ABSTRACT
This essay begins in the 1940s in a backwoods Texas prison camp. It ends on a compact disc, navigating the channels of the global economy. From prison worksongs to hip-hop, this essay tracks the insurgent culture of prisoners’ music in the United States over the second half of the twentieth century as it ruptures the isolations of incarceration. Inside prison walls, inmates’ music re-territorialises the space-time of exile in a grounded politics of community against the grain of unfreedom; the polyrhythms inflect a temporality that pays little allegiance to the linear metric of time-as-punishment. Through sound, prisoners craft an oppositional milieu that is functional (songs can pace work), expressive (of desire, fear, pain) and resistant (surveillance is inverted as prisoners constitute knowledge of their keepers). Prisoners’ music refashions community in this overtly male domain, operating within and expressing the conflicted masculinities of penal worlds.
