Berkeley College Landscape as Prisonscape Presentation Hi I am doing a group presentation about Thadious Davis, “Landscape as Prisonscape”. I have already

Berkeley College Landscape as Prisonscape Presentation Hi I am doing a group presentation about Thadious Davis, “Landscape as Prisonscape”. I have already some powerpoint material that I have started and I am uploading it! Feel free to change something if you think that would be better!

I will be doing the following parts:

– 1st slide consists of author info

– 2nd slide is About Landscape as Prisonscape, just an overview about the text and whatever you think is important for me to say during the presentation.

– 3rd slide is about the thesis. In my view it is the following one “Whether in pre-emancipation or post-slavery settings, Gaines connects the literal prison with the metaphorical incarceration manifested in his representation of the plantation and its force in the lives of its inhabitants. The prison structure and the plantation culture intertwined together become a more prominent and recognizable trope for the status of blacks in the American South.” (p. 293). I need an explanation about it and the relevance to the text.

– 4th slide I will be discussing In My Father’s House and the character Robert X – relevance. This has to be the biggest part of my script.

I need a script with everything that I will be saying during the presentation + powerpoint slides with the main points so I can show during the presentation. Please do not put too much information in the slides. My presentation should be around 5 minutes. PLEASE DO NOT USE DIRECT SENTENCES FROM THE TEXT OR INTERNET.

“This assignment is meant to familiarize you with the analytical process necessary to write a persuasive paper in the humanities and to improve your oral communication by thinking critically about secondary sources. It will also teach you the important parts of a secondary source. For this assignment, students will work together in groups to present on an article or chapter that is related to one of the primary texts or subjects we will be studying. Your midterm paper and final creative project for this class could synthesize textual, historical, and cultural analysis, and your examination of a secondary source will help you with this task.

Here are some of the questions your presentation could address:

