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Kristina Graaff (HU Berlin):
"The Street-Prison Symbiosis: A Spatial Analytical Tool to Interlink
Literary and Material Spaces of Marginality"
Abstract
My doctoral thesis examines the popular African American literary genre known as Street Literature or Urban Fiction that emerged in the late 1990s in black low- income neighborhoods of the US‐American East Coast mainly through the practices of self-publishing and streetvending. Largely written by first‐time authors – many of them current or former inmates – the popular narratives are usually set in similar low-income neighborhoods. They center on the protagonists’ attempts to escape the neglected urban areas mostly through the involvement in the crack trade which usually results in their incarceration or death.
As my dissertation illustrates, Street Literature is infused by an inextricable linkage between the location of low—income communities, in particular the space of ‘the streets’, and the prison system on numerous levels: in regard to its narrative content and language as well as on the level of its production, distribution and consumption. The genre thus not only emerged from the linkage of the two locations but also relies on it for its continuing existence.
Placing this symbiosis front and center, my dissertation traces and examines these various linkages that exist on the fictional and material level and works out the genre’s ambiguous stance towards it. The concept of the ‘ghetto‐prison symbiosis’ by the urban sociologist Loïc Wacquant serves as a conceptual starting point to frame and define this linkage. Motivated by the interest to avoid the frequently stigmatizing notion of the ghetto and replace Wacquant’s rather top-down approach with a more practice-oriented one, the dissertation expands and rescales his ghetto‐prison symbiosis into what I term ‘street‐prison symbiosis’.
In my presentation, I will first discuss my conceptual framing of the street‐prison symbiosis. In a next step, I will illustrate how it can be applied to the genre of Street Literature and to what extent this street‐prison symbiosis can be understood as the most recent mechanism to spatially, socially, economically and politically exclude large parts of the country’s black population.
As my dissertation illustrates, Street Literature is infused by an inextricable linkage between the location of low—income communities, in particular the space of ‘the streets’, and the prison system on numerous levels: in regard to its narrative content and language as well as on the level of its production, distribution and consumption. The genre thus not only emerged from the linkage of the two locations but also relies on it for its continuing existence.
Placing this symbiosis front and center, my dissertation traces and examines these various linkages that exist on the fictional and material level and works out the genre’s ambiguous stance towards it. The concept of the ‘ghetto‐prison symbiosis’ by the urban sociologist Loïc Wacquant serves as a conceptual starting point to frame and define this linkage. Motivated by the interest to avoid the frequently stigmatizing notion of the ghetto and replace Wacquant’s rather top-down approach with a more practice-oriented one, the dissertation expands and rescales his ghetto‐prison symbiosis into what I term ‘street‐prison symbiosis’.
In my presentation, I will first discuss my conceptual framing of the street‐prison symbiosis. In a next step, I will illustrate how it can be applied to the genre of Street Literature and to what extent this street‐prison symbiosis can be understood as the most recent mechanism to spatially, socially, economically and politically exclude large parts of the country’s black population.
Bio
Kristina Graaff is a doctoral fellow at Berlin’s Humboldt University. From 2008 to 2011 she has been a fellow at the Transatlantic Graduate Research Program Berlin-New York. In the fall semesters of 2008 and 2009 she was a Visiting Scholar at Fordham University’s African American Studies Department and the Bronx African American History Project. Her areas of research include African American popular fiction, prison writing and the U.S. penal system. Among her most recent projects is the anthology Urban Street Vending in the Neoliberal City: A Global Perspective on the Practices and Policies of a Marginalized Economy (2013). She has currently finished writing half of her doctoral thesis.