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THE RHETORICS of COMMUNITY in PRISON WRITINGS Helen Hye

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THE RHETORICS of COMMUNITY in PRISON WRITINGS Helen Hye IMPRISONED VOICES: THE RHETORICS OF COMMUNITY IN PRISON WRITINGS Helen Hye Eun Lee A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. Chapel Hill 2016 Approved by: Jane Danielewicz Daniel Anderson Jordynn Jack Ruth Salvaggio Ashley Luca © 2016 Helen Hye Eun Lee ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT Helen Hye Eun Lee: Imprisoned Voices: The Rhetorics of Community in Prison Writings (Under the direction of Jane Danielewicz) In this dissertation, I examine contemporary U.S. prison writings of the late twentieth and twenty-first century, namely Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice, Mumia Abu-Jamal’s Live from Death Row, and Jimmy Santiago Baca’s A Place to Stand. In this study, I read them as highly political and rhetorical works of protest in which they speak out about the problems of the criminal justice and penal systems. The three writers use their works to not only make visible the obscured space of prison but also bridge spatially and socially separated communities using innovative rhetorical strategies. As I will show, prison writings are works of protest that can be defined by the social work they perform. iii To Jay, Caleb, and Chloe iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENT Firstly, I want to thank my family for their love, support, and encouragement. I especially want to express my deepest gratitude to my husband whose unconditional support and encouragement kept me writing. Secondly, I want to thank the committee for their patience and assistance. This project would not have been completed without the generous support and guidance from Jane Danielewicz, my director. I would like to thank Dan Anderson for giving me the idea for this project as well as for his diverse contributions as the chair and reader. My gratitude to Jordynn Jack for reading through my early drafts and for her awesome feedback. I would like to thank Ruth Salvaggio for wonderful advice throughout the years. Lastly, I am indebted to Ashley Lucas for the meticulous attention she paid to my work and for sharing her passion for the field of prison scholarship and activism with me. Lastly, I want to relay my heartfelt gratitude to all my friends at UNC whose moral moral support and encouragement I couldn’t have done without. v TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................. 1 Arts-in-Prison Movements ..................................................................................................... 4 CHAPTER TWO: “WE SHALL HAVE OUR MANHOOD”: THE RHETORIC OF BLACK MASCULINITY IN ELDRIDGE CLEAVER’S SOUL ON ICE ............................ 15 Cleaver’s Exploration of Black Masculinity Through the Outlaw ...................................... 19 Cleaver’s Confrontation of the Trauma of Lynching and the Myth of Buck the Rapist ............................................................................................................................. 23 Cleaver’s Confrontation of the Trauma of Lynching and the Figure of Uncle Tom ...................................................................................................................................... 29 The Confession: Cleaver’s Rhetoric of Violence ................................................................ 35 Cleaver’s Search for Redemption Through the Black Jeremiad .......................................... 40 CHAPTER THREE: “THE ILLUSION OF OTHERNESS”: THE RHETORIC OF NEWS-WRITING IN MUMIA ABU-JAMAL’S LIVE FROM DEATH ROW ..................... 52 The Free Mumia Movement: Mumia Abu-Jamal and His Case .......................................... 53 “From the Valley of the Shadow of Death”: Mumia Abu-Jamal’s Live from Death Row ............................................................................................................................ 56 The Ideological “Black Hole” Function of Prison: Rhetorical Constraints of Prison Writers ...................................................................................................................... 61 vi “From Death Row, This is Mumia Abu-Jamal”: The Use of Investigative Reporting and the Invention of the Real .............................................................................. 69 “A Violation of Ordinary Principles of Humanity”: The Use of Human- Interest Stories and the Invention of the Everyday .............................................................. 78 CHAPTER FOUR: “MY JOURNALS, POEMS, AND WRITINGS ARE HOME”: THE RHETORIC OF BELONGING IN JIMMY SANTIAGO BACA’S A PLACE TO STAND.................................................................................................................... 