Foucault and the Black Panthers

City

Volumn 11, Issue 3, 2007, Pages 313-356

  Heiner, Brady Thomas ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 36549012322     PISSN: 13604813     EISSN: 14703629     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/13604810701668969     Document Type: Article

References (203)

1. A shorter and otherwise modified version of this paper is appearing in Biopolitics and Racism: Foucauldian Genealogies, eds Jeffrey Paris and Eduardo Mendieta (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007).
2. Mao Tse-Tung, 'On Protracted War', Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung, Vol. II (Peking: Foreign Language Press, 1965), p. 153.
3. Huey P. Newton, 'Functional Definition of Politics', The Black Panther, 17 January 1969; reprinted in The Black Panthers Speak, ed. Philip S. Foner (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 1995 [1970]), p. 47.
4. George Jackson, 'George Jackson: P.S., On Discipline', The Black Panther, 27 March 1971.
5. This claim derives from Foucault's 1976 lectures at the Collège de France. Foucault foreshadows this claim in 1975 in Discipline and Punish, and he reiterates it in the 1976 publication of the first volume of The History of Sexuality. Cf. Foucault, 'Society Must Be Defended': Lectures at the Collège de France 1975-1976, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), p. 15 (hereafter referred to as 1976 Lectures)
6. Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1999), p. 168
7. The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), p. 93.
8. It is important not to overstate the radicality of this change of orientation; for instance, there exist several crucial elements of continuity between Foucault's work of the 1960s and that of the 1970s, namely, a concern with the role of knowledge in processes of subjectivation. In addition, one can surely locate certain components of Foucault's analysis of power relations and techniques of domination in the earlier books Madness and Civilization (1961) and Birth of the Clinic (1963). Nevertheless, the shift that Foucault's work undergoes in the early 1970s does lead to the displacement of certain concepts and the formulation of new ones. For example, 'episteme', a concept that pervades the earlier texts, appears only once in Discipline and Punish (p. 305), and the concept of 'the historical a priori' is abandoned entirely. As for the methodological concept of 'archaeology', it is neither mentioned in Discipline and Punish nor 'The Discourse on Language'- a text written just 1 year after Foucault had so meticulously defined the concept in The Archaeology of Knowledge.
9. See, for example, Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault, Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), pp. 104-117
10. Béatrice Han, Foucault's Critical Project: Between the Transcendental and the Historical, trans. Edward Pile (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), pp. 73-108
11. Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Seán Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988) and 'What is a Dispositif?', in Michel Foucault: Philosopher, trans. Timothy Armstrong (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 159-168
12. Beatrice Hanssen, Critique of Violence (New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 30-96
13. Jeffrey Minson, Genealogies of Morals: Nietzsche, Foucault, Donzelot, and the Eccentricity of Ethics (London: Macmillan, 1985), pp. 40-78
14. Peter Miller, Graham Burchell and Colin Gordon (eds), The Foucault Effect (New York: Harvester, 1991)
15. Jeremy Moss (ed.), The Later Foucault (New York: Sage, 1998)
16. Gary Gutting, Foucault and Literature: Towards a Genealogy of Writing (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 119-146.
17. As will be discussed below, the three published documents, to my knowledge, where a connection between Foucault and the BPP is mentioned are (1) the brief notes included in Daniel Defert's 'Chronology', Dits et écrits, Vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), pp. 33, 38, 39; (2) Alessandro Fontana and Mauro Bertani's editors' postscript to the 1976 Lectures, 'Situating the Lectures', where they cite Defert's notes on the connection (1976 Lectures, p. 282); and (3) Edmund White's biography of Jean Genet, where he documents Foucault's association with Genet, who was a prominent French literary figure, a contemporary of Foucault, and a BPP supporter.
18. See Genet: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 1993), pp. 567, 570, 697 n. 43 (hereafter cited as Genet). The influence that the US black liberation struggle had on the Groupe d'Information sur les Prisons, of which Foucault was a founding member, is mentioned in Le Groupe d'Information sur les Prisons: Archives d'une lutte, 1970-1972, eds Philippe Artières et al. (Paris: IMEC, 2003), pp. 91-132.
19. Foucault, 'Nietzsche, Genealogy, History', Essential Works, Vol. 2, p. 386.
20. L'ordre du discourse (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), p. 55
21. translated as 'The Discourse on Language' and published as an appendix to The Archaeology of Knowledge, p. 219. I have modified the translation.
