Prisons in North America have been sites of narrative production since they opened. Over twenty years ago, Bell Chevigny (1999) traced out the rise of US prison literature and art in the 1960s and its attempted suppression, first by late 1960s-early 1970s Nixon-inspired ‘law and order’ moral panic and then during the Reaganite 1980s (2000, 235-236). Chevigny, H. Bruce Franklin (2000), and other prison studies scholars endorsed earlier arguments by Etheridge Knight (1970), Judith Scheffler (1986), and Ioan Davies (1990) that prison literature was intrinsic to socially informed literary studies.
More recently, critics such as Heather Ann Thompson, Dylan Rodriguez, Dan Berger, Naomi Murakawa, Jordan Camp, A. Naomi Paik, Rashad Shabazz, and others have challenged collectively whether academic or scholarly engagement with prisons can have positive effects. Others, notably Doran Larson (2010), have argued that engagement with prison writing, artwork, and educational projects enables incarcerated people, outside students, and teachers to work together and catalyze discussions of justice (144).
The proposed panel engages with this debate. It begins with an historical retrospective on these issues. A first paper from Gordon Hutner (University of Illinois) addresses the function of authorial witness in Budd Schulberg’s Sanctuary V (1969), his last completed work. This novel drew on his years in Mexico to portray the experience of a liberal reformer incarcerated by a dictator modeled on Fidel Castro. Schulberg describes the complex relations among the inmates and the broken bond between the protagonist and this Latin American radical despot. Schulberg’s novel, published as the US carceral state was expanding rapidly under Nixon’s ‘law and order’ policies, represents the externalization of witness where the carceral state was over the horizon in a foreign land.
A second paper by Josh Ellenbogen (University of Pittsburgh) and Adam Jolles (Florida State University) shifts to the US domestic scene. It examines visual narratives from the historical turning point in the period of the Attica Uprising (1971). The collaborative project of this paper highlights the role of photography in the proliferation of pedagogical initiatives that sought to instruct prisoners, generally members of minority and marginalized groups, in various means of self-expression and self-narration. While most scholarly attention has focused on literary endeavors to this end, a direct result of this visual arts initiative was the pioneering photobook Sing Sing: The View from Within (1972), a collaboration between photographer Steven Schoen and inmate John Conroy, featuring photographic work by prisoners. Their paper contextualizes this work within then-contemporaneous representations of US prisons.
A final paper by Jennie Snow (Fitchburg State University) brings the panel to the current day. It analyzes the US carceral-humanitarian state in immigration detention centers within US borders and military detention at Guantánamo Bay Prison. Placing Valeria Luiselli’s Tell Me How it Ends (2017) alongside Mohamedou Salahi’s redacted and restored Guantánamo Diary (2015, 2017), Snow will examine how these complementary non-fictional accounts of incarceration stage different modes of address directed towards a humanitarian reading public invested in their own rights-bearing status.
One argument guiding this panel is that mass incarceration becomes mass narrative. These three 18-minute papers and the following Q&A discussion will suggest to an academic audience how they may contribute towards engagement with the social realities of millions of fellow humans living caged lives.
Works Cited
Chevigny, Bell (2000). “Inside Stories: Prison Writing in the 20th Century,” Punishment and Society 2 (April) 2:235-240.
Chevigny, Bell, ed. (1999) Doing Time: 25 Years of Prison Writing. New York: Arcade.
Davies, Ioan (1990) Writers in Prison. Oxford: Blackwell.
Franklin, H. Bruce, ed. (1998) Prison Writing in 20th-Century America. New York: Penguin.
Gilmore, Ruth Wilson (1999) “Globalisation and US Prison Growth: From Military Keynesianism to Post-Keynesian Militarism,” Race & Class 40 (1998/1999) 2/3:171-188.
Knight, Etheridge (1970) Black Voices from Prison. New York: Pathfinder Press.
Larson, Doran (2010) “Toward a Prison Poetics,” College Literature 37 (Summer) 3:143-166.
Rodriguez, Dylan (2006) Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.