This panel begins with the premise that the incarceration of at least 2.3 million people in the United States has created an extensive network of literary production and a surging US prison literature. The panel seeks to examine the terms of production and selected examples of this literature.
Recent research has documented the continuous presence of prison literature in US literary history, and the synergies between slavery, convict lease labor, Jim Crow, and regional carceral regimes that targeted African Americans, Hispanics, and indigenous peoples (Lockard 2017; Green 2008; Reed 2017; Hernández 2017; Rymhs 2008). As new scholarship has traced these histories from colonial origins to the present day, critical discussion has become aware and sensitive to their formative influence on contemporary prison writing.
The present panel proposal seeks to elaborate and discuss such historical echoes in the context of narratives, fiction, and genre literature emerging from US prisons and jails. Two of the three presenters teach in prisons; the third has conducted extensive interview research into street literature with formerly incarcerated people. Each of these proposed papers explores how prisoners and former prisoners transform carceral experience into critical literary expression. This literature of incarceration synthesizes enduring discriminations against race, gender, class and sexuality with proximate communal histories of confinement and oppression. In prison literature, as these papers suggest, social borders outside are as close as prison walls and fences inside.
A first paper from Patrick Elliot Alexander examines the tradition of radical African American activist women’s autobiographies through the lens of Susan Burton’s Becoming Ms. Burton: From Prison to Recovery to Leading the Fight for Incarcerated Women (2017), linking it to a line of post-1960s political prisoners’ narratives that allude to slavery and anti-slavery activism to express African American resistance to mass incarceration, state violence, and the exploitation of women of color. A second paper by Kristina Graaff addresses the ‘street lit’ genre since its emergence in the 1990s. This neo-noir literature produced by incarcerated and formerly incarcerated writers has gained wide popularity for its frequently brutal representations of prisons, drug culture, and sex. Her paper will discuss how street literature illuminates mechanisms of racial control in US society, one of the objectives of African American literature since the first eighteenth-century slave narratives. A final paper from Ed Wiltse engages with earlier African American writers who have confronted incarceration – Chester Himes, Donald Goines, Iceberg Slim – in order to examine their influence on participants in a New York state prison writing workshop. In revealing the process by which prison readers become prison critics, his paper reframes questions of production and consumption in constructing the category “prison literature.”
The argument guiding this panel is that mass incarceration becomes mass narrative. These three papers (20 minutes apiece) and the following audience discussion will contribute towards US literature’s engagement with the social realities of millions of citizens living caged lives.
Works Cited
Green, Tara (2008) From the Plantation to the Prison: African American Confinement Literature (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press).
Hernández, Kelly Lytle (2017) City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771-1965 (Durham: University of North Carolina Press).
Lockard, Joe (2017) “Prison Literature from the Early Republic to Attica,” chapter 18 in Cambridge History of American Working-Class Literature, Nick Coles and Paul Lauter, eds. (New York: Cambridge University Press).
Reed, Austin (2017) The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict, ed. Caleb Smith (New York: Modern Library).
Rymhs, Deena (2008) From the Iron House: Imprisonment in First Nations Writing (Waterloo, ONT: Wilfred Laurier University Press).