Migrants, Vagrants, and the Making of the Anthropocene

Olaudah Equiano and the Sailor's Telegraph:The Interesting Narrative and the Source of Black Abolitionism Matthew D. Brown (bio) I. The strong presence of the sea is grossly under-examined in American literature, doubly so in African American literature.1 As Elizabeth Schultz observes, "Historically and culturally, the African American experience has been an inland one. Black Americans," she continues, "have not generally turned seaward in their literature." Although she comes to a "however" that adds the observation "the sea is not absent from African American literature," the rhetorical pose imagined in the claim that "the sea is not absent" is that it will take a good deal of searching to find it (233).2 And yet, as Jeffery Bolster observes in his ground-breaking 1997 study Black Jacks, "Sailors wrote the first six autobiographies of blacks published in English before 1800" (37).3 Many of these autobiographies carry clear abolitionist intent and hint at the type of anti-slavery discussions carried on by sailors around the Atlantic world. When scholars of African American literature turn their attention to works written by sailors, like Olaudah Equiano's The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavas Vassa, the African. Written by Himself (1789), most suffer from the misplaced assumption Schultz points to, and thus fail to see the crucial link between sailors and black abolitionism. Indeed, what Crispus Attucks, Paul Cuffee, Robert Smalls, Frederick Douglass, and so many other black revolutionaries in America have in common is that they were all sailors or in some other way directly connected to the maritime trades. Chinosole observes, "The temptation is strong in some criticism to tune in to only one of Equiano's voices and to silence others," and goes on to lament that the factionalization of academic disciplines has dislocated Equiano's Interesting Narrative from the contexts that can best support important new readings (10). What Chinosole highlights is a dilemma every reader of The Interesting Narrative must confront, as Equiano explicitly lists several "voices"—Olaudah Equiano, Gustavas Vassa, Jacob, Michael, Captain, Freeman—and The Interesting Narrative itself is largely about the power and possibility of controlling and shifting identities. Indeed, its very title lists a "himself" who wrote it, but confronts us with an "or" that questions the identity of "himself:" Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa. This is, of course, further complicated where "The African" seems to be appended not to Equiano's African name but rather to what he calls his "current name," Gustavus Vassa, a Swedish name he was given as a slave. Small wonder it is, indeed, that critics will "tune into only one voice." We are confronted with multiple dynamic identities and asked to sort and prioritize them. The question Chinosole seems to suggest has not so much to do [End Page 191] with which identity is the most "authentic," but rather which is it that allows Equiano to develop and, ultimately, control the others? Of The Interesting Narrative's many voices, that which is most often and most completely silenced is, indeed, that voice which speaks the loudest. After Equiano is taken captive, the voice into which every important event in his narrative is keyed is the voice of the sailor, and it is this center from which all other voices flow. The significance of this is that Equiano's forecastle sailor's voice speaks from a largely hidden source of power in anti-slavery efforts that I call the Sailor's Telegraph—a network of information that flowed through free black and enslaved sailors throughout the African Diaspora. Almost a hundred years before the electronic telegraph, the Sailor's Telegraph was a conduit of information from the world of slavery to the world of anti-slavery, without which the world of anti-slavery could not have made any progress against the institution of slavery. Since the slave trade itself as well as the slave-dependent industries related to the production and refinement of cotton and sugar were inextricably bound up with Atlantic sailor culture, the experience of slaves was readily available to sailors and the experience of sailors was, if to a slightly lesser degree, available to slaves. Equiano's experience...

