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A LINGERING COLONIALITY: CONSIDERING THE EPISTEMIC AND STRUCTURAL (IM)POSSIBILITIES OF UNIVERSITY-SPONSORED PRISON WRITING PROGRAMS By ANNA CHARIS PLEMONS A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY WASHINGTON STATE UNIVERSITY Department of English MAY 2014 © Copyright by ANNA CHARIS PLEMONS, 2014 All Rights Reserve © Copyright by ANNA CHARIS PLEMONS, 2014 All Rights Reserved To the Faculty of Washington State University: The members of the Committee appointed to examine the dissertation of ANNA CHARIS PLEMONS find it satisfactory and recommend that it be accepted. _____________________________________ Patricia F. Ericsson, PhD., Co-Chair _____________________________________ Victor Villanueva, PhD., Co-Chair _____________________________________ Kristin L. Arola, PhD. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENT I am grateful without words, and even if I knew the right ones, I find that more thanks are due than I can fit in this space. To the writers at New Folsom, thank you for welcoming me into the space you have created with your words. It is brave and sacred, and I am honored that you have shared it with me. To Spoon and Marty, the tenders of the writing circle, thank you for sharing your classrooms with me and for teaching me about teaching inside. To my dad, Jim Carlson, and all the artists who participated in Arts in Corrections through the years, thank you for making opportunities in prison your business. You have worked tirelessly, in challenging circumstances, to bring pencils, pastels, half-notes, and dance steps into places that have not always understood or valued your work. Learning more about the history of AIC has convinced me that things that once were possible can be possible again. I would also like to offer my sincere thanks to the inspiring scholars who made up my committee. Patricia Ericsson, Victor Villanueva, and Kristin Arola, I hope that you see in this text the fruits of your patience with me as I muddled through. Thank you for introducing me to such a rich cross-section of what is, and has been happening, in our field. And to Jason, thanks for your acts of support, both great and small. None of these words would have made it to paper without you. iii A LINGERING COLONIALITY: CONSIDERING THE EPISTEMIC AND STRUCTURAL (IM)POSSIBILITIES OF UNIVERSITY-SPONSORED PRISON WRITING PROGRAMS Abstract By Anna Charis Plemons, PhD. Washington State University May 2014 Co-Chair: Patricia F. Ericsson Co-Chair: Victor Villanueva Walter Mignolo suggests a fused relationship between modernity and coloniality. I suggest that prison writing sponsorship carries the possibility of this coloniality in the ways that sponsors account for and justify programs. Specifically, I suggest that the way scholars use student texts assumes a modernistic fixity that may not be there. In response to this critique, I provide a theoretical lens for looking at the prison writing classroom that suggests that both the writing communities and the texts they create are inherently organic and might not be measurable, package-able, and exportable in they ways we want them to be. This remixed theory brings together grammatology, ecosocial theory, and actor network theory, each of which operates on the assumption that a fundamental instability underlies relationships between people and things in their networks. Taken together, these theories help describe the messy, complicated, and contingent work being done by prison writing communities and lead me to assert that such communities stand to lose iv when program sponsors dictate the type of work being done, and/or require explicit or implicit evidence of transformation from program participants. Whereas the aforementioned theories work to disrupt a modernistic paradigm for understanding and evaluating prison writing programs, indigenous methodologies open up possible decolonial options for thinking about how we construct, and carry out, acts of sponsorship and research in the prison system. The theory and praxis suggested in this text makes use of the particular history of Arts in Corrections at New Folsom, the maximum-security prison where I have been a guest teacher in the classrooms of two incarcerated teaching artists, both of whom are serving life without parole sentences. In the interplay between theories that speak to the instability of things and methodologies that privilege relationality and relational accountability I offer joining (versus helping or transforming) as a possible posture for scholars interested in the sponsorship and study of out of school writing communities. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS………………………………………………………………iii ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………………………...iv CHAPTER PREFACE………………………………………………………………………....1 1. GETTING INSIDE: AN INTRODUCTION………………………………….3 2. JOINING THE WORK: COMPLICATING PRISON LITERACY SPONSORSHIP……………………………………………………………...20 3. WRITING SUBJECTS: MAKING THE CASE FOR OPPORTUNITIES THAT SUPPORT A RANGE OF AUTHORIAL PURPOSES……………..43 4. DERRIDA GOES TO PRISON: THEORY, MEANING, AND THE COLONIAL IMPULSE IN COMPOSITION……………………………….73 5. COLONIALITY AND ACADEMIC INQUIRY: THOUGHTS ON A “FAILED” STUDY OF TWO INCARCERATED TEACHING ARTISTS…………………………………………………………………...103 6. ECOSOCIAL SYSTEMS, ACCOUNTABLE RELATIONSHIPS, AND DECOLONIAL OPTIONS IN THE STUDY OF PRISON WRITING PROGRAMS……………………………………………………………….133 7. IN LIEU OF A CONCLUSION: THREE MORE LOOKS AT AIC………163 BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………177 vi Dedication To the fellowship of writers at New Folsom vii PREFACE I gave a completed first draft of this text to Marty Williams, the incarcerated teaching artist whose story is interwoven herein with my own. I would have also liked to have also shown it to Spoon Jackson, the other incarcerated teaching artist to be introduced in Chapter 1. However, by the time it was completed, Spoon had been moved without notice down to a Level Three institution in southern California, leaving the crowd of pigeons that he used to feed through the chain link between the sallyport and the Small Side Yard shuffling around, hungrily pecking at the concrete. The chaotic and transitory California prison is, by its mission, at odds with the type of relational methodology this text points toward. And my inability to discuss the finished text with Spoon frustrates the end to my own small story. Although I did not get to officially good-bye to Spoon, I did have a chance to say good-bye forever to Marty. That was over a year ago. He is still at New Folsom, so I see him in class. We continue to have conversations about teaching and writing in prison. Since we already said good-bye forever, now we just shake hands at the end of class and chat our way out the library door that opens onto the sallyport. He waits for a guard to let him back onto the yard that bridges the sallyport and his housing unit. I turn and walk the other way, without looking back, down the windowless hallway of the Medical Clinic where inmates wait on narrow wooden benches for dialysis or pill dispensation. It is a strange space between good-bye forever and an actual transfer. It has afforded me some extra time to learn from Marty and to let him speak back to the theory I see forming in the interplay between the seemingly disparate scholars whose ideas appear in this text. Five years ago I did not expect that Marty and I would be talking about 1 composition and coloniality. I knew Marty was a self-made scholar, but I was not sure, even as I handed him the draft of this text, that he would want to serve as a reader for this particular project. And even though I had attempted to eschew a cliquish, insider discourse as I wrote, I was not sure that I had made my thoughts readable. Nonetheless, it was important to me to bring the text back to the incarcerated teachers at New Folsom before it went into the public record. A month after I gave Marty the draft we sat down together to talk about the text. I was really touched to learn that he had read it through three times and scribbled in the margins. And I knew that he had heard me when, as an initial response to the text, he quoted Thoreau: “If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life.” I laughed. As is usually the case, the thing I had wanted to say had already been said long, long ago in a sentence or two. Thoreau, invited to the conversation, gets at the heart of part of the issue I have attempted to lay out. There is a fundamental problem with conscious designs intended to enact good upon another in his or her own house—and maybe even a deeper violence when the place the recipients of such good are living is not their home at all. I am grateful to Marty for bringing Thoreau into the conversation. I am also deeply grateful to him for his criticism of the initial draft. And, of course, I will always be grateful that he allowed me to be a guest teacher in his classroom. 2 CHAPTER ONE GETTING INSIDE: AN INTRODUCTION We can’t wait to speak until we are perfectly clear and righteous. There is no purity and, in our lifetime, no end to this process. --Adrienne Rich, Contradictions We differ in the presentation of theory, not in our capacity to theorize. --Lee Maracle, Oratory: Coming to Theory This dissertation is the story of a personal and professional incongruence, a state of disharmony, a recognition of things unsuitable. Specifically, it is a collection of related observations about how a lingering coloniality functions within the epistemology and structures of inquiry employed in the discipline of Composition. In suggesting that Composition still carries and masks a colonial logic in the ways we think, write, and do, I implicate myself and set myself at the center of the critique.

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