{"id":1162,"date":"2021-09-03T18:20:15","date_gmt":"2021-09-03T22:20:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/revolution1313\/?page_id=1162"},"modified":"2022-06-27T17:14:53","modified_gmt":"2022-06-27T21:14:53","slug":"7-13","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/revolution1313\/7-13\/","title":{"rendered":"7\/13 | George Jackson, Albert Woodfox, Paul Redd, and Revolutionary Prison Writing and Praxis"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"YouTube video player\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/2MiE432tkno\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<h1 style=\"text-align: center;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/revolution1313\/albert-woodfox\/\">Albert Woodfox<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/revolution1313\/paul-redd\/\">Paul Redd<\/a>,\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/revolution1313\/darryl-robertson\/\">Darryl Robertson<\/a>,\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/revolution1313\/joy-james\/\">Joy James<\/a>,\u00a0and Bernard E. Harcourt<\/h1>\n<h1 style=\"text-align: center;\">read and discuss<\/h1>\n<h2 style=\"text-align: center;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/books\/edition\/Soledad_Brother\/AuoMEYE5mhIC?hl=en&amp;gbpv=1&amp;printsec=frontcover\"><em>Soledad Brother<\/em><\/a> and\u00a0<em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/books\/edition\/Blood_in_My_Eye\/JX7V2__KNtsC?hl=en&amp;gbpv=1&amp;printsec=frontcover\">Blood In My Eye<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>by George Jackson,\u00a0<em><a href=\"https:\/\/groveatlantic.com\/book\/solitary\/\">Solitary<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>by Albert Woodfox,\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/revolution1313\/writings-on-the-short-corridor-collective\/\">Writings on the Short Corridor Collective<\/a>, and\u00a0<em><span id=\"productTitle\" class=\"a-size-extra-large\"><a href=\"https:\/\/sunypress.edu\/Books\/T\/The-New-Abolitionists2\">The New Abolitionists: (Neo)slave Narratives And Contemporary Prison Writings<\/a>\u00a0<\/span><\/em><span id=\"productTitle\" class=\"a-size-extra-large\">by Joy James<\/span><\/h2>\n<h1 style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>Wednesday, February 9, 2022<\/strong><\/h1>\n<h1 style=\"text-align: center;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/peoplesforum.org\/\">The People&#8217;s Forum<\/a><\/h1>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">~~~<\/p>\n<p>Albert Woodfox became a Black Panther at Angola\u2014the infamous plantation-prison in Louisiana\u2014and founded, along with another revolutionary, Herman Wallace, the very first official chapter of the Panthers behind bars. Reading the works of revolutionary thinkers moved Woodfox to political action and helped him survive four decades of the most torturous conditions of solitary confinement known to humanity. \u201cReading was my salvation,\u201d Woodfox writes in his remarkable memoir, <em>Solitary. \u201c<\/em>Leaning against my wall in the cell, sitting on the floor, on my bed, or at my table, I read.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Woodfox recounts the authors and books he read at Angola: George Jackson, Frantz Fanon, Mao, Eldridge Cleaver, Malcolm X, Mao, Marx and Engels, Fidel, Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh, Kwame Nkrumah, Marcus Garvey, Steve Biko.\u00a0His list reads like the <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/revolution1313\/revolution-13-13-bibliography\/\">bibliography for Revolution 13\/13<\/a>. Reading those works, Woodfox tells us, made him the person he is today. It also condemned him to four decades in solitary confinement\u2014or rather, the racist state condemned him to four decades of solitary for reading those books. \u201cI paid a heavy price,\u201d Woodfox acknowledges.\u00a0But he would not have had it any other way. When asked, as he often is, whether, looking back, he would have done anything different, Woodfox is adamant: \u201cNot one thing.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Reading, sharing, studying, discussing these prison writings and revolutionary books was formative as well for the members of the <a href=\"https:\/\/lareviewofbooks.org\/article\/short-corridor-isolated-prisoners-america-took-system-won\/\">Short Corridor Collective<\/a> at the SHU at Pelican Bay State Prison \u2014both in terms of personal transformation and political action. Reading George Jackson and Eldridge Cleaver, Assata Shakur, and also Michel Foucault and Howard Zinn, transformed the men in the SHU\u2014Sitawa Jamaa, Todd Ashker, Arturo Castellanos, and Antonio Guillen, who formed the Collective and were joined by Paul Redd and other men\u2014leading to prison hunger strikes and legal actions that sought to abolish solitary confinement. They also generate new prison writings, like the \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/sfbayview.com\/2021\/07\/agreement-to-end-hostilities\/\">Agreement to End Hostilities<\/a>\u201d released by the hunger strikers in the Short Corridor, an agreement that sought to formalize solidarity between racial groups engaged in the hunger strike in opposition to the state\u2019s attempts to fracture the movement. Paul Redd, one of the original signatories of that document, has <a href=\"https:\/\/sfbayview.com\/2021\/07\/decades-of-torture-hundreds-of-men-weeks-of-starvation-and-still-we-arent-free\/\">spoken extensively about those political actions and hunger strikes<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Prison writing\u2014works produced by authors while they themselves are incarcerated in jail or prison\u2014have a special role and influence on readers, but perhaps especially on persons who are imprisoned. <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/revolution1313\/joy-james\/\">Professor Joy James<\/a>, one of the world\u2019s leading scholars and thinkers on prison writing, describes poignantly how contemporary insurrectionist prison writings \u201ccan question the very premises of rehabilitation, indicting the state and society, contextualizing or dismissing individual acts of criminality by nonelites, the poor and racialized, to emphasize state criminality or the crimes of elites.