“To Refute Mr. Jefferson’s Arguments Respecting Us”Thomas Jefferson, David Walker, and the Politics of Early African American Literature Gene Andrew Jarrett (bio) Describing the political genealogy of early African American literature potentially opens the proverbial can of worms, if a 2006 roundtable published in Early American Literature is any indication. Titled “Historicizing Race in Early American Studies,” and featuring the eminent scholars Joanna Brooks, Philip Gould, and David Kazanjian, the roundtable reveals the fault lines of disagreement not only on how to historicize race but also on how to historicize its politics. The journal’s current editor, Sandra M. Gustafson, had invited the roundtable scholars “to think about the theoretical implications of their work for an understanding of ‘race’ in the early period” (310). In response, the scholars outline their methodologies of race and literary history by reciting and elaborating the arguments of their books, all published in 2003: Brooks’s American Lazarus: Religion and the Rise of African American and Native American Literatures, Gould’s Barbaric Traffic: Commerce and Antislavery in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World, and Kazanjian’s The Colonizing Trick: National Culture and Imperial Citizenship in Early America. To begin the debate, Brooks argues that the philosophical and practical impact of race on oppressed groups was quite evident. The very racial “concepts of ‘Blackness’ and ‘Indianness’ were essentially Euro-American inventions imposed upon people of color of various African and indigenous American ethnic affiliations to advance the economic and political dominance of whites” (315). Gould does not necessarily underplay this racial impact, but he does suggest that the meaning of race itself demonstrates a “far greater elasticity” than what Brooks permits (323). Interpreting “race in context of the historical formations of sentimentalism and capitalism,” [End Page 291] Gould considers the mutual influence of transnational and transgeneric literatures, on the one hand, and “ideologies of race that are themselves unstable,” on the other (322).1 Above all, the particular studies of Brooks and Gould proceed from different assumptions on the ideological construction and material tractability of race in early America. Measuring the tractability of race leads to a submerged, though no less important, disagreement between Brooks and Gould on the criteria by which we should assemble a literary archive of early America. Should we examine the lives and literatures of the alleged perpetrators of racial discrimination, or those of the alleged victims, in order to historicize race? What is at stake in studying white imaginations of race as opposed to black experiences of racism? Gould rightly points out that cataloging the archive merely in these terms neglects the ideological infection of racism across the minds and actions of both whites and blacks. Yet Brooks also correctly asserts that reducing racism to merely an ideology threatens to ignore its practical or material devastation of minority groups. Despite their different approaches to historicizing race, Brooks and Gould agree that the racial paradigm of human difference stood at the center of how the authors and subjects of primary texts negotiated, accumulated, and allocated political power in the early republic. Gould senses this agreement when he asks, “What does it mean, for example, to say that [Phillis] Wheatley is ‘free’? Or that she emancipates herself as a writer? The field is still in the process of engaging such questions. I would argue, as I think Brooks does, that addressing such questions necessitates thinking through the different registers on which the very terms ‘liberty’ and ‘slavery’ signified” (325). Just as relevant, we must study how early American literature served as the site of such thought, in which race, nature, slavery, politics, emancipation, liberty, and citizenship are defined in their contemporary terms, not retrofitted from our own. If we accept this precaution, how do we establish the political value and genealogy of early African American literature? In this essay, I argue that before we can ascertain that early African American literature is political insofar that it has confronted racism, and before we can reach conclusions on the political motives, effects, and success of this corpus of texts, we should take a closer look at how the notions of literature and politics themselves resonated in early American debates. These debates involved white and...

