Song Uncaged: Prison Temporality and Black Pop Culture Escape

Abstract

Following in the wave of scholarship on imprisoned intellectuals and activists, this brief examination considers the sound produced by the incarcerated Marcus Garvey who used his song “Keep Cool” as a method of escape and political possibility through musical composition. Richard Iton's work on visibility and the problematics of the Black citizen-subject provides a compelling series of theorizations and queries in my thinking on how incarcerated Black men and women are differently exposed to and in rebellion of state violences as the socially and civilly (un)dead who both elucidate and put pressure on Iton's “black fantastic."

Keywords:

• black fantastic
• citizenship
• imprisonment
• Marcus Garvey
• music
• prison
• time
• UNIA

Notes

Richard Iton, In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics and Popular Culture in the Post-Civil Rights Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 9.

Ibid., 217.

Marcus Garvey, “Statement of Arrest (January 1922),” Public Broadcasting Corporation (PBS), American Experience “Marcus Garvey: Look for Me in the Whirlwind,” Primary Sources: Statement of Arrest, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/garvey/filmmore/ps_arrest.html (accessed February 2, 2014).

Iton, In Search of the Black Fantastic, 26.

Basil Walters, “Jimmy Tucker, Warrior King Receive Marcus Garvey Music Awards,” Jamaica Observer (August 20, 2010), http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/entertainment/Jimmy-Tucker--Warrior-King-receive-Marcus-Garvey-Music-Awards_7889353 (accessed February 25, 2014).

For more detail on the UNIA musical program, including its anthem, see Shana L. Redmond, Anthem: Social Movements and the Sound of Solidarity in the African Diaspora (New York: New York University Press, 2014).

Marcus Garvey, “Keep Cool,” PBS, Primary Sources, Garvey's Poetry and Songs, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/garvey/filmmore/ps_cool.html (accessed February 2, 2014).

Garvey suffered from severe respiratory illness while incarcerated, a fact that led to his eventual pardon.

Iton, In Search of the Black Fantastic, 16, 28.

Ibid., 17.

Dylan Rodríguez, Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 246; Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985).

Rodríguez, Forced Passages, 227.

Iton, In Search of the Black Fantastic, 19.

See Charles Henry Rowell, “‘Words Don't Go There’: An Interview with Fred Moten,” Callaloo 27, no. 4 (2004): 954–966.

Iton, In Search of the Black Fantastic, 16.

This percentage represents state and U.S. federal facilities combined. Another 22% of the total incarcerated population is considered “Hispanic.” The Sentencing Project, “Fact Sheet: Trends in U.S. Corrections” (updated April 2014), http://sentencingproject.org/doc/publications/inc_Trends_in_Corrections_Fact_sheet.pdf (accessed July 20, 2014).

Prior to the 2014 FCC rules capping the charge for interstate calls made from prisons, some incarcerated peoples and their families were paying up to $17.00 for a 15-minute phone call. Sam Gustin, “Prison Phone Calls Will No Longer Cost a Fortune,” Time online (February 12, 2014), http://time.com/6672/prison-phone-rates/ (accessed July 23, 2014). In addition to phone call prices, the erection of prisons well outside of urban areas and the regular practice of interstate prisoner transfer means that families of incarcerated peoples spend small fortunes to travel for their loved ones. During the fiscal year 2011–2012, 9,404 California prisoners were housed in out of state facilities (most of them private) as far away as Mississippi. Randall G. Shelden and Selena Teji, “Collateral Consequences of Interstate Transfer of Prisoners,” Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice (July 2012), http://www.cjcj.org/uploads/cjcj/documents/Out_of_state_transfers.pdf (accessed July 23, 2014).

George Jackson, Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1994 [1970]), 3, 37.

Of course the prison has a history. Michel Foucault is one of the most lauded historian-theorists of punishment and dates its modern productivity to the 18th century. Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978 [1975]). See also Rebecca McLennon, The Crisis of Imprisonment: Protest, Politics, and the Making of the U.S. Penal State, 1776–1941 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

Thomas Meisenhelder, “An Essay on Time and the Phenomenology of Imprisonment,” Deviant Behavior 6, no. 1 (1985): 39–56.

Malcolm X and Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (New York: Ballantine Books, 1992 [1964]), 221.

Ibid., 220.

Malcolm “Shorty” Jarvis with Paul D. Nichols, The Other Malcolm—“Shorty” Jarvis (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 1998), 8.

Angela Y. Davis, An Autobiography (1974; New York: International Publishers, 1988), 65.

Clayborne Carson, “Civil Rights Reform and the Black Freedom Struggle,” in The Civil Rights Movements in America, ed. Charles W. Eagles (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1986), 27.

Davis, An Autobiography, 65.

There are examples with which to rebut the argument of the end of social movement activity in the United States, including the Summer 2014 mobilizations in support of Palestine across the country (and world).

Iton, In Search of the Black Fantastic, 19.

Documentary films about Louisiana State Penitentiary include The Farm: Angola, U.S.A. (1998), Six Seconds of Freedom (2008), and Serving Life (2013) as well as a number of journalistic exposes and human interest stories on television, including “Louisiana Lockdown” on the cable channel Animal Planet.

WWOZ, “Angola Prison Music Project Needs CDs,” New Orleans WWOZ-FM website (date unknown), http://www.wwoz.org/new-orleans-community/wwozangola-prison-music-project-needs-cds (accessed July 21, 2014).

Bruce McDonald, dir., “Music From the Big House,” Matson Films (2010), B009DQ6SO4.

Ibid.

Iton, In Search of the Black Fantastic, 17.

Marcus Garvey, “Last Speech Before Incarceration In the Tombs Prison, New York, U.S.A. (June 17, 1923),” PBS, American Experience, Primary Sources: Garvey's Last Speech Before His Incarceration, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/garvey/filmmore/ps_wind.html (accessed February 2, 2014) [emphasis added].

For studies of the relationship between incarceration and enslavement, see Rodríguez, Forced Passages; Kaidi Kasirika, Kenneth Divans, Maharibi Muntu, and Larry M. West, “Prison or Slavery,” The Black Scholar 3, no. 2 (October 1971): 6–12; Angela Y. Davis, “From the Prison of Slavery to the Slavery of Prison: Frederick Douglass and the Convict Lease System,” The Angela Y. Davis Reader (London: Blackwell Publishing, 1998), 74–95; Kim Gilmore, “Slavery and Prison—Understanding the Connections,” Social Justice 27, no. 3 (Fall 2000): 195–205. For imprisonment and Jim Crow, see Sarah Haley, “‘Like I was a Man’: Chain Gangs, Gender, and the Domestic Carceral Sphere in Jim Crow Georgia,” Signs 39, no. 1 (Autumn 2013): 53–77; Dennis R. Childs, Slaves of the State: Black Incarceration from the Chain Gang to the Penitentiary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming 2015); James Forman, Jr., “Racial Critiques of Mass Incarceration: Beyond the New Jim Crow,” NYU Law Review 21 (2012): 21–73.

Iton, In Search of the Black Fantastic, 27, 15.

Ibid., 11.