Session 6: Resistance and the Body
Chair: Laurence McKeown

David Schalkwyk - Mandela’s Lost Manuscript: Appropriation and Repression in Accounts of Robben Island
Chair, English Department, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch 7700, South Africa

During apartheid, Robben Island became the most famous (or notorious) prison in the world. Since 1994 a place of horror and suffering has been transformed into a national symbol. The establishment of the island and its former prison as a Museum, tourist attraction, and site of pilgrimage has instantiated a complex and contradictory space through which memory and history have tended to conflict with political and commercial appropriation. Lauded by some of its former prisoners as "the university", where a pan-Africanist solidarity was forged in a spirit of upliftment and opposition, it has been accused by others, especially women ex-prisoners of establishing a hegemonic control over the meaning and significance of the struggle against apartheid.

Nelson Mandela's A Long Walk To Freedom is probably the most well known account of life on the island. But it overwrites another manuscript that, Mandela tells us, was lost when it was discovered by prison guards and confiscated. This paper will examine the possible overwriting of this lost manuscript by the new book, written under the new and very different pressures of nation-building and the need for reconciliation. It will look at the various ways in which the history of the island (as nineteenth-century prison, leper colony, and common-law prison) has tended to be overshadowed by its present political symbolism, and at the ways in which the accounts, by a variety of prisoners, of their experiences on the island contradict what has now become a homogenising myth of solidarity and comradeship.

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Robert Perkinson - Hell Exploded: How Prisoner Music and Memoir Helped Topple America’s Convict Lease System and What This Means for the Future of Penal Reform
Department of American Studies, University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, Hawaii, U.S.A.

"Follow me, and I will place before you acts of fiendish cruelty the like of which ought to cause even the red hot dragons of lowest damnation to thunder forth protests. I hold myself today as standing delivered from a hell to which merciful God would not condemn a man’s soul" — Charles C. Campbell, Hell Exploded: An Exposition of Barbarous Cruelty and Prison Horrors (1900)

Convict leasing, which developed in southern states after the Civil War, constitutes perhaps the cruelest chapter in the history of American punishment. Rather than being confined in penitentiaries, thousands of southern convicts, most of them black, were hired out to coal mines and cotton plantations, where they toiled endlessly without pay and endured capricious whippings, nauseating food, and rampant disease. Contemporaries denounced this pioneering prison privatization program as “worse than slavery.” Despite the totality of subjugation, however, leased prisoners did not suffer in silence. Instead, they protested loudly, especially in work songs and muckraking exposés. In the process, they reshaped the course of American imprisonment and bequeathed important lessons for the present.

This paper examines an outpouring of convict self-expression around 1900, as convict leasing collapsed across the South. Focusing specifically on Texas--which today manages one of the world’s largest prison systems and which engendered particularly rich protest traditions--the paper explores how convict artists used music and memoir to survive the “pains of imprisonment,” and it shows how they helped overthrow convict leasing and also undermine its Progressive-era successor.

The paper considers the influence of convict expression on both the free and unfree worlds. Within leasing’s labor camps, it examines how prisoner intellectuals made sense of their servitude and constructed individual and collective identities. In particular, I am interested in how predominately white autobiographers and predominately black blues musicians grappled with issues of race, masculinity, and power, and how they adopted the conventions of slave narratives to express woe and assert righteousness.

Outside the gates, the paper examines how prisoners shaped public perceptions of punishment and influenced the trajectory of penal reform. By dramatizing their suffering and excoriating their masters, convicts destabilized leasing and hastened its demise. But they also frustrated the penal progressives who took over from lessees. By valorizing convict resistance and demanding far-reaching change, they antagonized their keepers and ultimately provoked fierce crackdowns. Prisoner intellectuals thus left a conflicted legacy, inspiring reform but also backlash. In this way, the history of convict music and memoir in the South illuminates broader cycles of penal reform and retrenchment. This is particularly important in the United States today, where the ghosts of convict leasing haunt the retributionist present.

Jonathan Ortiz - Digging up Resistance: An Exploration of Inmate Infraction as Resistance

This paper explores inmate rule infractions as not only a breach of policy but also, at times, as forms of inmate resistance to State power and control. When resistance is defined with an eye towards its flexibility of form and is based in both heroic and mundane actions, we must come to interpret inmate infractions as not simply ‘criminal thinking’ or ‘immature coping’ strategies but potentially as articulated forms of resistance and counter-hegemonic practice. Allowing that incarceration is, among other things, a form of State control - legitimate or otherwise - and a hegemonic process that is never totalizing or complete, we must then come to consider inmates’ infractions as a potential site of resistance to that power.

Drawing from my fieldwork experience at a halfway house for Federal Inmates, as an anthropologist and as a staff member, I will unravel the layers of meaning behind inmate disobedience in order to expose some of the forms of resistance carried out by inmates. Rather than view all infractions as resistance, I will excavate the many layers of motive and meaning behind certain actions in order to articulate instances of resistance, thus highlighting the richness that is part of the human experience- even in prison. In my analysis I will present, as examples, certain incidents at the halfway house and then explain how those infractions must be viewed as both organized and non-organized acts of resistance.

Once we understand some of the meanings behind inmate actions, we can then view certain of these acts as well thought out and performed acts of resistance. Viewed in this light, inmate’s misbehavior provides us a more nuanced understanding of systemic power and the resistance to it within Prison.

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