light (or darkness) of Langston Hughes's criticism in 1940 of the failure of the Harlem Renaissance – found themselves consumed by the impossibility of the choice facing them as representatives of the race” (14). Artists such as Julian Mayfield and Chester Himes are shown to recognize the unusual facility available to them towards that representation, the complex, often paradoxical “ill-logic” of the literary badman, and this realization is also made by artists at the centre of ensuing chapters. The development of blaxploitation cinema and the debt it owes both to the tradition established by Micheaux, Cooper and Mayfield and to contemporary developments in popular music generally – and to George Clinton, Curtis Mayfield and Sly Stone particularly – is examined both in and of itself, and as a precursor to what would become so-called “New Jack” film and other iterations of the gangsta aesthetic. The final chapter, and epilogue, considers recent and contemporary reliance on the trope of criminal self-representation, most notably in twenty-first-century hip-hop, in which Munby recognizes the potential for the “badman” trope to imbue popular expression with that condition to which rap must (apparently) always aspire: authenticity.

Under a Bad Sign demonstrates compellingly the value and insight to be gained from a truly interdisciplinary approach to subject matter which itself speaks across a range of experiences, classes, geographical spaces and other distinctions. Its strength lies primarily in the manner in which it synthesizes analyses of disparate yet related texts and periods, towards a fuller understanding of a trope which has always had currency in African American self-expression.