? What can you find out about the author and the publication from which the source comes?
? What is the thesis of the secondary source?
? What are the most important reasons that back up this author’s claims?
? If applicable, which moments in the primary text does the author refer to when backing up these claims?
? What kinds of research and resources does the author draw upon?Some examples could be historical events, cultural developments, or political debates that were happening at the time that the author was writing. Other examples include other scholars’ close readings, reactions to the primary text(s), and theories about race, gender, sexuality, violence, etc. Basically, what sources does the author refer to?
? What do you find particularly convincing about the argument?
? Can you identify further evidence that does not appear in the secondary source but that might further reinforce or complicate some of the author’s claims?
? What “scholarly conversation” is the author of the secondary source participating in? (In some sources, the author will explicitly state what conversation he or she is contributing to, but in other sources you might need to deduce what theconversation is.) Author: Thadious M. Davis
?
Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought
and Professor of English
?
Received her Ph.D. from Boston University
?
Her teaching areas include African American literature and
Southern literature with an emphasis on issue of race,
region, and gender
?
A New Orleans native, she is author or editor of eleven
books
About Landscape as Prisonscape
?
Originally published in 2011
?
The reading is centered around Louisiana plantations and prisons, especially Angola State Prison
which was developed and maintained by slave labor in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
?
According to the author futurity requires a person to unchain oneself of which this may or may not
be achieved especially because the plantation past haunts the memories of successive generations
of blacks
(add more)
Thesis
“Whether in pre-emancipation or post-slavery settings, Gaines connects the literal prison with the
metaphorical incarceration manifested in his representation of the plantation and its force in the lives
of its inhabitants. The prison structure and the plantation culture intertwined together become a more
prominent and recognizable trope for the status of blacks in the American South.” (p. 293)
(add more)
In My Father’s House
(add)
Copyright @ 2011. The University of North Carolina Press.
All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law.
fiction; however, he wanted to explore the psychology of the father and the
absent father’s impact on the son, both of which are areas he associated with
plantation formations that differ from the more transparent aspects of that
culture. The final encounters between Martin and Chippo Simon, his friend
from Reno Plantation, provide the occasion for recounting indirectly a subject that borders on an unexplored aspect of Gaines’s own autobiography. The
chaining to the past and to the plantation is present, but the method depends
upon Chippo’s memories to reveal the social history of Johanna and her children after Martin abandoned them, and, importantly, for explicating the despair and pain of Robert X’s life. Chippo functions not only as a storyteller but
also as an agent of surveillance. He gathers information about the plantation
and its residents, even those who, like Johanna, leave for California. Chippo
presents the folk perspective on time and history, as Keith Byerman points
out; the implication of his monologues is that “Martin must accept all of his
history, both the past and the present, and himself in that history, as a man
who must live with his guilt, his suffering, and his joy. His identity is not fixed
as either the failed father of the plantation or the successful leader of the
city; it is a process that contains both of those as well as whatever he makes
of himself in the future.”71 Beverly Ricord, a teacher and civil rights activist, understands precisely what Phillip Martin and their movement signify
when she says, “We work toward the future” (213). Her analysis is clear: “You
wanted the past changed, Reverend Martin. . . . Even He can’t do that. So that
leaves nothing but the future” (213). Ultimately, futurity requires the work of
unchaining oneself, yet that work may or may not be achieved, especially because the plantation past so haunts the memory of successive generations of
blacks that it inhibits the necessary transition forward for both the men, who
are in the foreground, and the women, whose lives are equally affected by
plantation culture but whose presence in the text mainly serves to underscore
the impact of the plantation on men.
ii. landscape as prisonscape
This area of space is not firm ground on which to stand. In no way is it a surface.
This is space as the sphere of a dynamic simultaneity, constantly disconnected by new
arrivals, constantly waiting to be determined (and therefore always undetermined)
by the construction of new relations. — doreen massey, For Space
The incarceral landscape and the imprisoning space of the plantation South
inherited in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries are defining tropes in
& PRISONS
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period prior to the Civil War through that of the civil rights movement. The
implied connection between the plantation and the prison metamorphoses
into the much more recognizable current-day prison complex in texts such as
A Lesson before Dying or Of Love and Dust, in which an initial exchange between
two characters leaves no doubt about how Gaines chains the two structures
together. One character in Of Love and Dust states: “[T]hat pen [penitentiary]
can kill a man,” and the other responds, “That plantation can do the same to
some people.”74 The only difference is “the open air” and “people who care
about you” on the plantation. The linkages between prison and plantation are
discernible in all of Gaines’s novels because each one is never far from the reality of Louisiana’s plantations and prisons, specifically Angola State Prison,
