Bary. "From Angola With Love."

Leslie Bary.
“From Angola With Love: Activism, Academics, and The Abolitionist Future.”

A RECORDING INTERRUPTS the telephone conversation to remind me that this call is from an inmate at a state penitentiary. My interlocutor and I pause to let it run its course, then go on speaking. We have been talking for thirty years. In a few weeks, I should be at Nathaniel’s clemency hearing. If his plea is granted, he will be freed from closed-cell restriction for the first time since his 1987 arrest. We may be able to sit down together at the picnic area in the main prison instead of talk on phones through glass in the visiting booths on death row and the old Camp J “dungeon,” where we have met before. Or his plea may be denied. I know people who have attended executions, to support the prisoner and to be a friend, since others glad to see them die will also be present. I should be more sanguine. After the Pinochet coup, we picked up released detainees flying from Santiago, Chile, to San Francisco, thin men in suits not their own, looking down. Later, living in Brazil, I visited the brother of a Peruvian friend in a Rio de Janeiro police prison where he had been tortured. I am still not ready to face a last meal, and even happy prison visits are somber.

I have been engaged in solidarity work on post-conviction relief for death row and other maximum-security prisoners at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola since 1992. During the COVID-19 lockdown, I also did interpretation and humanitarian support for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detainees in private prisons around the state. I came upon this work largely by chance. It has changed my life and caused an evolution in political perspective I will try to relate here, despite wanting to say, like Borges’s ethnographer, “Esos caminos hay que andarlos” (Those paths, one must walk).[1] The questions I have in mind are on praxis and how theory arises from it; on the limits of activist and professional work on the prison-industrial complex and how each must support the other; on class, solidarity, and mutual aid; and on the abolitionist future. Finally, I consider the relationship of activism and academic work. I am a professor of literature by trade. That is a different life, and it pulls in other directions.

With the inclusion of youth and ICE detainees, Louisiana currently incarcerates 1,094 people in every 100,000, the highest known rate in the world.[2] Nearly as many are on probation or parole, which means that the carceral system penetrates most neighborhoods. Two-thirds of Louisiana’s prisoners are of African descent, although African Americans are only one-third of the state population. Angola is the largest maximum-security prison in the nation, with most inmates serving life without parole, and it is one of several Southern prisons housed at former plantations. Practices originating in slavery, including convict leasing, continued well into the twentieth century, and the old work songs were preserved here. It was at Angola that ethnomusicologists John and Alan Lomax recorded bluesman Huddie Ledbetter’s “Governor O. K. Allen,” his musical plea for reprieve.[3] Gangs of mostly Black men still walk out each morning under mounted guard, picks and shovels on their shoulders, to break clods at gunpoint.

The carceral system also marks daily life outside the gates. Prisoners working on roadways are a common sight. Incarcerated crews may do gardening at your university. At the state capitol canteen, they serve lunch. At the prison, they perform labor for facility personnel, working on cars, doing home renovations, cooking, staffing events. I met an inmate who had just typeset letterhead for my academic unit. Continuities between enslavement and mass incarceration are enacted before one’s eyes, and the “New Jim Crow” Michelle Alexander and others have discussed is not new, but rather an aspect of segregation that was never dismantled.[4] When I began to receive mail from the prison, my postman told me he had a cousin there. A neighbor revealed he had done time. Some students or their family members had, too. My hairdresser’s brother was a guard. And our colonial landscape of plantations carved out along the river is carceral by design, as are our segregated cities, and the roads to our jails are remote but well-traveled. When the aging bus used only for this trip, run for people without private cars, arrives at Angola, it is Black women and children who climb off, some visiting more than one relative.

