Situating Agency in the Memoirs of Mass Incarceration

ABSTRACT

Agency in prison writing is often theorized as resistance to the material conditions of incarceration and the ideological forces of the State. Situating agency in the larger history of mass incarceration (1970 – 2010) and in the memoirs of those who lived through it, however, shifts the focus from the prison writer as subject resisting an oppressive system and toward the prison writer as rhetor navigating the changing discourses and material conditions of mass incarceration in registers of agency that include resistance, self-determination, and recovery.

Notes

1. Thanks to RR reviewers David Holmes and Omedi Ochieng for their rigorous and insightful reviews of the manuscript; to Caddie Alford for her thoughtful feedback on agency; to Emma Sachs for her thorough research assistance on Cleaver, McCall, and Senghor; and to David Bussell for a spirited first-read of an earlier draft.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

David Coogan

David Coogan is an associate professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University. His most recent book is Writing Our Way Out: Memoirs from Jail, the creative culmination of a writing class in which ten men explore the conditions, traps, and turning points on their paths to imprisonment as well as the redemptive power of memoir. Coogan is also the co-author of The Public Work of Rhetoric: Citizen-Scholars and Civic Engagement. His essays have appeared in Rhetoric Society Quarterly, College Composition and Communication, College English, Community Literacy, and in Working for Justice: A Handbook for Prison Education and Activism.