Hannah Bowlus

Date of Award

2016

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Humanities

First Advisor

Wallace, Miriam

Area of Concentration

English

Abstract

This thesis examines the works of Etheridge Knight, particularly his first book of poetry, Poems From Prison, Look for Me in the Whirlwind: The Autobiography of the New York 21, and C.D. Wright’s One Big Self in the context of the prison literature genre and the history of the United States. All texts seek to negotiate the politically and artistically stifling air of the prison and its routinized mechanisms of censorship and surveillance while attempting to make their work relevant to the unimprisoned U.S. populace. In my first chapter, I discuss Etheridge Knight’s relation to a history of resistance and how it informs the poetry written under incarceration. Primarily relying on his first book of poetry, Poems From Prison (1968), I examine the use of tropes and allegory to make alternatives to historical narratives. Etheridge Knight utilizes the linguistic art of Signifyin(g) in order to escape the prison’s imposed mechanisms of surveillance. Relying on Blues conventions and misdirection, Knight is able to Signify upon the prison and relate his anger and isolation to an audience physically separate from him. In my second chapter, I discuss Look for Me in the Whirlwind: The Collective Autobiography of the New York 21 (1971), a book published only two years after Knight’s, signalling the increased oppression within the prison and the limits imposed on prisoners’ self-edification. The New York 21, part of the Black Panthers’ New York chapter, must contend with the paranoia that marked the New Left because of government infiltration while staying faithful to the party platform in spite of its rapid dissolution. The text addresses the genre of autobiography by providing a cohesive unending narrative that nonetheless reveals in moments the discord in the Panthers brought on by respectability politics, misogyny, and violence. In my third chapter, I discuss C.D. Wright’s One Big Self (2007), a work of documentary poetics formed around Wright’s visits to three Louisiana prisons alongside photographer Deborah Luster. As the only outsider narrative included in this project, Wright’s perspective is essential to the prison writing genre because it attempts to reconcile the prison population with the surrounding world, conflating her self-made archive of literature, theory, and pop culture with the voices of Louisianian prisoners in order to demonstrate how saturated U.S. culture is with vengeance and reductive images of criminal types.

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