Awareness of at least some of these things is what interested me in prison work in the first place, yet the work itself, the repeated exposure, still changed my understanding of our terrain. I had not fully perceived the sheer size of the carceral state: its auxiliary businesses, its long reach into lives and homes, and its ubiquity, visible once you learn how to look. I had not realized how many of the people I knew had direct contact with the prison system. I had not grasped in such a concrete way that the prison system is not hidden in the backlands but a part of all daily life, even when veiled. I had not understood how central a feature the carceral landscape is in Black life. I had not witnessed the fortitude of prisoners, and the dedication of families. I did not know what it was to ride back to the prison gates in a van with a worn mother and laughing child spinning a new top on the floor, prison made, after visiting husband, father, and older brothers in jail, or to see ragged parents who have traveled hours to see their child condemned to death and to spend a day playing checkers, “like we used to do.” I had not witnessed the isolation of the prisoners whose family connections have eroded, and this is the majority. The experiences I have had with activists, lawyers, investigators, judges, courts, inmates, families, and friends make academic work in carceral studies and on the global prison industrial complex — areas in which I lack formal training — comprehensible out of familiarity first, although my training in literary and cultural theory clearly contributes. What relationship exists between knowledge and the circumstances in which it is generated? Do circumstances generate specific kinds of knowledge? My knowledge here comes from praxis.

It began when I was living in New Orleans and working for Louisiana State University (LSU) in Baton Rouge. Reading the Times-Picayune, I saw an article on Williams vs. McKeithen, the 1971 lawsuit on prison conditions that resulted in major reforms at Angola and remains a point of reference today. Hayes Williams, the named plaintiff, had drawn a life sentence at nineteen based on what amounted to a technicality. I would later realize that imprisonment is always based on technicalities. In this 1967 case, a man was killed in an argument that was treated as an armed robbery. Waiting in the car for his friends, Williams was construed as the getaway driver. What transpired is still unclear, but it meant a murder charge for all involved. The advice Williams received was that he plead guilty in exchange for a life sentence, since standing trial meant risking the death penalty. A life sentence was parolable at ten years and six months, so he would come out of prison still a young man. But by the time ten years passed, life meant natural life, and Williams’s guilty plea left him without recourse. His codefendants, including the shooter, had pleaded not guilty, which made them eligible for sentence reduction, and most had been released. Meanwhile Williams, who had let his name be used on a lawsuit to benefit all inmates, was still in jail. His father had become disabled after an auto accident on the then-dangerous Angola road and was lying in a hospital bed in the family house on Louisa Street, near the Desire projects.

It was an interesting story, and a day or so later, someone published a letter in the paper saying we should all write to the governor requesting clemency for Williams. I wrote, and being in the habit of copying correspondence to people mentioned in it, I sent a copy to the prisoner for his records. I had not intended more, but he wrote back to thank me in handwriting that resembled copperplate, and the woman who had suggested we all write to the governor called me, wanting to form a committee and work on Williams’s release. What? I thought. We are going to get a convicted murderer, surely unpopular with state officials because of his lawsuit, out of prison? Without the backing of an organization like the Southern Poverty Law Center? Neither of us had experience in this kind of campaign, and the task was daunting. But Louisiana is a small state, my new friend pointed out. It is possible to meet with a judge or even the governor, and convicts sometimes win reprieve, she emphasized. And the die had been cast when I had copied Williams on my letter, anyway. I was already in.

In those days, I was seeing a man called Tyrone, a Cajun from Lafayette. Sometimes we drove out to the zydeco halls and gospel masses you could still find in the country then. Tyrone would stop off at a cottage near Bayou Maringouin to see Robert Pete Williams’s last relation and give her fifty dollars. Robert Pete Williams, already dead, was a major figure in blues guitar. He never received royalties for his music, and Tyrone was making up for that. Like Leadbelly, Robert Pete had sung himself out of Angola. He was released in 1958 to “servitude parole” on the private farm of former Angola warden Ruldoph Eastley, where he spent the next six years.[5] Enslavement and the prison industrial complex are always nearby. I mentioned my new project to Tyrone, and he had a neighbor working on such things. I met Beanie, a member of the Committee to Free Gary Tyler.

I began meeting with this committee, first as a visitor seeking insight to inform work on the Williams case, then as an active member. Gary Tyler had been at Angola since 1975 and was by this time an Amnesty International Prisoner of Conscience. His conviction and lack of relief were effectively political, as the event that led to his arrest was an integration riot in Destrehan, Louisiana. Tyler’s school bus was rushed by a white mob, and a youth in the crowd named Timothy Weber was shot and later died. The shot did not credibly come from the bus, but Tyler, then 16, was tried as an adult for murder. He became the youngest person ever sent to death row here, although the sentence was commuted to life the following year, during a brief window when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the Louisiana death penalty law unconstitutional. The conviction was a focal point for the civil rights struggle, and there were demonstrations as far away as New York and Detroit, where Rosa Parks keynoted. In the seventies, meetings of the Committee to Free Gary Tyler would regularly draw a hundred people, I learned. By the time I joined, it was small, consisting of his volunteer lawyer Mary Howell, Beanie, and a few others. Tyler had long since exhausted all his appeals, and the committee was focused on keeping the case in the news and building public support to seek clemency from the governor.

