Radical Togetherness: African-American Literature and Abolition Pedagogy at Parchman and Beyond
Abstract
:1. Introduction: Remembering Histories of Abolition Pedagogies in Jails and Prisons
In this article, I am in appreciative engagement with the perceptiveness of Ginsburg and other higher education in prison (HEP) scholars, like Robert Scott, and Erin L. Castro and Michael Brawn, who have made profoundly evident the multilayered, undeniable problems that arise when outside instructors conceive of college-in-prison programming (and particularly the unquestioned insertion of critical pedagogies within them) as inherently abolitionist work (Scott 2013, 2014; Castro and Brawn 2017). But in light of Rodríguez’s challenge, I also argue that a more comprehensive understanding of abolition as a pedagogical position and the potentially broad socially transformative impacts of that position—however temporary those impacts might be—can be attained by our heightened attention to an extensive historical contextualization of the abolitionist teaching paradigms of critical prison studies scholars: I refer, in particular, to the abolitionist teaching of the former political prisoner, critical prison studies scholar, and anti-prison activist Angela Y. Davis (Davis 1974, 2012). So, more precisely, it is my contention that we can grasp more fully the range of teaching approaches that Rodríguez sees as having the potential to “effectively and radically displace the normalized misery, everyday suffering, and mundane state violence” of the prison-industrial complex when we revisit, through the lens of critical prison studies scholarship, histories of those abolition pedagogies that have made concerted (though inevitably imperfect) efforts to esteem student leadership (Rodríguez 2010, p. 8). Thus, while this article does not seek to provide a definitive formula for abolitionist teaching—and does not find such an approach particularly useful—it does fundamentally seek to reframe important recent discussions of abolitionist teaching and critical pedagogies in HEP discourse by foregrounding critical prison studies scholars’ pedagogical theories and by re-historicizing their abolitionist work, particularly in jail and prison classrooms.2I do not think the crucial question in our historical moment is whether or not our teaching ultimately supports or adequately challenges the material arrangements and cultural significations of the prison regime … [T]he primary question is whether and how the act of teaching can effectively and radically displace the normalized misery, everyday suffering, and mundane state violence that are reproduced and/or passively condoned by both hegemonic and critical/counterhegemonic pedagogies.
2. The Jail Classroom Roots and Routes of Angela Davis’s Abolition Pedagogy
From Davis’s earliest carceral classroom teaching days with these “sisters” at the House of Detention to present, she has been committed to implementing counterhegemonic educational paradigms in order to establish solidarity—or, what she calls in the passage above “a real togetherness,” which also relates to my term “radical togetherness”—in spaces premised on the enforcement of social isolation, educational deprivation, and political passivity. Yet by foregrounding the intellectual curiosities of incarcerated learners in her jail teaching, Davis has helped to “strengthen [the] sense of community” not only between those within her classrooms, but also among those beyond it. Later in her autobiography, for instance, Davis recalls writing Jackson a letter regarding the reception of Soledad Brother at the House of Detention. The letter revealed how his book, on the one hand, elevated incarcerated women’s awareness of and organizing against racial injustice in the bail system, and on the other, sharpened their incisive critiques of patriarchy—owing to Jackson’s unconcealed misogyny in his conceptions of leadership in social transformation movements: “When my message reached George in San Quentin that the women were exhilarated by [Soledad Brother] but disturbed by his … uncomplimentary remarks about Black women, he apologized and wanted them all to understand his misjudgment” (Davis 1974, p. 317).More than half of the jail population have never been convicted of anything, yet they languish in … cells. Because the bail system is inherently biased in favor of the relatively well-off, jails are disproportionately inhabited by the poor, who cannot afford the fee. … The political issue, therefore, is how accused men and women can benefit from the so-called presumption of innocence by being free until proven guilty. [In light of this issue], the sisters wanted to talk about the [Black liberation] movement—and this was on their own initiative, without the least prodding from me. … When I wrote George [Jackson] of the enthusiastic reception of his book among the sisters there, it gave him pleasure to know that they were learning to relate to the movement through studying his individual political evolution. … A real togetherness was developing. I was anxious to strengthen this sense of community.(Davis 1974, pp. 60–63, emphasis added)
