This course explores how incarcerated writers and artists shape expansive life worlds within and beyond the carceral state. We will study the role of poetry and other forms of creative expression in the history of prison abolition and related social justice movements, and approach art-making as a practice of imagining abolitionist futures. We’ll ask questions like: how does poetry operate in relation to state power? What is (and has been) the role of poetry in organizing? How does poetry resist surveillance? We’ll explore how creative work happens in and beyond the prison-industrial complex, how it inhabits/names/refuses carceral logics, and how it provides methodologies for the critique and dismantling of carceral institutions (including but not limited to correctional facilities, Native American boarding schools, internment camps, immigration detention centers, and military prisons). As we will see, central to these critiques is the intersection of racial, gendered, economic, colonial, and environmental systems of exploitation. We will read poetry in part to better understand these systems, and (more centrally) to learn how creative artists imagine and craft alternative ways of being and being together.
- Teacher: Lindsay Reckson