22. It is important to note that Angela Y. Davis opted not to assume an explicit position within the BPP's leadership structure. In her introduction to The Angela Y. Davis Reader, Joy James reports the following: '[Davis] describes her affiliation with the Panther organization as a "permanently ambiguous status" that fluctuated between "'member' and 'fellow-traveler'." Active in community organizing, temporarily in charge of political education in the West Side office [...] and formulating political education for the Los Angeles Chapter, Davis remained on the fringes of the Panthers' internal contestations. Years later, she recalls her doubts about the Party's militarist posturing: "I thoroughly respected the BPP's visible defiance and principally supported the right to self-defense.... I also found myself using funerals and shootings as the most obvious signposts of the passage of time. However, sensing ways in which this danger and chaos emanated not only from the enemy outside, but from the very core of the Black Panther Party, I preferred to remain uninformed about the organization's inner operations."' Despite the distance she retained with respect to the BPP's inner operations, Davis maintained her affiliation with the Party and remained a prominent figure in the black liberation movements of the time. Cf. The Angela Y. Davis Reader, ed. Joy James (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998), pp. 6-7.
23. I have translated part of this pamphlet into English. See 'The Assassination of George Jackson', in Biopolitics and Racism, op. cit.
24. Original Fr. pub. Groupe d'Information sur les Prisons, L'Assassinat de George Jackson, >Intolérable>, No. 3 (Paris: Gallimard, 1971).
25. Groupe d'Information sur les Prisons, Enquête dans vingt prisons, ≪Intolérable≫, No. 1 (Paris: Champ Libre, 1971).
26. According to Eribon, it was published in May, according to Macey, it was published in June. Cf. Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault, trans. Betsy Wing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 224
27. David Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault (New York: Vintage, 1993), p. 268.
28. Reflecting upon this break, Eribon writes: 'How distant this text founding the GIP seems from the inaugural lecture at the Collège de France given just two months before!' (p. 225).
29. 'Outside La Santé', Macey reports, 'Foucault and others were arrested on the grounds that their leaflets had not been duly registered for copyright' (p. 270).
30. Foucault, 'Je perçois l'intolérable', interview with Geneviève Armedler, Journal de Génève: Samedi littéraire, Cahier 135, 24 July 1971.
31. Foucault, 'Rituals of Exclusion', in Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961-1984, ed. Sylvère Lotringer (New York: Semiotexte, 1989), p. 73.
32. Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Routledge, 1966/1994), p. xv.
33. La garde à vue, as Macey describes it, 'refers to the common police practice of holding people without charge for a period of up to twenty-four hours. [...] The usual pretext for taking people into custody is the alleged need to check their identity' (p. 515 n. 1).
34. 'Création d'un Groupe d'Information sur les Prisons', Esprit, March 1971, p. 531 (quoted in Macey, p. 258).
35. See Macey, pp. 209-236
36. Eribon, pp. 201-211.
37. Eribon, pp. 209-210.
38. Eribon, p. 210.
39. White, Genet, p. 570.
40. A number of BPP members have published mention of their encounters with Genet during his visit in the spring of 1970. Here is former BPP member and current US political prisoner and death row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal recalling his encounter with Genet at the BPP national office in Oakland, California: '[Genet] seemed more honored to be in the company of the Black Panthers than if he were accorded an honor guard by the president of the United States. [...] I often wonder why his wordless visit stands so stark in my memory. It is not because he was the only white visitor to the office. He wasn't. Several white radicals came by, some fairly often, but almost all of them radiated fear and discomfiture in the office. Genet seemed oddly at home and at ease around the office. As a former prisoner, and a homosexual, perhaps he saw himself as the perennial outsider, the consummate outlaw. I could tell by his body language, by the openness of his face, by his vibration, that he really dug being in the office. It gave him a kick. He looked like a little boy who had found his favorite toy. He did not fear us. Strangely, he seemed to feel as one with us. His Yale [University] speech certainly showed a deep support for the significance of the [Black Panther] Party in American life. Perhaps, as an outsider, he perceived these other outsiders as insiders?' Former BPP Chief of Staff David Hilliard shares similar reflections of Genet: 'Jean Genet, the French novelist and playwright, has come over to help mobilize support for us. Genet's an ex-inmate himself, a rebel and homosexual; although I don't understand a word he says - and he claims not to know English - I feel we are completely and easily accepted by him, that this world-famous writer is a comrade in arms.' Cf. Mumia Abu-Jamal, We Want Freedom: A Life in the Black Panther Party (Cambridge, MA: Southend Press, 2004), pp. 202-204
41. David Hilliard and Lewis Cole, This Side of Glory: The Autobiography of David Hilliard and the Story of the Black Panther Party (Boston: Little, Brown, 1993), pp. 260, 285, 294.