Again, Davis’s and Huggins’s commitment to such radical nominal transformation is the kind of ideological-level, racial-historical abolitionist work that can also be seen in an imprisoned Malcolm X’s repeated references to his fellow imprisoned learners as “my black brother inmates” or “brothers” in his acclaimed autobiography, and in Jackson’s titling of his prison letter collection Soledad Brother, emphasizing the unforeseeable political-intellectual community-building that he and other imprisoned men established amid the prison’s routine disciplinary practices of social isolation, educational deprivation, and political repression—practices whose emphasis on mass-based alienation inevitably call to mind the social control methods of the Transatlantic Slave Trade and slavery (Malcolm X and Haley 2001, p. 278).7 The abolition work of radical nominal transformation is thus also reflective of what I have termed radical togetherness.[T]he leadership you have given the sisters at Niantic … was unmistakably clear. … I thought the idea of Sisterlove Collective [was] positively powerful: the mere notion of sharing among prisoners militates all the internal hostilities officials invariably attempt to engender. … As you well know, sisters behind these walls are urgently in need of outside encouragement and support. … Many more of these kinds of projects are needed … to uncover in their entirety the abominable conditions prevailing in women’s institutions.(Davis 1971, pp. 124, 126, 127, emphasis added)
3. Abolition Pedagogy at Parchman
Today, Parchman definitely displays evidence of reform, but students who I teach through the Prison-to-College Pipeline Program (PTCPP) at Parchman frequently remind me and my fellow professors and teaching assistants that our class meetings—which only happen once a week for three hours and are limited to twenty imprisoned participants—are vital diversions from their slavery-reminiscent penitentiary experiences. PTCPP students’ candid remarks about conditions at Parchman do not represent overstatements: since the closure of the prison’s supermax unit in the aftermath of an American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) lawsuit in 2010, investigations have exposed recurring issues at the penitentiary ranging from non-functioning showers, sinks, toilets, and water fountains to medical neglect to guards’ outright acts of assault against imprisoned men and imprisoned men’s routine unexplained premature deaths (Mitchell 2015; Clarion Ledger 2017; Fowler 2018; Rojas 2020).Prisoners in striped garb work in the fields, supervised by officers on horseback with shotguns across their laps. The scene is reminiscent of a pre-Civil War plantation. … The conditions for … inhabitants [in the supermax unit] were repugnant. Cells had a small window on the outer wall, but most of the screens were broken. … The toilets tended to back up in one cell when flushed in the next, and the cells were filthy but the prisoners were not provided any cleaning materials.
In many ways, Hicks’s words echoed those of Davis’s students at the House of Detention, for, at one level, he was grateful for the opportunity to engage the literature of a fellow native Mississippian whose ideas granted him access to language that helped him to articulate more fully an issue he had always known was an issue: the distance between U.S. democracy’s lofty ideals and the disturbing facts of the nation’s sanctioning of mass-based, lethal white supremacist practices like lynching. At another level, though, and again like Davis’s students at the House of Detention, Hicks’s engagement with a literary work that is part of the field of African-American literature also facilitated his launch of a critique of the broader society. In this case, Hicks critiqued his systemic undereducation in Mississippi, a state with a long and troubled history of underfunded, under-resourced, understaffed, and low-rated public schools—and thereby intimated that such state-sanctioned inferior education played a defining role in his own incarceration (Mitchell 2019; Harris 2020). Recall again Hicks’s concluding statement: “I’m upset that Wells wasn’t taught to me in high school. I believe I might have had a broader look at the world and my purpose in it. I actually believe I wouldn’t have ended up in prison. I believe I would’ve strive[n] to be more like Ida.”In her speech, “Lynching: Our National Crime,” Wells basically encourages us to demand our given rights. She gives us an outline of what we want and how to get it. She tries to arouse a response from us that helps reshape the nation into what it is supposed to be. She reminds the law of the law. … She is most definitely a great part of American history. Without her determination, courage, smarts, and perseverance, the United States wouldn’t be what it is today. I first read … Wells’s work in [this] prison course. The thing I enjoyed about reading her work was everything. I love everything about her and the struggle she fought to win. She was a very intelligent woman. She has really inspired me. I’m upset that she wasn’t taught to me in high school. I believe I might have had a broader look at the world and my purpose in it. I actually believe I wouldn’t have ended up in prison. I believe I would’ve strive[n] to be more like Ida.
