Academia, Activism, and Imprisoned Intellectuals

Reading prison writing must ... demand a correspondingly activist counterapproach to that of passivity, aesthetic gratification, and the pleasures of consumption that are traditionally sanctioned by the academic disciplining of literature.--Barbara Harlow (1972), Barred: Women, Writing, and Detention. The radical intellectual, struggling for her own place in an academy already under siege by market forces and political interference, may lack the stomach for engaging in external conflicts that are deemed "controversial" by the media projectors of the status quo; for even radical intellectuals must eat; and to eat means to affiliate with aggregates of intellectual organization and power (universities), if one wants to teach.... Nothing written in this essay will relieve the tension between one's fear and one's conscience, for nothing is more controversial in the American context than the state's role in determining whether its purported citizens should live or die.--Mumia Abu-Jamal (2003), "Intellectuals and the Gallows." Love and Rage IN A RECENT LETTER ADDRESSING MY QUERIES ABOUT A TRADE BOOK BY ONE OF HIS former attorneys, death row author and intellectual Mumia Abu-Jamal succinctly signed his missive. Describing his emotional response to his former activist-attorney's breach of trust and commodification of Abu-Jamal as a spectacle for the marketplace and the executioner-state, he closed: "Love and Rage--Mumia." Love and rage initially seem paradoxical, coupled as oddities. They are assumed by some to appear in exclusive sites, as distinct and unrelated experiences and feelings. But they coexist, with a dynamic ability to metamorphose or shape-shift, one into the other. Love and rage are the impetus for much reflection, agonizing, action, and risk taking. They also seem to fuel considerable thoughtlessness and inactivity, either in abstract or maudlin sentiment or in pyrotechnic performance, and their respective sterility illuminates their shared characteristics. Love and rage constitute the organizing force behind this gathering coordinated during expanding wars. Love for community, freedom, and justice, for the incarcerated and for the "disappeared"--for those dying or surviving in war zones. To the extent that love for humanity leads to rage against injustice, we also must ask and answer: Where does rage lead us? For now, we can remember that in our national context, love and rage led to resistance in antiracist, antiwar, and anti-gender/sexual violence movements. Resistance was met with further repression, in the context of the United States, aptly administered by the Federal Bureau of investigation and its COINTELPRO or counterintelligence program. (1) These repressive government measures surveilled and destabilized the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES), which was seeking to stop death squads funded by our tax dollars. COINTELPRO also violently dismantled radical groups and formations such as the Black Panther Party, the American Indian Movement, the Puerto Rican independence movement, as well as various antiwar and anti-intervention militants. The political prisoners currently contained in U.S. penal sites present us with difficult questions and challenges as critical thinkers and actors: What is our relationship to the "imprisoned intellectual"? Who or what is s/he? Who or what are we in relation to visionary, risk-taking struggle? That is, what is our relation to visionary struggles for justice that are neither consumed by rage nor performance radicalism, struggles not shrugged off as insurmountable, but embraced as worthy of theoretical and organizational commitments? Perhaps such struggles bring into question all vanguard sites and formations, whether academic or activist. Given that communication is likely just another way of speaking about ourselves, we might as well start responding to the queries by scrutinizing the site(s) we currently occupy. …