which signified the fate of black men in his Louisiana as much as the literal
plantation.
At the same time, however, Gaines does not write the narrative of the conjunction of plantation and prison as merely literal and material. The figurative
projection is perhaps best embodied in the existential condition of Robert X,
a.k.a. Etienne, in In My Father’s House. He is the rootless son who searches for
his father, ostensibly to confront him for ruining his life and that of his mother,
Johanna, and his siblings, Antoine and Justine, but also to find meaning for
his own existence. He appears not only ghostlike but occupies the subjective
space of an ex-convict: “He was too thin, too hungry-looking. . . . He looked
sick. His jaws were too sunken-in for someone his age. His deep-set bloodshot
eyes wandered too much. He could have just been released from the state
pen. He definitely looked like somebody who had been shut in. They probably
had let him go because they figured they had punished him enough already
and knew he would die soon” (3–4). Robert X has not been incarcerated in the
state penitentiary, but he has been imprisoned by his life on Reno Plantation
and the psychological toll of that life. Written on his body is the narrative
of the conjoined carceral states in Gaines’s fiction. Robert X’s alienation and
suffering are refracted in his casting off of his old Louisiana-inflected name
and with it the traceable stigma of his illegitimacy and his plantation origins.
What he is unable to disguise in a new political identity, however, is the personal mark of imprisonment, the existential confinement that wears down
the body and the mind and that ultimately questions the efficacy of protest
marches and simple idealism when the fundamental issues of human conduct
go unaddressed.
Prison and plantation collide much more directly in Of Love and Dust, set
on a False River plantation and centered on a young man sentenced to prison
and bonded out to work on the Hebert plantation. Prison shadows the text
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of Angola itself do not figure as such in his writing, despite the fact that Angola is a looming presence in Gaines’s work as it is in Louisiana, and with the
appearance of Wilbert Rideau’s book, In the Place of Justice: A Story of Punishment and Deliverance (2010), much of the conditions at that prison during the
forty-four years of Rideau’s imprisonment are once again in the public eye.
The book by Rideau, who spent a part of his incarceration as the editor of the
prison magazine, The Angolite, the only prison organ in the nation that was
not censored, adds another chapter to the place of Angola in public culture. In
addition, Gaines has referred directly to his reading of The Angolite and to his
contacting the warden at Angola specifically for accurate information while
he was writing A Lesson before Dying.72
The unique situation of having one of the nation’s largest and most infamous prisons linked to plantation culture and history a short distance away
from the twentieth-century working plantation on which Gaines was born
contributes to both the time-space compression and the incarceral trope noticeable in his fiction. Surveillance, an expected component of the prison, as
Michel Foucault has explained, is in Gaines’s Louisiana a necessary part of
the functioning of Angola State Penitentiary, but inasmuch as the looming
presence of Angola is also understood as a postslavery plantation, surveillance is as well integral to the plantation as a living work space in Gaines’s
fiction. That space is a material and metaphorical structure representing the
enclosed, incarceral nature of life under legally sanctioned segregation. It is,
in fact, “various prisons” whose operations must be infiltrated and subverted,
as John Lowe has concluded in a richly detailed reading of surveillance in
A Lesson before Dying using Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the
Prison.73 Lowe applies Foucault’s formulation of the “double foundation” of
the prison, “juridico-economic” and “technico-disciplinary,” to connect it to
the “confinement and concealment of the poor,” as in the plantation school
that figures in Gaines’s text. The interconnection between an understanding
of incarceration as a prison house and a knowledge of confinement as a plantation space is constant in Gaines’s representation of black life.
Whether in preemancipation or postslavery settings, Gaines connects the
literal prison with the metaphorical incarceration manifested in his representation of the plantation and its force in the lives of its inhabitants. The
prison structure and the plantation culture intertwined together become a
more prominent and recognizable trope for the status of blacks in the American South. Throughout Gaines’s canon, the spatial geography of the physical world utilizes the plantation and the social geography of first slavery and
then segregation to constitute the incarceral for African Americans from the
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Gaines’s fiction. His prisonlike Louisiana forwards the metaphorical limits of
incarceration as a psychic state associated with space. The parish, a Louisiana
geographical and governing unit similar to a county, functions not only as a
division of public space but also as a way of dividing resources and people.
In Pointe Coupée, the parish is intricately connected with the plantation,
because the elite landowners of the large plantations also controlled the parish. The connection between the plantation and the prison in Gaines’s area of
Louisiana is at once more metaphorical and more historical. The prison in his
fiction becomes emblematical of the relegation of a cordoned-off, negative
space for blacks, who in the physical constraints of their everyday experiential realities suffer the restraints of a color caste along with the race caste. At
the same time, the prison is always also the material reality of Angola, the
working plantation turned state penitentiary. Gaines’s fiction, then, imagines an incarceral space that is persistently architecturally invested in spatial
demarcations and the social distinctions stemming from the plantation and
