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Reading America, Reading Rodriguez: Exploring American Literature at an English Prison Book Group
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 February 2024
Abstract
This article details a cutting-edge Knowledge Exchange initiative which advanced the ongoing partnership between the University of Hull and HMP Hull, and stemmed from the annual BAAS conference, held in Hull in April 2022. The purpose of the article is to explore the value of critiquing US culture in a nonacademic setting and the extent to which a prison reading group presents a productive opportunity for so doing. Our research analyses the reception of a number of texts discussed in an American-themed book club hosted in HMP Hull, with a particular focus upon the responses of prison learners to the literary works of gang-member-turned-best-selling-author Luis J. Rodriguez.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright
- Copyright © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press in association with the British Association for American Studies
Footnotes
The authors would like to thank Dr. Rachel Williams, Dr. Stewart Mottram, and Jamie Smith, learning and skills manager at HMP Hull, for their assistance in the facilitation of book groups. Many thanks also to the BAAS awards team for supporting this project.
References
1 HMP refers to “His Majesty's Prison.” Please note that when we refer to “HMP” in this article, this includes facilities in just England and Wales; Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own prison systems.
2 Note our use of “people in prison” here. The authors have observed, and certainly endorse, the move away from stigmatizing language and toward person-centred terminology as best practice when referring to incarcerated persons. See David Breakspear and Philip Mullen, “The Dangers of Labelling,” Russell Webster, 8 September 2021, at www.russellwebster.com/the-importance-of-person-centred-language (accessed 29 August 2023).
3 Durán, Isabel, “What Is the Transnational Turn in American Literary Studies? A Critical Overview,” Atlantis, Vol, 2 (Dec. 2020), 138–59, 138CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4 The extensive correspondence between people in prison and Luis J. Rodriguez that is held in his personal papers speaks to the popularity of Always Running among prison populations. See Luis Rodriguez Papers, CEMA 204, Department of Special Research Collections, UC Santa Barbara Library, University of California, Santa Barbara. Rodriguez details his extensive work in prisons in From Our Land to Our Land: Essays, Journeys, and Imaginings from a Native Xincanx Writer (New York, Seven Stories Press, 2020), 118–19.
5 The work of Rodriguez as being of interest and importance to academics is further demonstrated by an upcoming anthology. See Josephine Metcalf and Ben Olguin, eds., The Life and Legacy of Luis J. Rodriguez (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming 2024). It was contributors to this anthology who spoke at the 2022 BAAS conference.
6 This speaks to an emerging body of work along these lines, for instance Perrett, Stephanie and Gray, Benjamin, “Exploring Health and Wellbeing in Prison: A Peer Research Approach,” International Journal of Prisoner Health, 16, 1 (2019), 78–92CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Thrasher, Justin, Maloney, Eric, Mills, S., House, J., Wroe, T., and White, V., “Reimagining Prison Research from the Inside-Out,” Journal of Prisoners on Prisons, 28, 1 (2019), 12–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
7 Please note that the order in which the books are listed is the order in which we read the books in the reading group. The authors of this article would like to thank all the academics whose papers at the BAAS 2022 conference inspired our book club choices. These include Matt Thorne, “Representing Thugs: Angie Thomas and ‘Trends’ in Racial Commentary”; Paula Serrano, “Grief as a Political Matter: An Analysis of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper”; Susan Mary Grant, “Anger Nation: Two Moments in American Emotional Time”; and Foteini Antoniadi, “Maid in the USA: Motherhood, (Pro)Creativity and the American Dream.” We would also like to extend our thanks to each of the scholars on the three panels at the BAAS 2022 conference which focussed specifically upon the life and literary works of Luis J. Rodriguez.
8 A “BAAS bookshelf” was originally set up by the HMP Hull librarian in line with information we fed about the conference screenings on Hull TV as well as the book groups.
9 With The Yellow Wallpaper in particular, and its themes of mental health, we were careful not to veer into anything “beyond our scope of practice.” We are not trained therapists and wanted to avoid a “missionary mode” of engagement with prisoners, which we did by flagging our boundaries to the group in the very first session with Gilman's book.