While Hicks’s essay and Davis’s remarks express understandable frustration with the facts and impacts of their undeniable systemic undereducation in Mississippi, their concluding observations speak to how their collaborative curricular planning for the “Mississippi: Then and Now” seminar with the PTCPP teaching team has helped them—much like the women studying and discussing Soledad Brother in a jail space with Angela Davis—to raise consciousness in ways that improve, if only temporarily, the educational well-being of other incarcerated men in the many environments within Parchman that extend beyond the prison classroom. Along these lines, a feature published in one of Mississippi’s most widely-read newspapers, the Clarion Ledger, notes that “Hicks, who presented his writings during the class meetings, now uses his books to teach other incarcerated men the things that he’s learning now that … he missed in high school” (James 2019). In the same feature, Cimetrio Davis states: “No one could convince me I’m not a student, a teacher, a scholar, and capable. … I can be of more help to myself and those around me by utilizing what I know and teaching them as well” (James 2019).I learned that the fight for equality, the fight for civil rights went beyond Martin Luther King and people like that that they taught us about in high school. … They did not teach us about Fannie Lou Hamer and Ida B. Wells. I didn’t know the extent or depth of lynch law and how deeply rooted it was in our government.
4. Radical Togetherness at the University of Mississippi
This student’s awakening, by way of African-American literature, not only to her own “whiteness and the harm that certain versions of white liberalism can bring about,” but also to the specific way in which her previously unquestioned “fit” within “the larger white supremacist system” has the potential to reproduce harm in her attempts to aid incarcerated people returns me to the challenge raised by Rodríguez that I discussed at the outset of this article.The reflection that was the most challenging [for me] to write [was] Justice Journal #2, [which I wrote from the perspective of] the [white male] character … Jan [from Richard Wright’s novel, Native Son]. [Becoming Jan] made me reckon with my whiteness and the harm that certain versions of white liberalism can bring about. … In fact, one of the most important things I learned from Jan is that there are harmful ways to attempt to help [incarcerated] people, and that before I do anything to help—I have to generally question how I fit into the larger white supremacist system. In a sense, I am learning to construct a new lens with which to see the world, and that has been difficult, painful, and beneficial in immeasurable ways.
The Justice Journals that I challenge my students at the University of Mississippi to create with a sensitivity to the often-overlooked agency of incarcerated people constitute a kind of re-education inspired by African-American literature—a field of study that, at its core, interrogates institutional power and the self in ways that make what Rodríguez calls “the work of building and teaching radical and liberatory common sense” more possible in this epoch of the prison-industrial complex. In sum, the raised consciousness of nonincarcerated students, and the processes of self-interrogation that their critically reflective engagements with African-American literature inspire are also (self-)teaching acts; these acts potentially displace, ideologically, the practices of human disappearance and agency disavowal that typify the social ordering logic of the prison-industrial complex. So nonincarcerated students’ commitment to re-view and reaffirm the agency—not only the humanity—of incarcerated people through their encounters with African-American literature is also the kind of abolitionist work that I call radical togetherness.[T]eachers and students can attempt to concretely understand how they are a dynamic part of the prison regime’s production and reproduction—and thus how they might also be a part of its abolition through the work of building and teaching a radical and liberatory common sense (this is political work that anyone can do, ideally as part of a community of social movement).
Funding
Acknowledgments
Conflicts of Interest
References
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1 | Prison-industrial complex was a term coined by social historian Mike Davis, but Angela Y. Davis popularized it. For Davis, the term refers to a method of conceptualizing late twentieth- and twenty-first-century imprisonment as an industry, increasingly with private investment. The supply of raw materials for this “punishment industry”—disproportionately, Black, Brown, and poor bodies—is made available by social factors that cannot be reduced to crime, especially ideologies of racism and corporate agendas premised on global capitalism. For more, see (Davis 2003, pp. 84–104). |
2 | Critical prison studies, which I refer to here and throughout this article, is an emerging interdisciplinary field that has perhaps been made most visible terminologically by the American Studies Association’s Critical Prison Studies caucus, as can be seen at the following link: http://www.theasa.net/caucus_prison_studies/. Broadly speaking, critical prison studies encompasses humanistic studies (including literary studies, history, ethnic studies, visual studies, sociology, and geography) that draw on cross-disciplinary analyses of race, class, gender, and sexuality in order to critically examine domestic and international regimes of criminalization, captivity, and punishment. Particular emphasis is placed on investigating the centrality of global capitalism, racism, gender discrimination, and heteropatriarchy in the expansion of prison systems and in the normalization of state violence and patriarchal violence. Scholarship in this field also emphasizes the importance of conceptualizing coalitional strategies for prison abolition. Representative works of critical prison studies scholarship include: Angela Y. Davis’s Are Prisons Obsolete? Dylan Rodríguez’s Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime, Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s (Gilmore 2007) Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California, and Victoria Law’s Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women. Critical prison studies scholar Micol Seigel has written a particularly instructive summary of the field of critical prison studies in the official publication of the American Studies Association, American Quarterly (Seigel 2018, pp. 123–37). |