42. In a letter to Marianne de Pur in the summer of 1971, Genet wrote that George Jackson's book Soledad Brother 'has received a lot of attention here [in France]' (cited in White, Genet, p. 562). See George Jackson, Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson (New York: Bantom, 1970)
43. the French edition was published in 1971, cf. George Jackson, Les Frères de Soledad. Lettres de prison, Paris, Gallimard, 1971.
44. A number of these statements have been translated and published in Jean Genet, The Declared Enemy: Texts and Interviews, ed. Albert Dichy, trans. Jeff Port (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004).
45. Jean Genet, Preface to George Jackson's Soledad Brother (New York: Bantom, 1970), p. 4.
46. For more on Davis's life during this period, see Angela Y. Davis, An Autobiography (New York: International Publishers, 1974).
47. Davis, as is generally well known, continues to be a prominent leader and spokesperson in the prison abolition movement.
48. For further elaboration of this dual function of the American prison system, see Brady Heiner, 'The American Archipelago: The Global Circuit of Carcerality and Torture', in Colonial and Global Interfacings, ed. Gary Backhaus (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007).
49. In an essay written while incarcerated in May 1971, Davis explains that: '[a]fter the Civil War, the Black Codes, successors to the Slave Codes, legalized convict labor, prohibited social intercourse between blacks and whites, gave white employers an excessive degree of control over the private lives of black workers, and generally codified racism and terror'. Jackson writes in a July 1965 letter to his father: 'The forms of slavery merely changed at the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation from chattel slavery to economic slavery. If you could see and talk to some of the blacks I meet in here [i.e. prison] you would immediately understand what I mean, and see that I'm right. They are all average, all with the same backgrounds, and in [prison] for the same thing, some form of food getting.' Cf. The Angela Y. Davis Reader, op. cit., pp. 40-41
50. and Jackson, Soledad Brother, op. cit., pp. 61-62.
51. Angela Y. Davis, 'A Statement on our Fallen Comrade, George Jackson', The Black Panther, 28 August 1971, p. 18.
52. For a more in-depth historical treatment of the GIP than can be provided here, I direct the reader to Le Groupe d'Information sur les Prisons: Archives d'une lutte, 1970-1972, eds Philippe Artières et al. (Paris: IMEC, 2003).
53. GIP, Enquête dans vingt prisons, ≪Intolérable≫, No. 1 (Paris: Champ Libre, 1971). GIP, Enquête dans une prison-modèle: Leury-Méroqis, ≪Intolérable≫, No. 2 (Paris: Champ Libre, 1971).
54. GIP, Suicides de prison, ≪Intolérable≫, No. 4 (Paris: Gallimard, 1972). As Foucault biographer David Macey points out, the title of the pamphlet Suicides de prison 'makes telling use of the conjunction de: these are not suicides which simply happen to occur in prison. They are caused by the prison system: The prison's suicides' (p. 287).
55. See GIP, 'The Assassination of George Jackson', in Biopolitics and Racism, op. cit.
56. Fr. pub. L'Assassinat de George Jackson, ≪Intolérable≫, No. 3 (Paris: Gallimard, 1971).
57. White, Genet, p. 697 n. 43.
58. White, Genet, p. 567.
59. GIP, Enquête dans vingt prisons (quoted in Macey, pp. 268-269).
60. Foucault, 'Power Affects the Body', in Foucault Live, op. cit., pp. 207-208 (my emphasis).
61. For primary sources, see many of the published writings and memoirs of members of the BPP, a by no means exhaustive list of which includes: Mumia Abu-Jamal, Live from Death Row (New York: Avon Books, 1995)
62. All Things Censored (New York: Seven Stories, 2000)
63. We Want Freedom, op. cit.
64. Safiya Bukhari-Alston, 'Coming of Age: A Black Revolutionary', in Imprisoned Intellectuals: America's Political Prisoners Write on Life, Liberation, and Rebellion, ed. Joy James (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003)