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Many of the revolutionary authors who Woodfox and the Collective read wrote, themselves, from prison. Indeed, many of the worldly philosophers on our bibliography wrote from prison. Some, we have already discussed: <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/revolution1313\/3-13\/\">Antonio Gramsci<\/a> and his <em>Prison Notebooks<\/em>. <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/uprising1313\/8-13\/\">Martin Luther King<\/a> writing from the Birmingham city jail. <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/abolition1313\/9-13-prison-abolition\/\">Angela Davis<\/a>\u2019s letter from Marin County jail. <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/uprising1313\/5-13\/\">Gandhi<\/a>\u2019s writings on Satyagraha. Other writers, we would like to read: Nawal El Saadawi\u2019s <em>Memoirs from the Women\u2019s Prison<\/em>. Nelson Mandela and his writings from prison, <em>Conversations with Myself<\/em>. R\u00e9gis Debray, who became an associate of Che Guevara and Fidel, and his <em>Prison Writings. <\/em>Wole Soyinka\u2019s <em>The Man Died: The Prison Notes of Wole Soyinka<\/em>, and others as well, such as Nehru. And there are many more to add to our bibliography\u2014from contemporary prison writers going back in time: Mumia Abu-Jamal, <em>Live from Death Row<\/em>. Leonard Peltier, <em>Prison Writings: My Life Is My Sundance<\/em>. Oscar Wilde, <em>De Profundis<\/em>. Jean Genet, <em>Our Lady of the Flowers<\/em>. Peter Kropotkin, <em>In Russian and French Prisons. <\/em>Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, <em>Gulag Archipelago. <\/em>Fyodor Dostoevsky, <em>Notes from a Dead House<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>Those prison writings and readings continue to shape the way we think and view the world today\u2014and the way we act. The writer Darryl Robertson, who himself has produced remarkable writings behind bars, traces how these writings and experiences <a href=\"https:\/\/www.vibe.com\/features\/editorial\/nas-tupac-george-jonathan-jackson-602888\/\">continue to influence contemporary artists and thinkers<\/a> like Tupac Shakur and Nas. They guide us in our praxis and our ambitions. They change who we are. They also shed light on what happens in the darkest corners of our society\u2014 the places where oppression and torture are most easily hidden. Paul Redd\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/truthout.org\/articles\/statement-of-paul-redd-pelican-bay-state-prison-shu-windowless-cells-dungeon-resident-to-victoria-law\/\">essay from Pelican Bay State Prison\u2019s SHU Windowless Cell Dungeon<\/a> exemplifies this, as he gives a first-hand account of the torturous conditions in the solitary confinement unit to counter the state\u2019s distortions and advocate for change. \u00a0As Professor Joy James observes, \u201cwhen they emanate from the site of the noncitizen, from men and women in cages, regardless of their outlaw and disreputable status, they illuminate past, present, and future possibilities for the reinvention of democracy.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Prison writing. Prison reading. These are the focus of our seminar Revolution 7\/13. They raise a set of questions: How do these revolutionary books, written from prison, work, motivate, and speak to us? What is the difference with other classical critical texts, insofar as these works emanate from behind bars? What is the experience like to read prison writings in particular? And what is the experience of reading in prison, in solitary, or in the collectivity of detention? What is it like to encounter, intellectually and politically, an author like George Jackson in the prison? These are some of the questions we will address.<\/p>\n<p>Welcome to Revolution 7\/13!<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone wp-image-2024\" src=\"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/revolution1313\/files\/2022\/02\/unnamed-14-300x169.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"667\" height=\"376\" srcset=\"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/revolution1313\/files\/2022\/02\/unnamed-14-300x169.png 300w, https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/revolution1313\/files\/2022\/02\/unnamed-14-1024x576.png 1024w, https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/revolution1313\/files\/2022\/02\/unnamed-14-768x432.png 768w, https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/revolution1313\/files\/2022\/02\/unnamed-14-1536x864.png 1536w, https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/revolution1313\/files\/2022\/02\/unnamed-14.png 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 667px) 100vw, 667px\" \/><\/p>\n<h1 style=\"text-align: center;\"><\/h1>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Albert Woodfox, Paul Redd,\u00a0Darryl Robertson,\u00a0Joy James,\u00a0and Bernard E. Harcourt read and discuss Soledad Brother and\u00a0Blood In My Eye\u00a0by George Jackson,\u00a0Solitary\u00a0by Albert Woodfox,\u00a0Writings on the Short Corridor Collective, and\u00a0The New Abolitionists: (Neo)slave Narratives And Contemporary Prison Writings\u00a0by Joy James Wednesday, February&hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/revolution1313\/7-13\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue Reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1603,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1162","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/revolution1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1162","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/revolution1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/revolution1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/revolution1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1603"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/revolution1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1162"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/revolution1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1162\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/revolution1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1162"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}