Jessica Adams
English Department

Stars and Stripes

The annual rodeo at Angola, the notorious state penitentiary northwest of New Orleans, is called by its promoters "The WildestShow in the South." The slogan certainly speaks to the nature of a spectacle so intimately involved in the transgression of boundaries. The contestants are all inmates, most of whom have been sentenced to life, and many of whom have never ridden a horse. My work considers the sometimes overlapping relationships between free and imprisoned, spectator and performer, wild and tame, escape and confinement, waste and use through an examination of penal technology--a reading of technology that is indebted to Foucauldian theory. I am interested in the way in which the technology of the prison mediates the relationship between performance and disappearance, as explored by such critics as Peggy Phelan and Herbert Blau. In a performance which takes place in prison, the relationship between presence andabsence, between what is seen and unseen is particularly poignant. The architecture of the 'stage' itself insists upon disappearance, which looms continuously in the form of the prison compounds into which the prisoners will vanish when the show is over.

Technology intersects issues of collective memory and cultural anxiety, which is incited by the spectacle of violence, in the performances inside the rodeo ring as well as in those that surround it--such as a bazaar where prison-made objects are offered for sale by prisoners themselves, who bargain with potential customers from behind achainlink> fence, and tourist photo opportunities including a mock prison cell. Looking at these performances, I discuss issues of spectatorial subjectivity, which operate in particularly interesting ways here. Stallybrass and White argue that the definition and rejection of the 'other' can be read as an act that constitutes bourgeois identity.  Their theory can be extended to incorporate the relationship between society as a whole and its 'other'--in this case, the prisoner--preparing the way for an analysis of the implications of a performance in which the spectatorial I/eye is complicit in the recirculation of that which it has segregated as 'waste'.

Return to Document Archive   |   Survival Discussion Board