10 There are numerous reasons why a person in prison may not be able to undertake additional “purposeful hours” at any given time, but we were pleased to be able to offer a second set of book groups for those who had not been able to attend the first cohort.
11 It is worth rendering our use of “we” visible here, as we start to discuss the actual groups. We are two white middle-class women, one an academic and the other a research assistant (and PhD student). We are not deliberately presenting ourselves as “invisible,” perhaps in line with the ethnographer or anthropologist; rather we were always aware, for example, of our presence as women in an all-male facility. We had some interesting discussions during the course of the groups, including our surprise at the number of female prison officers on site and the respect that was shown to them from the prison population.
12 HMIP, “Prison Education: A Review of Reading Education in Prisons,” at www.gov.uk/government/publications/prison-education-a-review-of-reading-education-in-prisons/prison-education-a-review-of-reading-education-in-prisons (accessed 9 March 2023).
13 Dame Sally Coates, “Unlocking Potential: A Review of Education in Prison,” at https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/524013/education-review-report.pdf (accessed 9 March 2023).
14 Taylor, Clare, “Prison Education in the UK: A Review of the Evidence by the Prisoners’ Education Trust,” Prison Service Journal, 223 (Jan. 2016), 44–52, 44Google Scholar.
15 Vanessa Thorpe, “George the Poet,” The Guardian, 7 Nov. 2021, at www.theguardian.com/culture/2021/nov/07/george-the-poet-its-easier-to-change-the-lives-of-offenders-in-prison-than-it-is-outside (accessed 9 March 2023).
16 For further information about prison education in England and Wales see Nichols, Helen, Understanding the Educational Experiences of Imprisoned Men (New York: Routledge, 2022)Google Scholar. For further information about prison education in the US see Mentor, Kenneth, “Education,” in Bosworth, Mary, ed., Encyclopedia of Prisons & Correctional Facilities, Volume I (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2005), 273–78Google Scholar.
17 Ronda, Michelle and Utheim, Ragnhild, “Toward Abolition Pedagogy: Teaching Social Justice in Prison Combined Classrooms,” Dialogues in Social Justice, 5 (Fall 2019–20), 64–80, 64Google Scholar.
18 Quoted in Drabinski, Kate and Harkins, Gillian, “Introduction: Teaching Inside Carceral Institutions,” Radical Teacher, 95 (Spring 2013), 3–9, 6CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
19 In the UK's higher-education system, academics are expected to adhere to the Knowledge Exchange Framework (KEF) and the Research Exercise Framework (REF), the latter of which includes impact case studies (ICSs). See Steven Hill, “Know Your REF from Your KEF,” UK Research and Innovation, 4 March 2019, [ARCHIVED CONTENT] Know your KEF from your REF – UKRI (nationalarchives.gov.uk) (accessed 18 October 2023).
20 Ben Olguin speaks to the difficulties academics face when doing “prison work” in La Pinta (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010), 233–34, asking, “How could I capitalize a career, salary, benefits, and even more social status by writing about human beings, prisoners, whose existence was defined in terms of their deliberately diminished material and social status?”
21 Drabinski and Harkins, 6.
22 Russ Litten, “What Better Way to Rehabilitate than to Read?”, Serpent's Tail, at https://serpentstail.com/what-better-way-to-rehabilitate-than-to-read (accessed 9 March 2023).
23 Ibid.
24 Ibid.
25 See, for example, Luis J. Rodriguez, “Pages of Power,” Los Angeles Times, 23 Nov. 2003, at www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2003-nov-23-op-rodriguez23-story.html (accessed 9 March 2023).
26 Anna Barker, “Novel Approach: Reading Courses as an Alternative to Prison,” The Guardian, 21 July 2010, at www.theguardian.com/society/2010/jul/21/texas-offenders-reading-courses (accessed 9 March 2023).