The lawyer, of course, was in contact with public officials, international organizations, and the pardon and parole board as well as watching for changes in the law that could have favorable implications. For volunteers, the work involved tabling and petitions, much of it done at the street fairs and other public cultural events for which New Orleans is famous, which take place in parks after a Mardi Gras Indian procession or a second-line parade. We also did fundraisers in music clubs for expenses, since it is one thing for an activist attorney like Howell to volunteer time but another to cover costs, and costs accumulate. With a club owner supporting the cause, a band donating a night, and a restaurant donating food, cover charges went to Tyler’s case. Each event raised his profile, and we would meet people willing to circulate petitions at work or wear Free Gary Tyler T-shirts. The blues guitarist Corey Harris turned up one weekend night when we were tabling outside a popular venue in the Marigny neighborhood, and he later played a fundraiser for Williams at the Banks Street flat I had then. Tyler himself, meanwhile, was president of the Angola Drama Club, which wrote and performed original plays. John Whitley, the reformist warden of Angola at the time, enabled some inmate groups to travel in order to build bridges to the public, and the Drama Club performed at universities and community centers in the region. We attended whenever we could to support the project, meet people in the audience, and see Tyler. We would also go to the Angola crafts fair, held twice yearly, where some of the Drama Club members sold crafts and there was time to talk. Tyler had a taco stand to raise funds for the Lifers’ Club, as many of the members were old men with medical needs. Items like aspirin are expensive in prison, and wages are as low as four cents an hour. We bought Tyler’s tacos and ate them on the benches, looking at the waves of people. Some were there because of the adjacent Angola Rodeo, some to shop, some to support and socialize with family members. I marveled at the casual way the prison was a part of so many lives.

And it was easy to support Tyler and promote his case since he was involved in interesting activities and was so widely recognized as innocent. As with Williams, his incarceration was predicated upon a series of what amount to “technicalities.” Some of these were the decision to try him as an adult and the subsequent determination to construct a capital case. Another was that since Tyler’s lawyer had not objected to the serious errors made by the prosecutor at the time of the trial, these errors could not be redressed now. As I came to understand such details, I was progressively seeing how it is precisely these, not guilt or innocence, that had determined most of the prisoners’ fates. And the law is richer than a set of rules, but it is not the same thing as justice.

Work on Williams’s case was ongoing, and it involved a great deal of learning. We were raising funds and circulating petitions but also looking for a competent lawyer who would take the case for expenses. We met with Williams’s family, with an investigator, and with the judge who would preside over hearings. We found an old collaborator on Williams vs. McKeithen, we went to law libraries, and we pulled documents. I served a subpoena on Williams’s original attorney, an old man in an unfurnished apartment in central New Orleans, who was sitting on the floor surrounded with empty bottles. I began to wish I had professional training, since I lacked the lawyer, the paralegal, and the investigator I needed to be free to do the advocacy work I could do well. In the end, we did find an attorney who took the case for the money we had raised and who got Williams’s conviction vacated. He was released in 1997 and had a good three years before getting shot when he tried to intervene on behalf of his daughter in a domestic violence incident. The project I had originally taken on was thus ended, but Tyler’s situation was still unresolved, and I was also involved by then in another project Beanie had started, related to death row inmates at Angola.

