“An Idea of a Boundary”: The Dispossession of Knowledge in Illinois State Prisons

• In Event: Roundtable: Epistemic Carcerality: Exploring the Intersections of Epistemic Injustice and the Carceral State

Abstract

Caroline Levine in her work on form has suggested that walls are not just physical architectural structures. They are also the ways in which people move through space and the knowledge those people bring with them. Form, in other words, is both the physical and disciplinary structures that shape life. In a prison, those forms are made manifest in very real gates and walls, but we suggest that the wall is as much an idea as it is a physical boundary. How does knowledge curtail space or allow movement in a prison? Mike has seen first-hand as an incarcerated student how form, the shape that knowledge takes, directly affects what knowledge is available and how it moves. Writing takes on the institutional forms of structure, easily denied or censored. Orality and sound, on the other hand, are carried in with people; it moves differently. With Scott McCloud’s theorization of the gutter as a wall in art and literature as a framework, we propose a reading of Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Dispossessed alongside the spaces of epistemic movement in the prison. LeGuin’s novel begins with a wall, but it is falling apart and does not physically curtail anyone’s movement. It is only “an idea of a boundary.” Yet, no one crosses the wall. The wall is less a wall than it is a visible manifestation of difference, the boundary between an “us” and a “them.” The walls in the prison are much the same, separating an outside from an inside, and it is that boundary, that idea of difference, that must be controlled, much more than the wall itself. With this boundary in mind, we compare the walls of the prison to the epistemic oppression that builds its own walls, and we ask where the gutters are that create liminal spaces where knowledge might manifest, even if only for a moment.

Author

• Erin Cheslow, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign