Prison Writings Research Articles

Complicities: the intellectual and apartheid

Preface Introduction: Complicity, the Intellectual, Apartheid Two Colonial Precursors The Intellectual and Apartheid Apartheid and the Vernacular Prison Writing Black Consciousness Don't Forget to Tell Us What Happened to You Yourself. .: Towards a Conclusion Bibliography

Gathering Seaweed: African Prison Writing

Gathering Seaweed: African Prison Writing

Against the Discipline of “Prison Writing”: Toward a Theoretical Conception of Contemporary Radical Prison Praxis

Against the Discipline of “Prison Writing”: Toward a Theoretical Conception of Contemporary Radical Prison Praxis

Discursive Delinquency in Leonard Peltier's Prison Writings

Discursive Delinquency in Leonard Peltier's <i>Prison Writings</i>

‘In an Attempt to Erase’: Breyten Breytenbach’s Prison Writing and the Need to Re-Cover

‘In an Attempt to Erase’: Breyten Breytenbach’s Prison Writing and the Need to Re-Cover

Poetry and a Prison Writing Program: A Mentor's Narrative Report

This brief report examines the role poetry plays towards the road to recovery as witnessed through the experience of a poetry writing mentor when analyzing the poetic works of prisoners who participated in Pen America's Prison writing program.

“In the Shadow of Biblical Work:” Barth and Bonhoeffer on Reading the Bible

Two things at least are clear about the relationship of Barth and Bonhoeffer: that disentangling the history of their relation is of considerable importance for making sense of Bonhoeffer, if not of Barth; and that the disentangling is a rather delicate operation which involves some discriminating interpretation of the writings of two complex theologians. Much, for example, hangs on what we are to make of Bonhoeffer's scattered remarks on Barth, revelation and non-religious interpretation in the prison writings, and of Barth's puzzled response to them. Bonhoeffer experts will no doubt put me straight, but my own-highly corrigible-judgment is that the prison texts do not contain the most important or interesting things which Bonhoeffer had to say: there is much more theological good sense on questions of the presentation of the gospel to be found in the Finkenwalde homiletics lectures, for example. The common attempt to display the coherence of these writings from the end of Bonhoeffer's life with more developed aspects of his thought-his appropriation of Barth's early critique of religion, Bonhoeffer's fondness for the Old Testament and his concern with the gospel as moral and social reality-is only partially successful, and the fragmentary state of the remarks leaves them perilously exposed to abuse by interpreters invoking Bonhoeffer's shade for modish theological or ecclesiastical projects. Again, a good deal in clarifying Bonhoeffer's relation to Barth hangs on pondering Bonhoeffer's worry that Barth gave insufficient weight to the ethical. Barth was, I believe, quite right when he pointed out in his letter to Bethge that Bonhoeffer's emphasis on the ethical was in fact "just the outlook which I presupposed"; indeed, Barth was from the beginning no less a moral theologian than Bonhoeffer, and his Ethics deserves at least the same kind of serious study that has been devoted to Bonhoeffer's work of the same title

Doing Time: Twenty-Five Years of Prison Writing

Doing Time: Twenty-Five Years of Prison Writing

Strategies for Black Liberation in the Era of Globalism: Retronouveau Civil Rights, Militant Black Conservatism, and Radicalism

(1999). Strategies for Black Liberation in the Era of Globalism: Retronouveau Civil Rights, Militant Black Conservatism, and Radicalism. The Black Scholar: Vol. 29, Black Issues: 2000, pp. 25-47.

Prison Sentences

Review of Doing Time: 25 Years of Prison Writing edited by Bell Gale Chevigny.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

The Courage to Stand Alone: Letters from Prison and Other Writings (review)

The Courage to Stand Alone: Letters from Prison and Other Writings (review)

Gramsci's political analysis: a critical introduction

Antonio Gramsci's prison writings of the 1930s have made a lasting impression on contemporary political theory. Above all, his concept of `hegemony' has enabled new kinds of research into the relationship between culture and power. In this new introduction to Gramsci's thought, James Martin takes a critical look at the core themes of his famous Prison Notebooks and considers the relevance of Gramsci's analysis today. Martin situates Gramsci in the context of Italy's social and political crises in the first decades of the twentieth century. the Notebooks are then interpreted as a theoretical response to that crisis. Three central political themes are examined: the intellectuals, the relation between state and civil society, and the function of the revolutionary party. Finally, the uses and limitations of Gramsci's concepts for theorising state legitimacy and class politics are appraised.

Nature in a ‘world come of age’

What is striking about the reception of the account of worldliness in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s prison writings is how few commentators have drawn attention to the fact that Bonhoeffer concentrates on the status of nature. To be sure, nature is not part of the definition of ‘the coming of age of mankind’. But the aim of such ‘coming of age’ is ‘to be independent of nature’. Bonhoeffer writes: ‘Our immediate environment is not nature, as formerly, but organization. But with this protection from nature’s menace there arises a new one — through organization itself.’ So the claim that ‘organization’ is now the environment of humanity is to be understood dialectically: the emancipation of humanity from nature leads to new forms of domination.For Bonhoeffer, the attempt to escape nature thus raises once more the question of humanity. Or, as Bonhoeffer puts it, if the menace of nature is displaced by the menace of social organization, ‘What protects us against the menace of organization?’. ‘Coming of age’ is thus an anthropological development (the theme of worldliness) predicated upon the emerging independence of humanity from nature which, in turn, requires a theological response (the theme of ‘secular interpretation’). Such interpretation must address the fact that nature is now mediated to us by social contexts. So the theological interpretation of a ‘world come of age’ includes judgements about the status and significance of nature for humanity.The difficulties raised here for Christian theology by the place of nature in a ‘world come of age’ are acute for we are driven back to the origins of modernity.

:In Hope of Heaven: English Recusant Prison Writings of the Sixteenth Century

This book represents a fresh look at four Recusant writers of the sixteenth century - John Fisher, Thomas More, Robert Southwell, and Benedict Canfield - each imprisoned for the practice of his Catholic faith. All are united by the additional bond that while in prison, they wrote books in which they stated their ultimate belief that the crown of martyrdom awaited those who persevered. At times polemical, at other times reflective and consolatory, these men encapsulated the best of traditional Catholic thought for an audience living in shifting and perilous times. This book offers a new evaluation of an old and vital tradition, one too often neglected by traditional literary studies.

Book Review: Committing Journalism: The Prison Writing of Red Hog

Book Review: Committing Journalism: The Prison Writing of Red Hog

Reluctant Witnesses: Jews and the Christian Imagination (review)

Book Reviews 151 of current research on the subject. While the original text facilitates the reader's own interpretation, they are integrated into Evans' interpretation, which is judicious and somewhat cautious without being reactionary. Both the texts and Evans' interpretation give substance to the author's claim that much hyped "Jesus research" in North America has not attended to the Jewish-Palestinian context of Jesus' life. Likewise the essay "Messianic Claimants of the First and Second Centuries" discusses nine "messianic kings" from Judas to Simon, complete with citations of primary sources and English translations. Since John Meier, whose work is generally appreciated by Evans, argues there is no clear evidence for messianic claims by or about any Jew in the Greco-Roman period except Jesus of Nazareth and Simon ben Kosiba (A Marginal Jew, 2:611), Evans' essay shows that the discussion offirst-centuryJewish messianism is still a matter of interpreting evidence, not merely collecting it, and that the two elements cannot be neatly separated. As Evans is aware, definition plays a key role here. The main contribution of this book is to provide readers with resources and reasons to see the Jesus of the Gospels as fitting into the context of first-century Judaism. While Evans acknowledges that the pictures of Jesus in the canonical Gospels are the products of Christian interpretation, he believes that a strictly historical approach will reveal a Jesus not fundamentally distorted by the church's creativity, which he tends to minimize. The book is thus not without its own apologetic theological agenda, though this is not made explicit as in the "Old" and "New" Quests. It is nonetheless somewhat strange to find Evans accepting the neutral, atheological view claimed by the Third Quest (e.g., pp. 46, 458). The "just a historian" claim can be made to serve many different perspectives. M. Eugene Boring Brite Divinity School Texas Christian University Reluctant Witnesses: Jews and the Christian Imagination, by Stephen R. Haynes. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1995. 221 pp. $18.99 (p). We must begin with full disclosure:· In this book I am among the Christian Holocaust scholars· (along with Paul van Buren, Franklin Littell, Alice and Roy Eckardt, and others) who are criticized for continuing what 152 SHOFAR Fall 1996 Vol. 15, No. 1 the author calls the Christian "witness-people" myth about Jews. It is pernicious theology, Haynes claims, and is promulgated by such unexpected writers as Walker Percy, Karl Barth, and Hal lindsey. Before I give my analysis of this work, it should be said that Richard L. Rubenstein, one of the most respected thinkers on the topic of the Holocaust, writes, "Especially important is Haynes' analysis of Christian Holocaust theology as a well-intentioned but dangerous continuation of the 'witness-people' tradition." After pointing out that "there are no Jews in Dante's purgatory," Haynes tells readers that a thesis of his book is that "Jews must always be special cases in products of the Christian imagination, because of the uniquely ambivalent place which the Jewish people inhabit there." So Professor Haynes (of Rhodes College in Memphis) presents his theory of the "witness-people myth" which he attempts to prove is "more subtle in its pernicious influence than pure Jew-hatred." Since I am listed among the offenders, the reader may understand that I disagree with Haynes. Those, like me, of whom Haynes warns his readers, "remain quite unaware of the myth'S presence in their own discourse"; in our attempts to deny what historic Christian anti-Judaism has posited, we "inadvertently reaffirm the most fundamental Christian ideology about Jews-the conviction that the existence, fate, and redemption of the Jews are signs for God's church." I would be less than candid if I did not say here that I think the author is in error regarding my work, Franklin Littell's, and others'. Haynes has points to make about Karl Barth, the early Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Martin Niemoeller without suggesting what was revised in their subsequent thinking. This seems particularly unappreciative of Bonhoeffer, who through his martyrdom and prison writings has become one of the most influential theologians of this century. While Rubenstein finds this book comprehensive...

Review. 'The Last Day of a Condemned Man' and Other Prison Writings. Translated with an Introduction and Notes by Geoff Woollen. Hugo, Victor

Review. 'The Last Day of a Condemned Man' and Other Prison Writings. Translated with an Introduction and Notes by Geoff Woollen. Hugo, Victor

REVIEWS

REVIEWS VICTOR HUGO: ‘The Last Day of a Condemned Man’ and Other Prison Writings. Translated with an Introduction and Notes by GEOFF WOOLLEN. (The World's Classics). Oxford-New York, Oxford University Press, 1992. xxx + 198 pp. Pb £4.99. RACHEL KILLICK RACHEL KILLICK UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar French Studies, Volume L, Issue 3, July 1996, Pages 341–342, https://doi.org/10.1093/fs/L.3.341 Published: 01 July 1996

'The Last Day of a Condemned Man' and Other Prison Writings

The Last Day of a Condemned Man Claude Gueux My Visit to the Conciergerie The Condemned Cells at La Roquette.

Conscience and courage

Conscience Be My Guide: An Anthology of Prison Writings edited by Geoffrey Bould (Zed Books, London and New Jersey, 1991).