Utopia in D Yard: Prefigurative Politics and the Attica Prison Uprising of 1971
This paper draws from research conducted for my Master’s Essay to examine the Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 as a case study in prefigurative politics. I situate political action and social performance at Attica within a framework of social-political transformation, suggesting that social relations form an essential backdrop for radical political change within carceral geographies. I assert that the state coerces certain performances of racialized deviance in criminalized subjects such that policing and incarceration preclude meaningful political action, solidarity, or revolutionary consciousness. However, the Attica Prison Uprising proffers a valuable site of political change embedded within and enacted through social transformation, as the utopian social world of the prison’s D Yard afforded new possibilities for political action among its marginalized residents. With this in mind, I argue that political theorists have routinely undervalued political prefiguration as a mode of political action and suggest that a performance studies approach to prefigurative politics highlights its efficacy and transformative significance. Prefiguration is a fundamentally performative approach to political strategy, as participants in prefigurative projects seek to bring forth a desired world through enacting its structures and relationships in the present. I demonstrate that protesting inmates at Attica Prison embodied the political structures and social relations they aspired to see in the future, emphasizing that prefigurative political strategies are not individualizing but essentially social. I challenge pervasive critiques of prefigurativism as distracted or whimsical by asserting that prefigurative acts are inherent to revolutionary politics within spaces such as prisons, where interpersonal relationships, social interdependency, and political consciousness are systematically criminalized. The Attica Prison Uprising compels us to rethink organizing for liberation and instead commit to organizing as liberation, a timely reminder that challenges carceral logics in their many forms and offers productive directions for organizing against state repression in the present. While this study is best understood as a theoretical intervention calling for a theory of performative prefiguration, it is also a historiographic intervention that reclaims Attica and its legacy of political progress, both disruptive and productive, as a dramaturgy of change. This project draws on performance theory, utopian studies, political theory, critical carceral studies, and Black studies to assert that this political change may be best understood through a lens of performance.
Published by TDR: The Drama Review in their June 2024 Issue. Access here: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1054204325000073
Selected by Cambridge University for their Special Issue on Politics and Performance. Access here: https://www.cambridge.org/core/browse-subjects/drama-and-theatre/highlights?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTAAYnJpZBExWkw1enQzWTFlMzl6WmFMaAEemQOvaMZli8R0XWF33QtJ4rlHiLov5_-w9xwWsrEsaJp6f-vzThck6dhhS-M_aem_Ro0Np6wmBbRm7uM43rDITg
Winner of the 2024 Student Essay Contest held by TDR: The Drama Review
Selection for The Performance of Politics: Dramaturgies of Change Working Session, The Performance of Politics Working Group, 2024 American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR) Conference
Adapted from my 2024 Master’s Essay
Chair: Paige McGinley
Committee: Joanna Dee Das, Jami Ake, Robert Henke
Washington University in St. Louis