Rethinking the Black AtlanticGallows Literature, Slave Narratives, and Visual Culture Rochelle Raineri Zuck (bio) In the Shadow of the Gallows: Race, Crime, and American Civic Identity Jeannine Marie DeLombard Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012 446pp. Journeys of the Slave Narrative in the Early Americas Edited by Nicole N. Aljoe and Ian Finseth Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014 239pp. Picture Freedom: Remaking Black Visuality in the Early Nineteenth Century Jasmine Nichole Cobb New York: New York University Press, 2015 264pp. While it has been twenty-three years since Paul Gilroy published The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), it remains a touch-stone in studies of the African diaspora. Three recent works, Jeannine Marie DeLombard’s In the Shadow of the Gallows, Nicole N. Aljoe and Ian Finseth’s edited collection Journeys of the Slave Narrative, and Jasmine Nichole Cobb’s Picture Freedom, all engage with Gilroy’s work and offer fresh perspectives on textual productions by and about people of African descent in the Atlantic world, particularly as they speak to issues of race, subjectivity, and political and social belonging. DeLombard highlights the ways in which Gilroy’s concept of the “Black Atlantic” led to the formation of the canon of early Afro-diasporic literatures that we know today, including such figures as Olaudah Equiano, Phillis Wheatley, Venture Smith, [End Page 683] and many others.1 This vein of scholarship, she argues, has “entrenched the Afro-diasporic canon’s foundations ever more deeply in masculinist life-writing, [but] it has ignored arguably the most widely circulated, influential form of early black personal narrative, the criminal confession” (12–13). It is this gap that DeLombard addresses in her fascinating study of “gallows literature” and the criminal confession. Aljoe’s introduction opens with a discussion of Gilroy’s concept of the slave ship as a “chronotope” and Marcus Rediker’s analysis of the actual ships that participated in the slave trade, many of which were refurbished vessels that had originally pursued other enterprises. Journeys of the Slave Narrative, which features essays on works from North America, South and Latin America, and the Caribbean, is informed by Gilroy’s conception of the Black Atlantic and by Rediker’s characterization of the slave ship (which functions as a counterpoint to Gilroy’s chronotope). In advancing the volume’s argument for a more capacious definition of the “slave narrative,” Aljoe offers a compelling reading of Rediker’s vision of the slave ship—a blend of different materials and purposes from around the Creole Atlantic—as a metaphor for the early narratives on which the collections’ authors focus. Cobb also draws on Gilroy’s discussion of the slave ship, describing the “transatlantic parlor” as another “single, complex unit of analysis” of the African experience in the Atlantic world (Gilroy qtd. in Cobb 17). Gilroy’s ship provides both a critical model and a point of contrast for Cobb’s own exploration of the ways in which black freedom was “domesticated” through the use of visual images. Informed by Gilroy’s concept of the Black Atlantic and the expanded literary canon that his work made possible, DeLombard, Aljoe and Finseth, and Cobb offer fresh perspectives on early African American literature and culture and pressure familiar understandings of genre and temporality. At a basic level, these three works share a concern with representations of the freedom and unfreedom of people of African descent and devote significant attention to African Americans. The work of DeLombard, Cobb, and the authors featured in Aljoe and Finseth’s collection of essays testifies to the range of critical approaches that can be brought to bear on African diasporic literatures and early American studies, including law and literature, critical race theory, Marxism, feminism, transnationalism and hemispheric studies, food studies, intellectual history, visual theory, and so forth. They also complicate and extend what we understand as African American literature—moving beyond first-person narratives of the journey [End Page 684] from slavery to freedom to include texts such as criminal confessions, ship’s logs, and lithographs. In so doing, these three works also turn away from the search for an “authentic” black voice—with DeLombard noting the distinction between “writers of...

Book Review| December 01 2005 The Cultural Geography of Colonial American Literatures: Empire, Travel, Modernity; Barbaric Traffic: Commerce and Antislavery in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World Ed White Ed White Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literature (2005) 77 (4): 847–849. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-77-4-847 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Ed White; The Cultural Geography of Colonial American Literatures: Empire, Travel, Modernity; Barbaric Traffic: Commerce and Antislavery in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World. American Literature 1 December 2005; 77 (4): 847–849. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-77-4-847 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsAmerican Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. 2005 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

‘Coming to terms with racial capitalism’ brings together three scholars from the disciplines of History, Geography, and Sociology to open up consideration of this increasingly popular concept. This is done by engaging the idea of ‘racial capitalism’ with the historical role of colonialism in Jamaica, Latin America, and Ireland. Each author draws on the resources of their discipline to locate the concept within debates such as Black Marxism and to consider it in relation to discussions about Indigenous rights and questions of racism. Catherine Hall offers a case study of one temporal and spatial instance of racial capitalism in the mid-18th-century Atlantic world. Sarah A. Radcliffe examines the place of Indigenous peoples in the racial colonial capitalism of Latin America. The final paper by Gurminder K. Bhambra argues for the significance of colonialism to understandings of capitalism through an examination of Irish colonial history.

Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative follows the author as he occupies various subject positions, including sailor, illiterate heathen, lettered Christian, hairdresser, merchant, master, and commodity. Equiano adopts and critiques European ontological forms of feeling and speaking as he narrates his movement across the Atlantic world. Equiano does not simply become a speaking subject by attaining literacy but rather by undergoing a biopolitical and economic conversion that both produces his Narrative and leads to the imperial propositions he puts forth at its end. Two different logics of capital work on Equiano throughout his text: the first, a logic that fragments the body to compensate it for the loss of its parts, as applied to sailors and colonial officers who were compensated for the loss of eyes or legs, and a logic that creates a corporeal totality, allowing the body to be sold as one unit, as applied to chattel slaves. These logics shape the way he narrates his journey from slavery to freedom. His text narrates his transformation from solely “bare life” to an indeterminate space between good and human being; not quite a slave and not quite a citizen, Equiano illustrates an indeterminate space of subjectivity in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world.

Reviewed by: Secret Cures of Slaves: People, Plants, and Medicine in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World by Londa Schiebinger Rana Hogarth Londa Schiebinger. Secret Cures of Slaves: People, Plants, and Medicine in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2017. xvi + 234 pp. Ill. $24.95 (978–1–5036–0291–5). For many scholars the eighteenth-century Caribbean represents a contentious space shaped by European colonization and Atlantic World slavery. For others it is a geographic space where cultures and knowledge collided. Londa Schiebinger’s latest book, Secret Cures of Slaves: People, Plants, and Medicine in the Eighteenth-Century [End Page 120] Atlantic World, combines these views and offers a new perspective: the eighteenth-century Caribbean as a site of medical innovation, experimentation, and knowledge production. She sees its indigenous and African inhabitants as skilled healers—experts on local plants and herbs—and stewards of highly sought-after medical knowledge. As Schiebinger notes early on in the text, “Fine educations in Europe could not guarantee success on the ground in the tropics” (p. 5). As such, European practitioners relied on enslaved healers’ knowledge or knowledge shared with them from indigenous sources. Her book then is devoted to exploring the transfer of knowledge from enslaved African practitioners to European physicians and the contentious relationships between these two groups set against a backdrop of Atlantic World slavery. Indeed, Schiebinger recounts how European physicians resorted to spying on enslaved healers to learn of their secret cures and running “trials” in which European treatments were pitted against local or indigenous ones to test their efficacy. Her book is divided into five chapters. Chapter 1 examines the experimental impulse in the eighteenth-century Caribbean. In this chapter, Schiebinger demonstrates how white physicians took advantage of their new surroundings and their exposure to black Africans in unfamiliar climates to explore questions about racial difference, the origin of black skin color, and the effect of climate and place on bodily temperature through experimentation. Chapter 2 traces how European practitioners gained access to African and indigenous American plant based therapies. Schiebinger balances cautious speculation with textual sources to outline the transfer of knowledge from indigenous sources to African ones, and African ones to European. African slaves not only practiced medicine, but adopted indigenous knowledge and adapted their own healing customs to treat ailments that proved too challenging for European physicians. She draws these points out in her discussion of yaws—a contagious, painful, disfiguring skin condition that left slaves unable to work. Chapters 3 and 4 explore principles of medical ethics and medical experimentation as it was understood and practiced in the metropole and the colonies. Schiebinger carefully puts experimentation on enslaved populations in the broader context of experimentation that took place in Europe and in the colonies on the poor, prisoners, and other wards of the state. These groups, Schiebinger contends, were vulnerable to medical experimentation. Unlike slaves, however, they did not carry a value as property—a status that Schiebinger notes could shield slaves from reckless experimentation. That said, slaves faced having their humanity acknowledged and dismissed. When it suited a physician’s experimental aims, slaves’ bodies could be interchangeable with whites. In other cases, they were viewed as innately different, but close enough substitutes. Chapter 4 stands out for its descriptions of exploitative experiments conducted on enslaved populations. Schiebinger examines John Quier’s dangerous experiments with smallpox inoculation that involved more than eight hundred slaves in Jamaica during the 1760s. This chapter clearly highlights the long and still understudied history of the medical subjugation of Africans and their descendants across the Americas. The fifth chapter rounds out the narrative by exploring the [End Page 121] underlying tensions between white medical interventions and slaves’ use of spirituality in healing as was the case with obeah and vodou. European practitioners and colonial officials, Schiebinger notes, dismissed enslaved people’s healing practices as witchcraft or quackery. Some went as far as citing such practices as propagating rebellion (p. 128). Schiebinger acknowledges that her narrative does “privilege European-style experimentation”—in both the sources used and the ways “experimentation is conceptualized” (p. 15), but she clearly gestures toward the limitations of such sources. The reader does...

