This analysis uses a critical race framework from African American literary studies (Morrison 1993, McBride 2001) to locate discourses of whiteness circulating between the texts of prison-based scholar-practitioners and their imprisoned counterparts, considering how those rhetorical economies risk marginalizing prisoners in an already vexed space. Recognizing the role of affect and bodily ritual in shaping those economies, the analysis then turns to Jennifer LeMesurier’s account of somatic metaphor (2014) as a storehouse of rhetorical knowledge, and what John Protevi describes as, “a personal political physiology [capable of shaping] institutional action” (Protevi 2009, xii) to explore how such bodied knowledge scales from the personal to the political.
A Journal of Community-Engaged Writing and Rhetoric