65. Philip S. Foner (ed.), The Black Panthers Speak, op. cit.
66. David Hilliard and Lewis Cole, This Side of Glory, op. cit.
67. George Jackson, Soledad Brother, op. cit.
68. and Blood In My Eye (Baltimore, MD: Black Classics Press, 1990 [1972])
69. Huey P. Newton, To Die for the People: The Writings of Huey P. Newton (New York: Writers and Readers, 1995 [1972])
70. Huey P. Newton, The Huey P. Newton Reader, eds David Hilliard and Donald Weise (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2002)
71. Bobby Seale, Seize the Time (New York: Vintage, 1970 [1968]) Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography (Chicago: Lawrence Hill, 1987)
72. Dhoruba Bin Wahad, Mumia Abu Jamal and Assata Shakur, Still Black, Still Strong: Survivors of the War Against Black Revolutionaries, eds Jim Fletcher et al. (New York: Semiotext(e), 1993). An orientational list of secondary sources includes:
73. Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, Agents of Repression: The FBI's Secret Wars Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement (Boston: South End Press, 1990)
74. Kathleen Cleaver and George Katsiaficas (eds), Liberation, Imagination, and the Black Panther Party (New York: Routledge, 2001)
75. Charles E. Jones, The Black Panther Party Reconsidered (Baltimore, MD: Black Classics Press, 1998)
76. Jack Olson, Last Man Standing: The Tragedy and Triumph of Geronimo Pratt (New York: Doubleday, 2000)
77. Nkechi Taifa et al., 'Human Rights: U.S. Political Prisoners and COINTELPRO Victims', in States of Confinement: Policing, Detention, and Prisons, ed. Joy James (New York: Palgrave, 2002).
78. Among the primary texts from the American black power movement that had been translated and were circulating in France during this period were (1) Eldridge Cleaver's early memoir Soul on Ice (New York: Dell, 1968)
79. Fr. pub. Panthère noire, Paris, Seuil, coll. ≪Combats≫, 1970
80. (2) a small 95-page transcription of a series of interviews with Angela Y. Davis recorded while she was awaiting trial in 1970, entitled Angela Davis parle, Paris, éditions Sociales, 1971
81. (3) a translation of Davis and Bettina Aptheker's If They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance (New York: Third Press, 1971)
82. Fr. pub. S'ils frappent à l'aube, Paris, Gallimard, 1972
83. (4) Davis' An Autobiography, op. cit.
84. Fr. pub. Autobiographie, Paris, Albin Michel, 1975
85. (5) George Jackson's Soledad Brother, op. cit.
86. Fr. pub. Les Frères de Soledad. Lettres de prison, Paris, Gallimard, 1971
87. (6) Jackson's posthumously published book Blood In My Eye, op. cit.
88. Fr. pub. Devant mes yeux, la mort, Paris, Gallimard, coll. ≪Témoins≫, 1972
89. (7) Huey P. Newton's 'Declaration at the Revolutionary People's Constitutional Convention' (delivered Nov. 1970)
90. Fr. pub. 'Declaration à la Convention constitutionelle des peuples révolutionnaires', La Taupe bretonne, No. 2, decembre 1971
91. (8) a tract by Huey P. Newton translated as 'Mouvement noire et lutte révolutionnaire', Partisans, No. 44, octobre- novembre 1968
92. (9) Bobby Seale's Seize the Time, op. cit., Fr. pub. À l'affût. Histoire du parti des Panthères noires, Paris, Gallimard, 1972
93. (10) Philip Foner's anthology The Black Panthers Speak, op. cit.
94. Fr. pub. Les panthers noires parlent, Paris, François Maspero, coll. ≪Cahiers libres 224-225≫, 1971
95. and (11) an anthology of BPP writings edited by Yves Loyer entitled Black Power (Études et documents), Paris, EDI, 1968.
96. Mumia Abu-Jamal provides the following characterization of the early ideological formation of the BPP: 'In the beginning, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was, for want of a better term, a Malcolmist party. [...] The influence of Malcolm X permeated early BPP thought, rhetoric, and self-perception. In this formative period, the BPP used language and themes that did not significantly differentiate it from other Black nationalist groups of the period [...]. This meant, in practical terms, that whites were anathema to any organizational or political work.' (We Want Freedom, op. cit., pp. 80-81)