This paper re‐examines the British workhouse within the framework of racial capitalism and the Atlantic world. Traditionally understood as a domestic mechanism for managing poverty and labour in an era of industrial capitalism, we argue the workhouse was deeply intertwined with global systems of racial exploitation and accumulation from the 17th to the 19th centuries. Tracing the workhouse's connections to Britain's colonial plantations, the transatlantic slave trade, and the circulation of finance, goods, ideas, and people in the Atlantic world, the paper challenges understandings of the workhouse's purely domestic function. Instead, the workhouse and plantation are understood as constitutively interlinked—forming a “workhouse–plantation nexus” which operated as a key component in shifting articulations of racial capitalism. Understanding this nexus reconfigures understandings of welfare histories that continue to shape racialised welfare systems and racial capitalism more broadly and is crucial for reparative justice.

Book Review| March 17 2023 The Black Technical Object: On Machine Learning and the Aspiration of Black BeingThe Digitally Disposed: Racial Capitalism and the Informatics of Value The Black Technical Object: On Machine Learning and the Aspiration of Black Being. By Ramon Amaro. Berlin: Sternberg Press. 2023. 152 pp. Paper $25.The Digitally Disposed: Racial Capitalism and the Informatics of Value. By Seb Franklin. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press. 2021. 268 pp. Cloth $108; paper $27; e-book $25.65. R. Joshua Scannell R. Joshua Scannell R. Joshua Scannell is an assistant professor of media studies at The New School’s School of Media Studies. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literature 10575204. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-10575204 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation R. Joshua Scannell; The Black Technical Object: On Machine Learning and the Aspiration of Black BeingThe Digitally Disposed: Racial Capitalism and the Informatics of Value. American Literature 2023; 10575204. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-10575204 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsAmerican Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2023 by Duke University Press2023 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

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Teaching & Learning Guide for: Literature, Social Science, and the Development of American Migration Narratives in the Twentieth Century