27 See Jenny Hartley and Sarah Turvey's Report on the Work of the Prison Reading Group 1999–2013, at https://prisonreadinggroupscouk.files.wordpress.com/2016/03/what-books-can-do-behind-bars.pdf (accessed 9 March 2023).
28 HMIP, Purposeful Hours, at www.justiceinspectorates.gov.uk/hmiprisons/our-expectations/prison-expectations/purposeful-activity (accessed 9 March 2023).
29 Jenny Hartley, “Twenty Years behind Bars: Reading Aloud in Prison Reading Groups,” Changing English: Studies in Culture & Education, 27, 1 (2020), 100–8, 100.
30 Billington, Josie, “‘Reading for Life’; Prison Reading Groups in Practice and Theory,” Critical Survey, 23, 3 (2011), 67–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
31 Alison Liebling, Katherine Auty, Judith Gardom, and Elinor Lieber, “An Evaluation of the Experience and Meaning of Shared Reading in Psychologically Informed Planned Environments in Prisons,” HMPPS, https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1110547/evaluation-of-shared-reading-in-pipes.pdf (accessed 9 March 2023).
32 Sweeney, Megan, Reading Is My Window: Books and the Art of Reading in a Women's Prison (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 258CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
33 Ibid., 51.
34 David Coogan, Writing Our Way Out (Richmond, VA: Bradylane Publishing, 2010), 2.
35 Drabinski and Harkins, “Introduction,” 8.
36 John Gardner, Grendel (London: Gollancz, 2015; first published 1971), 86–87.
37 Ibid., 36, 40, 48, 51, 64, 66, 92.
38 Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give (New York: Balzer & Bray, 2017), 113, 181.
39 Rodriguez, From Our Land to Our Land, 118.
40 See, for example, Antonia Darder's “Latino Youth: Pedagogy, Praxis, and Policy,” Latino Studies, 4, 3 (2006), 302–4; and J. Singer and R. Shagoury's “Stirring Up Justice: Adolescents Reading, Writing, and Changing the World,” Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 49, 4 (Dec. 2005), 318–39.
41 See the introductory essay by Maggie O'Farrell to Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper and Selected Writings (London: Virago Press, 2009); and John Gardner's Grendel (London: Gollancz, 2015): xviii.
42 Luis J. Rodríguez, Always Running. La Vida Loca: Gang Days in LA (New York: Touchstone, 1994), 133. The original hardback edition of Always Running was released in 1993 by Curbstone.
43 Ibid., 3.
44 Luis J. Rodriguez, Borrowed Bones: New Poems from the Poet Laureate of Los Angeles (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2016), 1.
45 Rodriguez's first books were poetry: Poems across the Pavement (Chicago: Tía Chucha Press, 1989); and The Concrete River (Willimantic, CT: Curbstone, 1991).
46 Suzette Henke, Shattered Subjects: Trauma and Testimony in Women's Life-Writing (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), 12.
47 See for example, Natalia Toscano and Kristian Vasquez, “Red Road Traveller: The Xicanx Humanism of Luis ‘Mixcatl Itztlacuiloh’ Rodriguez” in Metcalf and Olguin, The Life and Legacy of Luis J. Rodriguez.
48 Rodriguez, From Our Land, 31.
49 See www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/609196/from-our-land-to-our-land-by-luis-j-rodriguez (accessed 15 March 2023).
50 Rodriguez, From Our Land, 46, 53.
51 Ella Simpson, Catherine Morgan, and Laura Caulfield, “‘From the Outside In’: Narratives of Creative Arts Practitioners Working in the Criminal Justice System,” Howard Journal of Crime & Justice, 58, 3 (Sept. 2019), 384–403.
52 Michelle Ronda and Ragnhild Utheim, “Toward Abolition Pedagogy: Teaching Social Justice in Prison Combined Classrooms,” Dialogues in Social Justice , 5 (Fall 2019–20), 64–80, 65.
53 Josephine Metcalf and Ben Olguin, eds., In the Long Run: The Life & Works of Luis J. Rodriguez (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming 2024).
54 Ronda and Utheim, 65.