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The Antipanopticon of Etheridge Knight

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Michael Collins
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Abstract

Panopticism seeks to make the pysche visible to a top-down system of examination and classification. In the process, it drives out privacy, the right to privacy, and, with them, the right to free self-making. Against this driving out, Etheridge Knight poses a remarkable body of poetry and prose that becomes a kind of antipanopticon in its cultivation of unconstrained communication and communion. During the years he spent as a “guest” of the Indiana State Prison, for instance, Knight wrote for prison and, later, other publications. He sought, even in the prison columns that were his main early outlet, to cultivate a communicative feedback loop capable of providing a channel through which hospitality could reach those who could not recognize themselves in mainstream American discourse. Knight's feedback loop confirms Jacques Derrida's view that “language is hospitality.”

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 123 , Issue 3 , May 2008 , pp. 580 - 597
Copyright
Copyright © 2008 by The Modern Language Association of America

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