97. See also The Huey P. Newton Reader, op. cit., pp. 1-180.
98. Angela Y. Davis speaks of the international and multi-racial character of the liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s: 'Today people tend to think about the movements of the 60s as movements that were very separate, nationalist, [and] raciallydefined, because they're looking at them through the lens of what is generally considered to be identity politics today. But as a matter of fact, the black power movement per se was not an exclusive movement. There were people of all racial/ethnic backgrounds involved in that movement. There was a connection with global movements. [...] We were part of a global revolution. There was no question about the importance of making those connections and building those bridges.' The above quotation is transcribed from an interview recorded on the documentary CD Prisons on Fire: George Jackson, Attica & Black Liberation, produced by the Freedom Archives, and available at www.freedomarchives.org. On the internationalist character of the Black Panther Party
99. see also Eldridge Cleaver, 'The Land Question and Black Liberation' (April/May 1968), in Post-Prison Writings and Speeches, ed. Robert Scheer (New York: Ramparts, 1969)
100. Lee Lockwood, Conversation with Eldridge Cleaver (New York: Delta, 1970)
101. Huey P. Newton, To Die for the People, op. cit.
102. The Huey P. Newton Reader, pp. 181-293 (esp. pp. 181-199)
103. and Abu-Jamal, We Want Freedom, pp. 80-88.
104. Cleaver, 'The Land Question and Black Liberation', op. cit., pp. 123-124.
105. Point Ten of 'The Ten-Point Platform and Program of the Black Panther Party' (October 1966), original emphasis.
106. Cf. Foner, 'Introduction', The Black Panthers Speak, p. xxxvii.
107. 'Call for Revolutionary People's Constitutional Convention', reprinted in The Black Panthers Speak, pp. 268-271.
108. Bobby Seale, Seize the Time, op. cit., pp. 116-117 (my emphasis).
109. Dhoruba Bin Wahad (formerly Richard Moore) was a former Black Panther leader who was wrongly convicted on evidence that was falsely concocted by the FBI. Falsely imprisoned for 19 years, he argues that America's COINTELPRO enacted a civil war against its colonial interior in the late 1960s and early 1970s. 'The implementation of the Counterintelligence Program transcended mere investigation. It was in effect a domestic war program, a program aimed at countering the rise of Black militancy, Black independent political thought, and at repressing the freedoms of Black people in the United States. The Counterintelligence program can be seen as a program of war waged by a government against a people, against its own citizens. It was a program of domestic warfare.' Dhoruba Bin Wahad, 'War Within', in Still Black, Still Strong: Survivors of the War Against Black Revolutionaries, eds Jim Fletcher et al. (New York: Semiotext(e), 1993), p. 18. Bin Wahad was released in 1990 after a New York State judge found that the FBI had suppressed crucial evidence from his defense.
110. See Churchill and Vander Wall, Agents of Repression, op. cit.
111. Nkechi Taifa et al., 'Human Rights: U.S. Political Prisoners and COINTELPRO Victims', in States of Confinement, ed. Joy James (New York: Palgrave, 2002).
112. Bobby Seale, 'The Ten-Point Platform and Program of the Black Panther Party', The Black Panther, 18 October 1969 (reprinted in The Black Panthers Speak, p. 80).
113. My account of this action closely follows, sometimes to the letter, that of Foner in his Introduction to The Black Panthers Speak. Cf. p. xxviii.
114. Quoted in Foner, 'Introduction', The Black Panthers Speak, p. xxviii.
115. Seale and Newton originally chose the name of the Black Panther Party because the panther is reputed never to make an unprovoked attack but to defend itself ferociously whenever it is attacked. Cf. Foner, 'Introduction', The Black Panthers Speak, p. xv.
116. Bobby Seale, Seize the Time, pp. 412, 418-419.
117. See Churchill and Vander Wall, Agents of Repression, op. cit.
118. and The COINTELPRO Papers (Boston: South End Press, 1990)
119. Nkechi Taifa et al., 'Human Rights: U.S. Political Prisoners and COINTELPRO Victims', op. cit.
120. Safiya Bukhari-Alston, 'Coming of Age: A Black Revolutionary', in Imprisoned Intellectuals: America's Political Prisoners Write on Life, Liberation, and Rebellion, ed. Joy James (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), p. 126 (my emphasis).
121. Joy James, 'Introduction', The Angela Y. Davis Reader, p. 14.
122. Angela Y. Davis, 'Political Prisoners, Prisons, and Black Liberation', The Angela Y. Davis Reader, pp. 41, 43-44. Also available online in the ebook History is a Weapon, www.historyisaweapon.org. Hereafter referred to as PP.
123. For an analysis that demonstrates the continued relevance of Jackson's critique of the American prison system, see Brady Heiner, 'The American Archipelago: The Global Circuit of Carcerality and Torture', op. cit.