3 | By calling King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” a “jailhouse jeremiad,” I mean to call to mind the words of Andrew Young, King’s close friend and fellow activist, who remarked that, by April 1963, “[King was] like Jeremiah with fire pent up in his bones, and that’s the way this letter (from Birmingham Jail) was. It just spewed forth” (Rieder 2013, p. xix). Additionally, my phrasing, “jailhouse jeremiad,” situates King’s jail letter in the context of some of his public addresses that scholars like David Howard-Pitney have conceptualized as shining examples of the African-American jeremiad. According to Howard-Pitney, African-American jeremiads focus on social protest and social prophecy: those who deliver these addresses, who have included African-American abolitionists David Walker and Frederick Douglass, and National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) co-founder W.E.B. Du Bois, generally expose white America’s sins of slavery and segregation while advocating for African Americans to lead in realizing the unrealized promise of democracy for all in the United States. The African-American jeremiad is typified by three elements: the “citing of [a] promise; criticism of [America’s] … retrogression from [that] promise; and a resolving prophecy that [America must] … redeem the promise” (Howard-Pitney 2005, p. 7). |
4 | For more on the Stepping Stones program, see (Alexander 2017) and (Alexander 2011). |
5 | For more on the Prison-to-College Pipeline Program, see (Alexander and Pickett 2018) and (Alexander 2017). In 2018, the Prison-to-College Pipeline Program won the Mississippi Humanities Council’s Humanities Educator Award. |
6 | I have discussed “the human rights abuse of educational deprivation” in a previous article: [W]hat is also disturbing about the prison-industrial complex is its institutionalization of educational deprivation—a practice that I argue constitutes a breach in international human rights standards for the treatment of imprisoned people. Recall that when Congress eliminated Pell Grants for imprisoned learners by passing the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act in 1994, it effectively terminated public funding for the more than 350 college-in-prison programs then in existence, and thereby reduced the number of these programs to a meager eight by 1997. That law alone—passed under the Clinton administration—relegated higher education initiatives for imprisoned learners to the unpredictable whims of private support and donated labor and thus led to a mind-numbing disciplinary practice at odds with the United States’s position as a United Nations signatory. On the one hand, the United States has essentially institutionalized the deprivation of postsecondary education in prison; on the other, it remains a signatory of the United Nations’s 1990 resolution, “Basic Principles for the Treatment of Prisoners,” which states: “All prisoners shall have the right to take part in cultural activities and education aimed at the full development of the human personality” (Alexander 2017, p. 10, emphasis added). |
7 | With my phrasing, “radial nominal transformation,” I am attentive here to a trend in African-American writings produced from jail and prison in which incarcerated or formerly incarcerated Black writers, like Malcolm X and Davis, intentionally use the endearing title of “sister” or “brother” when referring to fellow incarcerated persons to contest ideologically and terminologically the practices of deindividuation, alienation, and disidentification inherent in jail and prison employees’ and administrators’ institutional practice of referring to incarcerated people by their jail or prison number and/or by infantilizing labels. Davis notes, for instance, that jail employees often demeaned her and her fellow incarcerated adult learners by referring to them as “girls,” as is the case with the guard she quotes in her autobiography: “I can’t let you out. Hasn’t anyone explained to you the rules of 4b? The ‘girls’ can only come out of their cells when two officers are on duty. (All prisoners—whether they were sixteen or sixty—were referred to as ‘girls’)” (Davis 1974, p. 30). The aforementioned imprisoned intellectual George Jackson is another Black writer whose work reflects this trend, as can be seen within his collection of prison letters, Soledad Brother, where, for instance, he refers to a fellow imprisoned man as “Brother Billingslea” and others imprisoned with him in California’s San Quentin State Prison as “brothers” (Jackson 1994, pp. 19, 26, 27). |
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Alexander, P.E. Radical Togetherness: African-American Literature and Abolition Pedagogy at Parchman and Beyond. Humanities 2020, 9, 49. https://doi.org/10.3390/h9020049
Alexander PE. Radical Togetherness: African-American Literature and Abolition Pedagogy at Parchman and Beyond. Humanities. 2020; 9(2):49. https://doi.org/10.3390/h9020049
Chicago/Turabian StyleAlexander, Patrick Elliot. 2020. "Radical Togetherness: African-American Literature and Abolition Pedagogy at Parchman and Beyond" Humanities 9, no. 2: 49. https://doi.org/10.3390/h9020049