prison situated in a landscape at once beautiful and treacherous.
While Brenda Marie Osbey’s architectonics of space is tied inextricably to
the urban and its built environment, Gaines’s incarceral fiction depends upon
the principal rural social and economic structure, the working plantation, for
its central spatial iconography. Developed and maintained by slave labor in
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Louisiana plantation survived
into the twentieth century, and it continues into the twenty-first not merely
with sites named plantations but also with the state’s largest prison, Angola,
the site of the historic Angola plantation, which was a working plantation
of over 18,000 acres formed in 1880 by joining four smaller plantations —
Panola, Belle View, Killarney, and Angola — on land initially purchased in the
1830s with profits from a slave-trading firm. Even before Angola became the
state penitentiary, the plantation used leased convicts to work the land. Still
known as “The Farm” because its inmates continue to work field crops, Angola has since the 1950s been infamous for the brutal treatment of its mainly
black inmates and their harsh work conditions. Highly publicized feature
films, such as Dead Man Walking (1995), The Green Mile (1999), and Monster’s
Ball (2001), have utilized Angola for setting or story. The award-winning
documentary The Farm: Life inside Angola Prison (1998) has shed light on the
present and past conditions of inmates incarcerated at Angola, many for life
or for long sentences that in effect mean life in prison without parole.
Gaines is not a “prison writer” in the vein either of the political type (for example, Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson) or the aesthetic
type (such as Etheridge Knight’s Poems from Prison). The intricate workings
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and subverts the plantation into an incarceral space that blacks, whites, and
Cajuns have learned to accept as the condition of their lives. Gaines has recalled that in Of Love and Dust, he wanted “to say something about my past,
something of what I had left out of Catherine Carmier. I wanted to talk about
the fields a little bit more, about the plantation story, the river, the church, the
house fairs.”75 Of Love and Dust captures the ambivalence of the social fabric
on a modern Louisiana plantation and unpacks the conventions of its social
and economic system. The voice of the observant narrator, Frank James “Jim”
Kelly, reverberates with the sounds of his community’s storytelling traditions,
and although detached and analytical, Jim has intimate knowledge of the social order. A plantation worker, Jim Kelly has in middle age gained trust and
respect for his years of mediating between the black workers and the white
managers (the Cajun overseer Sidney Bonbon and the landowner Marshall
Hebert). Cautious in order to maintain his small stake in the economic hierarchy, Kelly has accepted his own victimization and that of the other blacks.
Kelly’s promise to elderly Miss Julie Rand to look after her godson, Marcus
Payne, who has been released from prison to work on the plantation, precipitates his involvement in events that will disrupt his existence. Miss Julie
had been a cook on the Hebert plantation for forty years and knew how to
extract a promise from Jim Kelly. Her extraction of a “favor,” or in reality an
obligation, is a familiar aspect of Gaines’s fiction. In what may be labeled an
archetypal moment in Gaines’s representation of intergenerational interactions, an elderly black woman prevails upon a black man to step up in a moment of need or crisis in plantation society: “Miss Julie looked at me so long,
I turned my head. . . . I just didn’t feel comfortable with her looking at me
like that. Old people look at you like that for two reasons. One, when you’ve
done something wrong. The other is when they want you to do something for
them. The thing they want you to do usually turns out to be a burden. The
heavier the burden, the longer they look at you. And Miss Julie looked at me
a long, long time” (11). The gaze bears the weight of the elderly woman’s immediate close scrutiny but also of her long years of surveying the activities on
the plantation.
Under the microscope, Jim discovers that although he has been living both
within and just outside the boundaries of the plantation as a watchful country bluesman who plays guitar and sings songs of missed opportunities and
lost loves, it is Marcus who is a true blues subject, the black “badman” in open
defiance of and in conflict with conventional authority. Gaines’s portrayal of
Marcus as societal rebel challenging complacency in conduct and belief suggests that Of Love and Dust is a play upon Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust.76 In
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Cottage, Old Jail, Mix, False River, Point Coupee Parish, Louisiana. On False River,
the old jail of the sort Gaines depicted was similar to the houses. (Frances Benjamin Johnston,
photographer, 1938; Carnegie Survey of the Architecture of the South,
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.)
an inversion of the relationship between Faulkner’s youthful narrator, Chick
Mallison, and his elderly antagonist, Lucas Beauchamp, Gaines creates Jim
Kelly as a mature narrative consciousness being educated by a young antagonist. Through Marcus, Kelly learns that the prevailing racial codes must be
violated and that plantation life is not safe for the thinking man.
Marcus and Kelly on the plantation are versions of the characters jailed
in “Three Men,” a short story in Bloodline (1968), which initiated Gaines’s
discourses of black development within narrow spaces. Marcus appears to
be a reconfiguration of the central subject of “Three Men,” Proctor Lewis, a
nineteen-year-old who turns himself in to the police for stabbing a black man,
but who thinks: “Rodger Medlow would get me off like he had done once
before. He owned the plantation where I lived.”77 Proctor’s dilemma of selfdefinition revolves around his limited options: either accepting responsibil| 296EBSCO
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