The language of the prison house : incarceration, race, and masculinity in twentieth century U.S. literature

The history of the U.S. is inseparable from its practices of imprisonment. The centrality of incarceration is evident in books, films, and performances situated in tension between imaginative and historical discourses: William Faulkner’s novels Sanctuary (1931), Light in August (1932), and Go Down, Moses (1942); Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice (1968) and Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song (1979); Tony Kaye’s American History X (1998), Norman Jewison’s The Hurricane (1999), and Liz Garbus, Wilbert Rideau, and John Stack’s The Farm: Angola, USA (1998); Ken Webster’s Jury Duty (1999) and a 1999 protest, “Live from Death Row.” These representations of imprisonment provide the means to identify a carceral identity, as imprisonment has become a matter of cultural difference similar to other indices such as race, class, gender, and ethnicity. Raced practices of imprisonment have contributed to the equation of black masculinity with criminality in the cultural imagination, a practice resisted in texts that evoke a plural, social identity. Faulkner’s fiction demonstrates a shift in responsibility for criminality between 1931 and 1942, from the individual to the social, and challenges the degree to which lynching informed Southern execution practices. Soul on Ice and The Executioner’s Song bracket a transformation in the carceral identity from raced and politicized to an ahistorical, race-less phenomenon, a change apparent in the transcripts of the American Correctional Association as well. The wholesale expansion of imprisonment in the U.S. in the last quarter of the twentieth century figures prominently for films set in prison, and the films make claims to the real in a manner that affects actual prisoners. The concluding performances challenge the isolation of the carceral identity and foster dialogue between those in and out of prison, returning prisoners to history.