UC Irvine

Critical race theory's dire account of the prison-slave throws the hopeful pragmatisms of rhetoric and composition into stark relief, urging us to consider the extent to which writing about, with, and for imprisoned writers fulfills the discipline's civic and progressivist aims, or retrenches structural oppression. Using a suite of rhetorical and qualitative analyses, this project looks at a detention-based community publication serving youth and adults to understand how public writing and prison-based literacy sponsorship operate in ways not accounted for in the discourses of transcendence, resistance, and suffering that pervade prison writing scholarship. In so doing, I offer a set of curatorial practices that rhetorical field researchers, community engagement scholars, teachers, and activists might employ to render vernacular rhetorics in ways that both respond to critical race theory's critiques, and help them stand in more ethical solidarity with the communities and causes they take up in their work.

After examining prison scholarship's affinity with nineteenth-century abolitionist rhetorics of whiteness, I propose a set of rhetorical-representational correctives to prevent extending what Spillers might call a "grammar" of prisoner suffering. Taking up an exercise in phronēsis that honors public writing pedagogy's debt to the classical rhetorical tradition, I turn to the prudential reasoning and situated experience made available by qualitative method to reveal what radical critical theory does not. I do so by first conducting an archival analysis of a detention-based community publication known as The Beat Within. I then triangulate those findings through a rhetorical field study designed in partnership with Beat members. Noting the affinities between The Beat's practices around writing emotion and ascetic truth-practices described by Foucault, I suggest The Beat's cultivation of a kind of ethopoietic training serves as a precondition for public engagement, whether that engagement follow the contours of civil society as defined by the institution, assert counter-public spaces writers create for (and among) themselves, or embrace both domains simultaneously.