“Incarcerating Rhetorics, Publics, and Pedagogies” analyzes how cultural beliefs about empowerment and rehabilitation inform contemporary prison art and writing, as well as how activists mobilize prisoners’ creative work in order to humanize the incarcerated and re-educate the public about incarceration practices in the United States. I argue that art and writing behind bars provides us with an opportunity to better understand the multiple discursive contexts that shape prisoner experiences as well as representations of prisoner experiences. Rather than taking a position in arguments over whether prison art and writing is or is not “empowering,” I look critically at discursive assumptions of empowerment, as well as how such assumptions are negotiated rhetorically in acts of art and writing by individual prisoners. I provide a critical framework for looking at art and writing by prisoners that moves beyond questions and assumptions of empowerment and provides instead a means for understanding the rhetorical and discursive conditions that shape its production as well as its reception.
Throughout my dissertation I investigate the interaction of physical and discursive contexts in prisoner art and writing. I track the history of prison pedagogies, examining not only the development (and subsequent dismantling of) education programs in U.S. prisons, but the other ways in which institutional practices as well as rhetorics of reform and retribution have developed contemporary understandings of criminality. I provide ethnographic research to analyze how incarcerated youth use art and writing to respond to the conceptions of criminality and victimization applied to them in their treatment and programs at a juvenile corrections facility for girls. Finally, I investigate how activist mobilizations of prisoner writing, as well as prison writers themselves, often redeploy conventional discourses of criminality in their efforts to “humanize” prisoners.
This research enhances current scholarship in rhetorical studies – and English studies more broadly – that is concerned with rhetorical agency mobilized by speakers on the margins, by including much-needed perspectives from prison-writers, as opposed to simply writers about prison. However, I argue that analyzing carceral writing does more than simply expand the rhetorical canon; it also provides us with new ways for understanding how discursive and physical contexts interact to shape writers’ rhetorical choices. I offer a revised model for material analysis; rather than impose a top-down analysis that privileges the power of national and cultural discourses in structuring the institutional discourses and the works produced by prison artists and writers, I use a rhetorical theory of identification and resistance, informed by theories of institutional and discursive power, in order to account for the circumstances of production of the art and writing. This analysis also leads to a better understanding of the relationship between rhetoric and discourse more generally, and how discourses about the causes of and solutions for criminality function rhetorically in corrections facilities and in our culture as a whole.