INNER GAZE: THE ROLE OF PRISON WRITINGS IN THE AFRICAN AMERICAN STRUGGLE FOR RACIAL JUSTICE

Supervisor/s: Maria José Canelo

Doctoral Programme: Post-Colonialisms and Global Citizenship

Funding: FCT

In this project I propose to carry out a textual analysis of different forms of prison writings - letters, autobiographies, political manifestos, memoirs, articles and essays - elaborated by African American political prisoners between the 1960s and 1980s. Resorting the technique of close reading, my ultimate aim is to deepen the relevance of this prolific and heterogenous production in terms of political innovations for the antiracist struggle and processes of political subjectification. In other words, I firstly intend to investigate how prison writings helped to elaborate a critical account on the relation between racial slavery and incarceration; and secondly, how prison writing contributed to re-shape political theories and practices of struggle, drawing inspiration from the abundant experiences of Black Radicalism in the USA and from the transnational paradigm of Pan-Africanism and the network of anti-colonial struggles. By conducting an archival research of the sources that were not published and employing a textual and a rhetorical analysis, I aim to show how prison writings contribute to change the language, the theories and the practices of the struggle for racial justice in the USA. Ultimately, a postcolonial lens will help me to frame the phenomenon of incarceration, connecting colonial captivity and carceral formations to the criminalization of political dissent, that struck black radical movements from the 1960s, and to the contemporary racialized mass detention. Therefore, I argue that African American prison writings constitute the theoretical instrument to read the multifaceted modalities of confinement of Black people in the USA, thus the ultimate objective of this research is to analyze how this heterogeneous literature contribute to question the colonial rationality of racialized incarceration, to enrich the political strategies for racial justice and finally to shape a strong tradition of anti-racist pedagogy.