Bodily Instruments: Somatic Metaphor in Prison-Based Research

Abstract

This analysis uses a critical race framework from African-American literary studies (Morrison 1993, McBride 2001) to locate discourses of whiteness circulating between the texts of prison-based scholar-practitioners and their imprisoned counterparts, considering how those rhetorical economies risk marginalizing prisoners in an already vexed space. Recognizing the role of affect and bodily ritual in shaping those economies, the analysis then turns to Jennifer LeMesurier’s account of somatic metaphor (2014) as a storehouse of rhetorical knowledge, and what John Protevi describes as, “a personal political physiology [capable of shaping] institutional action” (Protevi 2009, xii) to explore how such bodied knowledge scales from the personal to the political. This revised sense of the continuum between affect, ritual, and the political might, in turn, provide prison-based scholar-practitioners with a new vocabulary for understanding our own subjectivities as they shape our carceral encounters, our activist impulses, and the scholarship that ensues, in a way that avoids retrenching discourses of whiteness, and painting prisoners as what Toni Morrison might call, “some suffering thing” (Morrison 1993, 3-4).

Journal
Reflections: A Journal of Community-Engaged Writing and Rhetoric
Published
2019-04-01
DOI
10.59236/rjv19i1pp33-58
CompPile
Open Access
OA PDF Gold
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Citation Context

Cited by in this index (1)

  1. Literacy in Composition Studies

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