124. see also the discussion between Angela Y. Davis and Dylan Rodriguez published in 'The Challenge of Prison Abolition: A Conversation', History is a Weapon, available at http://www.historyisaweapon.com/ defcon1/davisinterview.html, consulted 7 October 2006.
125. See also Angela Y. Davis, Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005).
126. 'Interview with George Jackson 3-29-71', The Black Panther, 3 April 1971, p. 6.
127. A separate work would be required to assess the points of disagreement that exist between the works of Davis and Jackson during this period. Divergences between their respective political analyses, as well as their respective strategic assessments of effective political action at the time, are quite evident. This is partly evidenced by the somewhat removed stance Davis maintained in relation to the internal leadership of the BPP (cf. note 11). By no means does the present work intend to represent Davis and Jackson as homophonous figures; for they are not. However, there are salient points of continuity between their respective analyses of the prison, as being both a repressive and ideological State apparatus, and of prisoners, as being political agents in more global struggles. These dimensions of their thought continue to influence prison abolitionism in the present day; they also greatly informed the French prison abolition movement of the 1970s, and Foucault's political philosophy of the same period.
128. Le Groupe d'Information sur les Prisons: Archives d'une lutte, 1970-1972, eds Philippe Artières et al. (Paris: IMEC, 2003), pp. 92-93. This and all subsequent translations of this work are my own.
129. Discipline and Punish (1975), the 1976 Lectures and the first volume of The History of Sexuality (1976).
130. The Freedom Archives has produced an extremely informative documentary audio CD on the Attica rebellion and the assassination of George Jackson, entitled Prisons on Fire: George Jackson, Attica & Black Liberation, available at www.freedomarchives.org. For more information on the Attica rebellion
131. see the 'Attica Revisited' web resources at www.talkinghistory.org/ attica.
132. A copy of 'The Attica Liberation Faction Manifesto of Demands and Anti-Depression Platform', drafted by the resisting prisoners, can also be found online at The Harriet Tubman Literary Circle website: http://www.brown.edu/Departments/African_American_Studies/JJames/ incarceration/attica_manifesto.pdf (accessed 27 January 2007).
133. For secondary (and sometimes contradictory) sources on George Jackson's life and the circumstances of his assassination, see Churchill and Vander Wall, Agents of Repression, op. cit.
134. Angela Y. Davis, An Autobiography, op. cit.
135. Jo Durden-Smith, Who Killed George Jackson? (New York: Knopf, 1976)
136. Joy James (ed.), Imprisoned Intellectuals (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), pp. 84-87
137. Paul Liberatore, The Road to Hell: The True Story of George Jackson, Stephen Bingham, and the San Quentin Massacre (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1996)
138. Eric Mann, Comrade George: An Investigation into the Life, Political Thought and Assassination of George Jackson (New York: Harper and Row, 1974).
139. GIP, 'The Assassination of George Jackson', trans. Brady Heiner, in Paris and Mendieta (eds), Biopolitics and Racism, op. cit.
140. Davis, An Autobiography, op. cit., p. 319.
141. Ibid., p. 317.
142. Transcribed from archival audio, The Freedom Archives, Prisons on Fire, op. cit.
143. On the morning prior to the massacre on 13 September 1971, William Kunsler, a lawyer who was serving as an intermediary in negotiations between the prisoners and the State, made the following prophetic statement to the press: 'We implore [the Commissioner], we implore him now, to have no force in there [i.e. inside the prison]. They [i.e. the prisoners] want to continue to talk. If they [i.e. the agents of the State] go in there, it's going to be a massacre in this prison, and it's on the heads of the authorities if it takes place. [...] [Governor Rockefeller's] refusal to come here is a monstrosity, because what he is saying is: "Kill these men, I have no concern. All I want to do is restore law and order." And I think that's a rotten exchange for lives.' (Transcribed from archival audio, The Freedom Archives, Prisons on Fire, op. cit.)
144. Immediately after the exposure of the torture that was organized and carried out by CIA and US military personnel at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, Silvia Baraldini wrote an oped piece describing the torture that New York Sate Troopers and National Guards had enacted against Attica prisoners in the violent counter-revolutionary aftermath of the Attica prisoner revolt. The State's treatment of Attica prisoners in 1971 belies, over against official State rhetoric to the contrary, that the systematic use of torture has remained a hallmark of the State's official and de facto procedure for the treatment of racialized subjects deemed 'resistant'. See Silvia Baraldini, 'Nei sotterranei degli States', Il Manifesto, 11 May 2004.