This was another advocacy and prisoner support group involving correspondence, visitation, lobbying of legislators and public consciousness-raising, largely through petition drives on specific cases. It was modeled in part on the efforts of Sister Helen Prejean, Pax Christi, and a British organization called LifeLines that worked against the U.S. death penalty. Beanie and her friend George had started this group to work outside the religious frame and to take more direction on projects from the prisoners themselves. That is, they were thinking more in terms of solidarity and mutual aid than of Christian charity or of reformist participation in civic life, the latter being how I saw my own activism at the time. I joined in support and because things had run together already; we were racewalking together most evenings to hold our meetings. The prison was a more liberal institution in some ways than it is now, and this new group was invited to Angola’s Death Row Appreciation Seminars, large social events held at the prison for lawyers, family, activists, and anyone helping make the death row inmates’ lives easier. Inmates were allowed to leave their cells and mingle. Lunch was provided by organizations from the main prison, like the Lifers’ Club and the Drama Club, so this was also an opportunity to see Tyler and other people, like the writer Percy “’Baki” Tate, whom we had met through Tyler. The Angolite, the prison’s award-winning newsmagazine, was uncensored then, and noted journalist Wilbert Rideau, also a former death row inmate, was the editor; we knew him and met The Angolite’s associate editor Ron Wikberg, also an inmate, as well as the magazine’s contributing editor Burk Foster, a criminal justice professor who became a colleague of mine when I moved from LSU to the University of Louisiana. All the projects were interconnected. Reading that Times-Picayune article on Williams changed my life.

It changed my life first in that it revealed a different world or, more accurately, revealed the world as different. The experiences I had progressively laid bare the vast extent of the carceral state before I became aware of the large bibliography on this topic, and before some of the works I now think of as essential were written. Ruthie Gilmore’s discussion in Golden Gulag of the California landscape from the point of view of prison construction and routes to prisons is one example.[6] Another is Rey Ortiz’s From Plantation to Prison, on the carceral geography of the Caribbean, formed by forts and barracoons since the Spanish conquest.[7] I now approach work of theorists of power like Foucault with a sense of recognition beyond conceptual understanding. I notice details I could not have, like the time, at a bank ATM in San Salvador, I realized the security guard’s uniform was that of the company operating a private prison in Louisiana I had visited a few months before. Most profoundly, the prison work caused me to embrace abolitionist politics before hearing the term. Both cases I began with could be undertaken from the point of view of reform. Tyler was not guilty and was unjustly imprisoned. Williams had an excessive sentence after inadequate representation, and he attracted interest because of his association with efforts at prison reform. And many death penalty activists I have worked alongside sought abolition of executions but not prisons. Prison abolition had been a project of the social movements of my childhood in the 1960s and 1970s, so the concept was familiar. But seeing in close detail not just how massive the carceral system is but also how arbitrary incarceration is in the sense that judgment, sentencing, and release depend so very much on technicalities makes the knowledge that we must act beyond reform instinctive before it is conceptual. Praxis informs theory.

I have seen in person and over time the things prison, and different levels of imprisonment and length of incarceration, will do to someone. At one Death Row Appreciation Seminar, Tate — who as a trusted inmate from the main prison was serving food — had the chance to meet his childhood friend Hakim, then on death row. Accustomed to talking with Hakim at death row visits, in the visiting cages outside the cell tiers, I would not have said he did not seem alert. But in comparison to Tate — with a much greater degree of freedom within the prison, a role in the Drama Club, and a possibility of reprieve no matter how slight — Hakim’s degree of diminishment was stark. When we had contacted Williams about the possibility of release, initially he had a much more modest aspiration: the visits he had when his parents were younger and could bring his children to see him. I first visited Williams at the punishment camp, where he occasionally spent time. He was calm there, but when my death row friend Nathaniel was sent to Camp J confinement, his deterioration was rapid. Finally — and this issue is not discussed enough — despite reforms in conditions, such as those mandated by Williams vs. McKeithen, I have had the opportunity to see prisons get worse and not better. Inmates could once get and read serious books at prison libraries and through the mail. George Jackson, killed at San Quentin in 1971, had been part of a revolutionary reading group.[8] When I began sending books to prisons, they had to be new and shipped from a store so they could not be infused with substances, and pornography or weapons information would have been flagged, but historical and philosophical content was not as closely vetted as now. There are e-tablets touted as convenient and offering choice, since inmates can choose readings at will, but the choices are limited, and they are heavy on depoliticizing genres such as self-help. Companies like JPay, which provide email, transfer of funds, and video calls at high prices, have replaced phone calls, letters, and postal money orders. All of these were public services, accessible without an internet connection or a bank card, and they defined the prisoners as part of a common polis from which they are increasingly separated now. Visiting lists are limited in ways they were not before. If you are on one list, you may not easily be approved for another, as you could then carry messages within the prison. This can have the effect of requiring visitors — who, as members of the class that gets incarcerated, may have both a friend and a family member in jail — to choose one inmate to see. It means most activists can no longer visit more than one prisoner. The death row inmate whose clemency hearing I hope to attend would like to change his visiting list but does not, since a revised list must conform to the new rules. The prison is cleaner than it was and its installations are more modern, but it curtails lives in new ways.