84 Chicano Ex-Convict/Writer/Activist Jimmy Santiago Baca................................................ 85 Chicano Experience in the Borderlands ............................................................................... 87 “Stain on Their Illusion of a Perfect America”: The Chicano as a Bordered Subject.................................................................................................................................. 92 “School Wasn’t Anything I Expected”: The Bordering Practice of National Literacy Pedagogy ............................................................................................................. 101 “I Wrapped Myself in This Cocoon of Language”: Transcending the Walls of Prison ............................................................................................................................. 109 CHAPTER FIVE: CONCLUSION............................................................................................. 115 WORKS CITED ......................................................................................................................... 124 vii CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION Although in recent years, prison writings have become more visible, in part due to the recent boom in the memoir publishing industry, they still remain largely a neglected area of study in academia. For example, H. Bruce Franklin has long argued for the need to examine prison as a significant site of literary production. In his well-known 1978 work, Prison Literature in America, Franklin gestures to the vastness of “prison literature” and mentions important figures who had been imprisoned dating back to the classical writers such as Socrates, Boethius, Villon, Thomas More, Cervantes, Donne, Bunyan, Defoe, Voltaire, Diderot, Thoreau, Melville, Oscar Wilde, Jack London and Dostoevsky. Most important, he points out how “the literature emerging today from the prisons of America constitutes an unprecedented phenomenon” and that studying these text would “lead to fundamental redefinition of American literature, its history and the criteria appropriate to evaluating all literary works” (233, xxix).1 In his valuable bibliography of prison writers, American Prisoners and Ex-Prisoners: Their Writings, there are over 750 published works by prison writers. Similarly, in arguing for more studies of prison writing, B.V. Olguin writes, “With the largest prisoner population in the world, the United States has become the prime incubator of prison literature, a multigenre corpus that is larger than any other tradition and trend in the canon of American literature” (70). Of the multi-genre corpus, it is interesting to note that life-writing and/or personal-writing by prison writers is what that often makes the journey to the bookstores. There have been fiction prison writers like Chester Himes, 1In this work, Franklin makes the important historical connections between contemporary prison literature to the African-American slave songs and narratives. 1 Malcolm Braly, Piri Thomas, Donald Goines, and Robert Beck and poets like Etheridge Knight, Jimmy Santiago Baca, Raul Salinas, and Ricardo Sanchez. However, by far, the most published genres in prison writing are autobiographies, memoirs, and personal essays/letters. For example, since the 1960s, a period that Bruce Franklin calls the prison renaissance, some of the most widely known works and/or mentioned works in scholarly studies are Malcolm X’s, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965),2 Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice (1968), George Jackson’s Soledad, Brother (1970), Robert Beck’s The Naked Soul of Iceberg Slim (1971), Rubin “Hurricane” Carter’s The Sixteenth Round (1974), Angela Davis’s Angela Davis: Autobiography (1974), Malcolm Braly’s False Starts: A Memoir of San Quentin and Other Prisons (1976), Jack Henry Abbott’s In the Belly of the Beast: Letters from Prison (1981), Jean Harris’s Marking Time: Letters from Jean Harris to Shana Alexander (1991), Mumia Abu-Jamal’s Live from Death Row (1995), Leonard Peltier’s Prison Writings: My Life is My Sun Dance (1999), and Jimmy Santiago Baca’s A Place to Stand (2001). Assata Shakur’s Assata: An Autobiography (2001), and Piper Kerman’s Orange is the New Black (2011). The most recent example, Piper Kerman’s Orange is the New Black, has been enormously popular and has been made into a long-running TV show. Kerman’s prison memoir is a good example of the ways in which prison writings have become more visible in the recent years. Since the successful publication of her memoir, Kerman has been a spokesperson for prison activism, speaking on behalf of prisoners and raising public awareness about issues such as solitary confinement and racism in prison. This study offers rhetorical criticism of
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