Reviewed by: The Occupation of Havana: War, Trade, and Slavery in the Atlantic World by Elena A. Schneider Matt D. Childs (bio) The Occupation of Havana: War, Trade, and Slavery in the Atlantic World elena a. schneider University of North Carolina Press, 2018 360 pp. In June 1762, Britain brought the Seven Years’ War to Havana, Cuba, the largest city in the Caribbean, the third largest in the Americas, and Spain’s gateway to its vast empire in mainland Latin America. Assembled outside of Havana’s harbor was a British force that would number 28,400 sailors, soldiers, and enslaved Africans—amazingly more people than lived in any British colonial city in the Americas at the time. After a six-week siege that even involved digging a tunnel under the famous Moro military fortress that guarded Havana’s deep harbor to dynamite its walls, the Spanish finally surrendered. The British would occupy Havana for nearly a year before it would be returned to Spain in exchange for Florida in 1763. Spain and Britain alike recognized the siege and occupation of Havana as a watershed moment in the history of the Atlantic world, often giving it as much historical weight as the arrival of Columbus in the 1490s and the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. Given the importance of the occupation of Havana for shaping Caribbean, Imperial, and Atlantic history, scholars have analyzed the event from military, political, economic, and diplomatic angles, which has produced a long and detailed historiography. Historian Elena Schneider’s The Occupation of Havana is the latest addition to this largest body of scholarship, and without a doubt it is the most detailed and comprehensive study to date. Other scholars have emphasized the importance of the siege and occupation of Havana, but mainly to illustrate a different story. For example, the event often figures as one of the last battles of the Seven Years’ War that forced Spain to the peace table, or the resistance by Cuban colonists is [End Page 499] highlighted as an early form of nationalism, or most frequently the economic changes initiated by the British during their brief occupation is portrayed as the first step in the development of the Cuban plantation system. Schneider breaks with this scholarly tradition whereby the occupation of Havana is leveraged to make an argument about a different historical topic. Instead, she explains that methodologically her study is a longue durée history of the preceding interactions between the British and Spanish in the Caribbean before the siege, a detailed narrative and analysis of the occupation and of the long-lasting consequences after Havana returned to Spanish rule. In developing this line of analysis, Schneider has performed exhaustive research in over two dozen archives in Europe, North America, and the Caribbean working in sources that range from papers relating to heads of state discussing political and military events down to the minutiae of individual sale transactions recorded by notaries. Drawing on this diverse source base, she skillfully juggles multiple levels of analysis that range from the macro analysis of global-structural events to the micro scale of individual actions by the enslaved produced out of contingency and expediency. Utilizing these sources and examining the occupation of Havana from a long historical view, Schneider argues that “the British invasion and occupation of a Spanish colonial space was not the radical rupture in Cuban history that it was once depicted as being . . . [but rather] the intensification of existing patterns and processes of interactions . . directly connected to slavery, the slave trade, and population of African descent . . . before during and after the events that transpired in 1762 and 1763” (9). In buttressing her argument on how the occupation of Havana was an intensification of preexisting patterns and accelerated interactions between colonies and empires in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, Schneider has structured her book through six detailed chapters separated into three parts. In part 1, “Origins,” the author provides an intellectual and cultural history of what she wittingly labels the “Deep History of British Plots against Havana,” which traces schemes, conspiracies, and actions to take Havana and New World Spanish lands fueled by religious and imperial rivalries. Collectively, these early...

This article weighs the meaning, potential, and pitfalls of the concept of “racial capitalism” for studying the nexus of racial division and the economy. The concept has spread like wildfire in Anglophone social science since its≠ introduction in Cedric Robinson’s revisionist account of the rise of capitalism as racializing, but it remains epistemically inchoate and analytically problematic. The critique of leading uses and common corollaries of the term shows that it stipulates that which needs to be explicated, namely, the “articulation” of capitalism “through race,” which is not a structural invariant but ranges from coevalness and synergy to parasitism and disconnection. The notion cannot accommodate the varied bases of race as a naturalizing and hierarchizing principle of vision and division as well as the historical peculiarity of the economic variant of slavery in the Atlantic world. Advocates of “racial capitalism” need to put in the hard work of epistemological elucidation, logical clarification, and historical elaboration needed if they are to make the label more than a “conceptual speculative bubble.”

Part 2, which includes chapters 3 and 4, examines developments in the coalfields that query the relationship between profit and prisons. Chapter 3 explores a new formation in the coalfields: the Brushy Mountain Development (BMD), a former prison in east Tennessee that has been turned into a site of eco- and prison tourism. The chapter first discusses the rich history of the site, as the prison’s construction in the 1890s–and the subsequent practice of forcing prisoners to mine coal for the state – was a direct response to militant labor uprisings against coal companies and the convict lease system. The chapter then turns to the contemporary carceral formation, as the site’s ownership has grafted the current embrace of craft spirits and local food onto the unlikely host of the former prison as part of a plan for the economic “revitalization” of the county. In the process, the BMD produces a cultural afterlife of incarceration, mobilizing tropes of violence and depravity in order to sell the experience and a related set of products. This history of one site indexes changing carceral capacities under racial capitalism across different conjunctures and raises questions about what may follow the prison while extending its ideological work.