Over the years, I have developed views in carceral studies. I can speak on mass incarceration and slavery, on other state functions of prisons, and on purposes of slavery beyond the extraction of labor. I would like to expand on Gilmore’s analysis of the prison industrial complex as an “anti-state state” that works to undermine democracy and social well-being. I am interested in the prison industrial complex as a global phenomenon and in the relationship between prisons, immigration detention, and other camp forms. And some of the Black studies and decolonial theory I read in connection with modern literature also illuminates issues in the carceral state. I have long felt the need for a law license, so I could simply do things that need doing, and with my other academic background, I can easily see the intellectual and activist career that might grow from this. But the prison work has not changed my orientation in literary study, and my literary expertise has not had an impact on what I could accomplish in the world of prisons. I undertook the prison projects as a member of the public, not expecting them to be a part of research or an aspect of career. This is important to me as a political position. The prison work stands on its own. I am similarly adamant about the independence and integrity of my academic work in literature.

If my disciplinary training has not seemed important in the context of the prison work, my broader academic skills have turned out to be essential, and after all, it was the professorial habit of sending courtesy copies of correspondence that got me involved in the first place. Much work in post-conviction relief — writing letters, meeting judges and legislators, calling and vetting lawyers, visiting libraries, finding and deciphering documents — calls on academic training. Not everyone has a high level of ease in archives or feels confident in learned or powerful venues. In terms of direct aid to prisoners using academic expertise, I have advised on the writing of foundation grants to support the activities of prisoner organizations. My organizing and canvassing skills, as well as event planning, were largely learned while forming the University of California (UC) student worker union that is now UAW 4811, and I have drawn heavily on them to advocate for prisoners. The ability to write and produce a newsletter is important, as are the means to put up a website. Once again, these skills are rarer than I knew. My academic connections have also enabled me to create opportunities for public dialogue and research. I invited a carceral studies colleague to speak at my university, got him access to Angola for fieldwork, and put him in touch with Albert Woodfox, a well-known former prisoner and author, who sadly died last year.[9] We arranged Tyler’s 2021 talk at Howard University. I connected Tate with a doctoral student in history who contacted me, after locating some of Tate’s writing in archives.[10] Tate’s correspondence from before I met him has literary-historical importance. I had no idea.

Other academic skills are useful for prison abolition work. How to serve on a committee. How to speak in public and lead a meeting. How to face a distant goal or a seemingly insurmountable task. How to come through. How to be turned down. How to lead from behind, something I know from advanced teaching. And this activism may not have altered my research program, but it did teach me a good deal about the home lives of the student population in my Research 1 but public institutions in a poor state. Since most of my prison work is done on evenings and weekends, I often have the same experience that many students do, going home to a working-class and non-white environment. Meeting my colleagues Monday mornings is strange. The university atmosphere seems foreign, and I come from places about which I am unsure how to communicate there. What did you do on the weekend? I visited someone in shackles, hands chained to their waist, in a punishment cell at Angola. I carried documents to their children in the Ninth Ward and drank tea.

Unlike me, some scholars blend activism and research, often coming to their research field from activism, such that the activism itself is fieldwork. This can work for careers and for the movement. It is the path I would have followed had I taken a law degree. Prison projects are absorbing, though, and a pattern begins to appear. After a few years, people either make careers of it or scale back. Beanie became a criminal investigator specialized in capital defense cases. Others were drained after supporting prisoners and families through appeals and, ultimately, executions. I kept on, eventually developing an academic interest in carceral studies. I can write in this field, and I could conceivably develop Latin American carceral studies as a teaching field. But neither of these activities, nor my literary projects, will get anyone out of jail. For that I must either continue as an activist or get a license that would enable me to function at a professional level.

