A Student Roundtable on Prison Abolition and Imprisonment Writing

P Lai: In spring 2009, I offered a junior-level English seminar on Literatures of American Imprisonment, a course that surveyed writing that emerges from or reflects on various historical moments and forms of captivity. Rather than considering such imprisonment as anomalous to the United States of America, the course forwarded an argument about the constitutive quality of such captivity for American national character. We read captivity narratives from colonial America in the contact between European and Native Americans; African American slave narratives; Indian boarding school memoirs; Japanese American internment poetry; contemporary prison writing and neo-abolitionist discourse; and poetry from the Guantanamo Bay prison detainees. While the readings covered a span of over three hundred years, we read them out of chronological order to avoid creating a progressive narrative of increasing freedom or decreasing restrictions on the individual body. Instead, we considered how imprisonment has functioned variously to delimit who belongs to the national body and where boundaries can be drawn for the nation-state. The class began with a focused consideration of prison abolition by way of Angela Y. Davis’s succinct, provocative Are Prisons Obsolete? and selections from Joy James’s Brown, Michelle. The Culture of Punishment: Prison, Society, and Spectacle. New York University Press, 2009.