145. My English translation, 'The United States Underground', is available on the Prison Activist Resource Center website: http://www.prisonactivist.org/pipermail/prisonact-list/2004-May/ 008991.html
146. In 2000, after 25 years of delays by the State, New York State was forced to settle for $12 million in a civil suit that was originally filed in 1974 and in which juries ruled that the State had engaged in cruel and unusual punishment, violating human and civil rights. Cf. The Freedom Archives, Prisons on Fire, op. cit.
147. and the 'Attica Revisited' web resources at www.talkinghistory.org/ attica. The quotation from the NY State Special Commission on Attica is cited in Voices of Freedom: An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement from the 1950s through the 1980s, eds Henry Hampton and Steve Fayer (New York: Bantam, 1991), p. 561.
148. Transcribed from archival audio, The Freedom Archives, Prisons on Fire, op. cit.
149. Le Groupe d'Information sur les Prisons, op. cit., p. 124.
150. It is on precisely this point that Foucault makes his only mention of the Black Panthers, aside from that made in the GIP's pamphlet L'Assassinat de George Jackson. In a letter to Daniel Defert he writes that the Black Panthers 'are developing a strategic analysis that has emancipated itself from Marxist theory'.
151. See Daniel Defert, 'Chronologie', Dits et écrits, Vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), pp. 33, 38, 39.
152. Also see Alessandro Fontana and Mauro Bertani's editors' postscript to the 1976 Lectures, 'Situating the Lectures', where they cite Defert's notes on the connection (1976 Lectures, p. 282).
153. Daniel Defert, 'The "Mechanism of War" as an Analytic of Power Relations', trans. Brady Heiner, in Paris and Mendieta (eds), Biopolitics and Racism, op. cit.
154. Literally translated, mise en abîme (also mise en abyme), means 'placing into an abyss' or 'placing into infinity'. The expression is used to describe a formal technique employed in painting, film and literature in which a frame-structure is constructed whose internal structure reiterates the frame-structure ad infinitum, effecting a kind of recursion. My thanks to Sam Butler for calling my attention to some of the nuances of this expression.
155. Cf. Foucault, 1976 Lectures, pp. 7-9.
156. Defert, 'The "Mechanism of War" as an Analytic of Power Relations', op. cit.
157. Cf. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, Part Five.
158. Numerous commentators, particularly in the area of postcolonial studies, have critically pointed out how Foucault remained, as James Clifford put it, 'scrupulously ethnocentric'. Gayatri Spivak and Ann Laura Stoler have each rightly dismissed Foucault's genealogies of power as self-contained versions of history that remain only about the West. For instance, Stoler writes: 'In both the [1976] lectures and [The History of Sexuality] volume one, the focus is on the internal dynamics of European states and their disciplinary biopolitical strategies. Contiguous empires figure in Foucault's genealogy of racism in his lectures, but imperial expansion outside Europe does not. In short, the genealogy of racist discourse is sui generis to Europe: Colonial genocide is subsumed, dependent, accounted for, and explained in absentia.' See Clifford, The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 265
159. Spivak, 'Can the Subaltern Speak?', in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988)
160. and Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995). Stoler citation from pp. 28-29.
161. Paolo Napoli makes a similar argument in a debate on the 1976 Lectures: 'At the beginning of the eighteenth century, when Boulainvilliers affirms that "the Gauls were invaded by the Franks," he expresses something that probably doesn't correspond to the actual truth. But if one gives up that empirical and descriptive approach and places oneself on the terrain of the very construction of historical events, as is Foucault's intention, it is less a matter of saying what occurred than of releasing a new possibility for speaking, of taking a position in the present, and thus of producing reality. In short, what is at stake is a veritable historical practice: Saying and doing history fall within the province of the same act.' Foucault's own discourse in the 1976 Lectures, I argue, is just such an attempt at historical practice, at taking a position in the present. Napoli's intervention appears in Defert, 'The "Mechanism of War" as an Analytic of Power Relations', op. cit.
162. 'Racism is, quite literally, revolutionary discourse in an inverted form.' Cf. Foucault, 1976 Lectures, pp. 61 and 81.