So how do activism and academia work together? Can we do radical work from an elite space, or undertake a counterhegemonic project in a hegemonic space? For me the answer is clear since the university is an ideological state apparatus. We can certainly write radical texts, and activism and academic work can flow together if they are in allied fields. We can undertake radical projects while also working in elite spaces. This might even be the most possible in a very elite space, with resources and a certain ease. Yet as we all know, activist work is fascinating and invigorating, but it is not recreation. Projects like those Beanie and I embarked upon are beyond the pale for most people with research programs in other areas, and that is just the first limiting factor in play.

Can universities as institutions support radical projects? Growing up in Santa Barbara during the civil rights era, I remember the United Front occupation of buildings at UC Santa Barbara and the writing of the Plan de Santa Bárbara, which became a blueprint for the creation of Chicano studies programs nationwide. It was hard fought. A few years later, at the dawn of the neoliberal turn that has given us the entrepreneurial universities we inhabit today, came the dissolution of the School of Criminology at UC Berkeley. It had housed radical criminologists. More recently, the radical field of Black studies has become acceptable in academia because it adhered to traditional standards, not because it changed them.[11] The recent Florida decisions limiting academic freedom are powerful, and Louisiana is eyeing proposals for post-tenure review that seek to ensure what legislators consider ideological balance among faculty. North Carolina is making funding decisions that practically redline units not in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, and West Virginia has already done so. Some universities will surely remain able to support radical thought and be resources for action. But action itself is a different thing. And this discussion is not new. Independent organizations, including chapters of the American Association of University Professors, have addresses off campus.

I am more interested in other questions — on the relationship between professional and amateur work and on what we mean by terms like “radical.” On the first issue, I have wanted a law degree because those skills and that license would permit me to do work I cannot. But as we also know, professional work and professionalization itself narrows the view and the allowable scope of activity. Amateurs, necessarily the majority in any movement, can have perceptions and analyses professional training works to interdict. This is also where other disciplinary knowledge, including the hermeneutic skills literary scholars cultivate, can come to bear. At the same time, my own groups have not always had all the knowledge or political education we needed. Once an inmate told me he had escape plans. I had to decide what to do alone. It was difficult, given the possible implications of any action. And when a group comes together, and the work is urgent but new, and politics are not talked through, projects and coalitions can fragment and causes can be lost.

I also wonder whether anything I have done is radical. It is true that through activism I have become an abolitionist, by reason and not just out of temperament. I do believe forging connections with the incarcerated is a radical act, particularly when it involves the incarcerated mass that is not exceptional because of being considered political or known to be innocent. I know the tenacity of New Left radicals supported the release and contribute to the current success of Tyler. At the same time, it is interesting to be thanked by prison officials for supporting the inmates and thereby helping to keep them in line or to have someone from ICE call your cell phone to say they will release someone from detention if you can come to pick them up. My friend Nell says we run an “underground railroad” by providing these rides. It is something to drive out into the country to a prison being used as a detention facility, to meet someone just released, and to welcome them to the United States in conditional freedom, after they have trekked through several countries. After apprehension at the border, after prisoner flights across the country in shackles, after months behind bars. To take them to a Target for clothes, to a restaurant, to a decent hotel. To get a call from an anxious relative who has not seen them in years, “¿Señora Leslie? ¿Ha encontrado a mi madre? Está conmigo, ya salimos, se la paso.” But the cooperation with ICE machinery is ironic, and the energy spent on this kind of aid is not spent toward the abolition of immigration detention itself. Nor have we found a way to address conditions within these corporate-run facilities. Finally, most of my activity, from death row to immigration detention, has been undertaken within a civil rights framework. An abolitionist future will require more, although Nell tells me the very attempt to address the carceral state is radical.

Do academia and activism work together? I have been saying they are separate, although we can participate in both, and access to the university means access to resources. Yet there are limits, since the university is a liberal institution at best, and serious activism requires sacrifices most faculty will not make. Like Martha McCaughey, whose discussion I recommend, I question the need for the category “scholar-activist,” and I insist on the democratic importance of civic life outside work.[12]

