City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 2-2017 “The Monster They've Engendered in Me”: Gothic Strategies in African American and Latina/o Prison Literature, 1945-2000 Jason Baumann Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/1910 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] “THE MONSTER THEY'VE ENGENDERED IN ME”: GOTHIC STRATEGIES IN AFRICAN AMERICAN AND LATINA/O PRISON LITERATURE, 1945-2000 by JASON BAUMANN A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2017 © 2017 JASON BAUMANN All Rights Reserved ii “THE MONSTER THEY'VE ENGENDERED IN ME”: GOTHIC STRATEGIES IN AFRICAN AMERICAN AND LATINA/O PRISON LITERATURE, 1945-2000 by Jason Baumann This manuscript has been read and accepted by the Graduate Faculty in English in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy. ____________________ ______________________________________ Date Robert Reid-Pharr Chair of Examining Committee ____________________ ______________________________________ Date Mario DiGangi Executive Officer Supervisory Committee: Robert Reid-Pharr Ruth Wilson Gilmore Carrie Hintz THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iii ABSTRACT “THE MONSTER THEY'VE ENGENDERED IN ME”: GOTHIC STRATEGIES IN AFRICAN AMERICAN AND LATINA/O PRISON LITERATURE, 1945-2000 by Jason Baumann Advisor: Robert Reid-Pharr Recent scholarship on American prison literature, such as Caleb Smith’s pivotal study The Prison in the American Imagination, has uncovered the power that the terrifying realities of the modern prison have had as an inspiration for the development of Gothic literature, as well as the ways that prison writers have in turn drawn upon these Gothic images. However, these scholars have considered prison writers as passively trapped by Gothic discourses that ultimately objectify them as monsters. In contrast, I will argue that African American and Latina/o prison writers in the post-war period have consciously transformed these Gothic themes in order to critique the prison-industrial complex, as well as call into question conceptions of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and justice. In my dissertation I will analyze a spectrum of Gothic strategies used by African American and Latina/o prison writers from the late 20th century—including Jimmy Santiago Baca, Miguel Piñero, Iceberg Slim, Billie Holiday, George Jackson, and Sanyika Shakur—and will show how they reconfigure Gothic conceptions of monstrosity in order to challenge their dehumanization by the state and the politics of mass incarceration. iv ACKOWLEDGEMENTS My eternal gratitude to those who made this project possible: To my advisor and committee for their keen advice, wisdom, and belief in my project, To my parents for raising me surrounded by so many books, To my sister for her intelligence, sass, and determination, To my husband for his patience and kindness, To my godfather for all his blessings, And, to my ancestors for their memories. And lastly, my praises to the orisha Shango for his continual encouragement, inspiration and grace— “Lightning – with what kind of cloth do you cover your body? With the cloth of death… Son of a leopard, who uses blood for bathing. The man who died in the market and woke up in the house, He is the one I will worship for the sake of my head. He takes his neighbor’s roof to cover his own head. He lends money and does not ask for it in return. The king who knows today and tomorrow, The one who knows what the white man speaks in secret. The one who turns a bad head into a good one.” Traditional Yoruba praise song for Shango. H.U. Beier, “Yoruba Vocal Music,” African Music Society Journal 1 (1956): 25-26. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Contents Introduction ................................................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1 ..................................................................................................................................................... 10 Chapter 2 ..................................................................................................................................................... 40 Chapter 3 ..................................................................................................................................................... 73 Chapter 4 ................................................................................................................................................... 115 Chapter 5 ................................................................................................................................................... 147 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................................ 177 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................................. 186 vi Introduction In her early study The Coherence of Gothic Conventions, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick resurrected a litany of notable themes in Gothic narratives, stitched together from a range of critical and creative sources. These include the priesthood and monastic institutions; sleeplike and deathlike states; subterranean spaces and live burial; doubles; the discovery of obscure family ties; affinities between narrative and pictorial art; possibilities of incest; unnatural echoes or silences, unintelligible writings, and the unspeakable; garrulous retainers; the poisonous effects of guilt and shame; nocturnal landscapes and dreams; apparitions of the past; Faust- and Wandering Jew-like figures; civil insurrections and fires; the charnel house and the madhouse. The chief incidents of a Gothic novel never go far beyond illustrating these few themes, and even the most unified novel includes most of them.1 One of her aims in that study was to show how these Gothic conventions overflow the confines of the classic Gothic novels proper into the wider language and strategies of 19th century British literature. Given this unsettling spread of the Gothic, it is no surprise that it has influenced many other literary discourses, including prison literature. Sedgwick’s list of Gothic conventions is eerily echoed by a parallel list of actual horrors in the narratives of prisoners: the religious roots of the penitentiary, the legal undeath of incarceration, the entombment of solitary confinement, the strange makeshift kinship of the prison yards, the threat of sexual violence and transformations of sexuality, the eroding madness caused by imprisonment, the fires and violence of prison insurrections, and the struggles with literary language to convey the unraveling of human subjectivity that is inflicted by prison-industrial complex. 1 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (New York: Routledge Kegan & Paul, 1986), 31. 1 This intertextuality between Gothic literature and prison narratives has been noted by scholars such as David Reynolds in Beneath the American Renaissance, where he showed the profound influence that the reports of Newgate Prison had on the “sensational” streams of American literature.2 More recently, Caleb Smith has shown how incarceration has figured as an awful specter haunting American ideologies of freedom and autonomy in his study The Prison & the American Imagination.3 However, little attention has been paid to the rhetorical strategies of prison writers themselves to see how their narratives of resistance have transformed the imagery and conventions of Gothic literature. Within my dissertation, I will argue that prison writers in the United States have appropriated Gothic imagery in order to challenge the horrors to which they have been subjected, to reimagine kinship and sexuality, to critique and revaluate societal conceptions of monstrosity, and to interrogate the legacies of slavery and its uncanny repetition in the current realities of racial oppression and violence in the United States. I will focus on American prison narratives by African American and Latina/o writers composed post-1945 showing how these texts are deeply indebted to Gothic conventions of the 18th and 19th centuries. I will consider both autobiographical and fictional narratives by authors who were themselves incarcerated. I have focused on the American post-war period since it is the most recent renaissance in prison writing in the 20th century and also the period in which mass-incarceration emerges. I have focused on narratives, both memoirs and novels (with the exception of Miguel Piñero’s plays), as that is where these Gothic resonances are most pronounced. Given the 2 David S. Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1989), 249-274. 3 Caleb Smith, Prisons and the American Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011). 2 tremendous range and history of American prison poetry, a thorough study of these issues in verse is beyond the reaches of this study. I have focused