163. Cf. 1976 Lectures, pp. 76-77, and the first volume of The History of Sexuality, pp. 92-102.
164. Cf. Foucault, 1976 Lectures, pp. 49-51.
165. Ibid., p. 56.
166. Cf. ibid., pp. 87-114.
167. Foucault, 1976 Lectures, pp. 50-51.
168. Jackson, Blood In My Eye, op. cit., p. 99.
169. In addition to Soledad Brother and Blood In My Eye
170. see 'Comrade George Jackson on Angela Davis', The Black Panther, 13 March 1971
171. and 'Field Marshal George Jackson Analyzes the Correct Method in Combating American Fascism', The Black Panther, 4 September 1971. The latter of these was posthumously transcribed from an audio recording that was played at Jackson's funeral.
172. On 7 August 1970, Jackson's 17-year-old brother, Jonathan, entered the Marin County Courthouse during the trial of prisoner James McClain, who was charged with the attempted stabbing of a Soledad prison guard. 'Jonathan Jackson armed McClain and, with prisoner witnesses Ruchell Magee and William Christmas, herded the assistant district attorney, Judge Harold Haley, and three jurors into a van parked outside. Law enforcement officers fired upon the parked van without regard for the hostages, as was prison policy, killing Christmas, McClain, and Jackson; wounding Magee; and killing Haley and wounding other hostages.' (George Jackson bio in James, Imprisoned Intellectuals, op. cit., p. 85)
173. The GIP wrote about their understanding of Jonathan Jackson's actions. 'Sequestering a judge in a full courtroom, Jonathan Jackson denounced justice as an evident instrument of the fascist repression of the U.S.- the justice that, with its white judges and its white juries, consigned hundreds of thousands of African Americans to the blood-thirsty slavedrivers of concentration camps. He demonstrated that the act of supporting prisoners is one of the forms of war.' ('The Assassination of George Jackson', in Biopolitics and Racism, op. cit.)
174. 'Field Marshal George Jackson Analyzes the Correct Method in Combating American Fascism', The Black Panther, 4 September 1971, p. 3.
175. Ibid., p. 5.
176. Angela Y. Davis articulates a similar position at this time: 'Although the most unbridled expressions of the fascist menace are still tied to the racist domination of blacks, Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, [and] Indians, it lurks under the surface wherever there is potential resistance to the power of monopoly capital, the parasitic interests which control this society.' (PP, p. 51)
177. Davis, PP, p. 40.
178. Ibid., p. 42 (my emphasis).
179. Frantz Fanon famously advances a similar argument in his analysis of the colonial situation: 'The native is a being hemmed in [...]. Confronted with a world ruled by the settler, the native is always presumed guilty.' See Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove, 1963), pp. 52, 53. The Davis quote above comes from PP, p. 50 (my emphasis).
180. GIP, L'Assassinat de George Jackson, ≪Intolérable≫, No. 3 (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), p. 11.
181. Cf. Foucault, 1976 Lectures, p. 256.
182. Published online: 'Remembering the Real Dragon - An Interview with George Jackson, May 16 and June 29, 1971', History is a Weapon, www.historyisaweapon.org.
183. Also: www.brown.edu/Departments/African_American_Studies/ wayland_fac_seminar/interview/george_jackson.html
184. Angela Y. Davis, PP, p. 46.
185. GIP, 'The Assassination of George Jackson', in Biopolitics and Racism, op. cit.
186. Ibid.
187. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 9.
188. GIP, 'The Assassination of George Jackson', in Biopolitics and Racism, op. cit.
189. For a critique of this erasure in Foucault's analysis in Discipline and Punish
190. see Joy James, 'Erasing the Spectacle of Racialized State Violence', in Resisting State Violence: Radicalism, Gender, and Race in U.S. Culture (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1996), pp. 24-43. Ariana Mangual and I wage a similar critique of Foucault in the context of an analysis of the function of schools in racialized communities.
191. See 'The Repressive Social Function of Schools in Racialized Communities', in States of Confinement: Policing, Detention, and Prisons, ed. Joy James (New York: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 222-230.
192. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 217.
193. Foucault, 1976 Lectures, pp. 256, 258.
194. Miranda Fricker, 'Epistemic Injustice and a Role for Virtue in the Politics of Knowing', Metaphilosophy, 34(1/2) (January 2003), pp. 154-173.
195. Fricker's analysis is developed further in Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
196. Fricker, 'Epistemic Injustice and a Role for Virtue in the Politics of Knowing', p. 161.
197. Ibid.
198. Ibid., p. 163.
199. Ibid., p. 153. 170
200. Ibid., pp. 170, 172.
201. Cf. note 10.
202. The Prison Activist Resource Center: http://www.prisonactivist.org/ pps+pows.
203. The Jericho Movement: http://www.thejerichomovement.com