Upon reflection, though, I would say the most fundamental divergence between academia and activism is in the kind of subject each one produces. Activism does mean action. An activist speaks up, stands up, takes risks for a collective cause. This is not what academic research is, nor is it how the academic world functions politically. Research can support activism, but the competitive individualism the neoliberal university requires and reproduces is incompatible with the generosity of solidarity and mutual aid. The latter mode we eschew to stay in the game, but the former is a source of our nearly intolerable malaise. I want a different sociability. The need for generosity and living together is a recurring theme in the work of Denise Ferreira da Silva and Irmgard Emmelhainz, philosophers I am reading now. Perhaps my projects in the academic sphere and outside it come together in that desire. I have also long been struck by the similarity, not the opposition, between university and prison systems: large, multifaceted apparatuses of bureaucratic control. Once, watching two prisoners compare experiences at different institutions and progress on their cases, I noticed how much they resembled up-and-coming professors at conference cash bars discussing jobs, publications, and tenure. I cannot gloss the discussion now, but in The Undercommons, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten engage some of the questions on professionalization, emancipation, and the university I have broached here. It is not from universities or after the critique of professions but in the “undercommons,” the zone outside and underneath the fortress, that the joyful collaboration they call “study” and practices of freedom meet.[13] Another poet, René Char, said Rimbaud had put an end to the idea of poetry as “a literary genre, a competition,” making it instead a house we should all inhabit.[14] In the undercommons, that house appears, where my scholarly and activist interests live together. The work lies ahead.[15]

Leslie Bary’s recent publications include an English translation of Peruvian surrealist César Moro’s La tortuga ecuestre (Cardboard House, 2025) and critical essays on Gloria Anzaldúa and Denise Ferreira da Silva. She teaches modern Latin American, Caribbean, and Spanish literature at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

endnotes

Jorge Luis Borges, “El etnográfo,” in Elogio de la sombra (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1969), 57–58; “The Ethnographer,” in Praise of Darkness, trans. Norman Thomas di Giovanni (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1974), 48. ↩
“Louisiana profile,” Prison Policy Initiative, accessed 10 August 2024, https://www.prisonpolicy.org/profiles/LA.html. ↩
Leadbelly, “Governor O. K. Allen,” by Huddie Ledbetter, recorded 1940 by Alan Lomax, track C2 on Leadbelly: The Library of Congress Recordings, Elektra EKL-301/2, 3x vinyl LP, 1966. ↩
Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2010). ↩
Mark Allan Jackson, “Angola Blues: The Prison Songs of Robert Pete Williams,” in Crossroads: A Southern Culture Annual, ed. Ted Olson (Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 2006), 93–103. ↩
Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). ↩
Reynaldo Ortiz-Minaya, “From Plantation to Prison: Visual Economies of Slave Resistance, Criminal Justice, and Penal Exile in the Spanish Caribbean 1820–1886” (PhD diss., SUNY Binghamton, 2014). ↩
George Jackson, Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson (New York: Coward McCann, 1970). ↩
Albert Woodfox, Solitary: Unbroken by Four Decades of Solitary Confinement. A Journey of Transformation and Hope, ed. Leslie George (New York: Grove Press, 2019). ↩
Richard D’Von Daily, “Locked In: Intimacy, Incarceration, and HIV/AIDS in the Black Gay Arts Movement During the Long 1980s” (PhD diss. Pennsylvania State University, 2023). ↩
Fabio Rojas, From Black Power to Black Studies: How a Radical Social Movement Became an Academic Discipline (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). ↩
Martha McCaughey, “The Trouble with Scholar-Activism,” Academe 109, no. 4 (Fall 2023): 52–55. ↩
Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Wivenhoe/New York/Port Watson: Minor Compositions, 2013). ↩
René Char, “Arthur Rimbaud,” in Recherche de la base et du sommet, Œuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1983), 731. ↩
I am grateful to all named here for their wisdom and trust, and to Joanna DeLaune, Omar Espinosa, and Mary Joyce, who accompanied my writing and whose voices are in it. ↩

Text prepared by:

Bruce R. Magee

Source

Bary, Leslie. “From Angola with Love: Activism, Academics, and the Abolitionist Future.” Occasion, vol. 14, Fall 2025, pp. 85-94, Stanford Humanities Center, 28 Jan. 2022, https:// shc. stanford.edu/ arcade/ publications/ occasion/ anticolonial-interventions-legal-culture-global-south-art-and. Accessed 22 Jan. 2026. © Dr. Leslie Bary. © OC · CA · SION Used by permission. All rights reserved.

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