Visting Writers Critical Perspectives Talk by Patrick Elliot Alexander – Revivifying Remembrances: Death Row, Willie Francis, and Imprisoned Radical Intellectualism in Ernest Gaines’ “A Lesson Before Dying”

Patrick Elliot Alexander will present a Visiting Writers Critical Perspectives talk at 7 p.m. on Monday, April 15, in UNC Asheville’s Highsmith Student Union rooms 225/226. This event is free and open to everyone. Alexander is associate professor of English and African American studies at the University of Mississippi.

In Revivifying Remembrances: Death Row, Willie Francis, and Imprisoned Radical Intellectualism in Ernest Gaines’ “A Lesson Before Dying,” Alexander revisits the Jim Crow-era plot of Ernest Gaines’s novel, A Lesson Before Dying in the more contemporary carceral context of its publication. Alexander’s lecture reconsiders the cultural significance of Gaines’ most acclaimed novel in light of its release during our post-Civil Rights era of racialized mass incarceration, an epoch in which reports of prisoner abuse have soared from within a profit-driven system of social isolation responsible for the punitive confinement of one in every ninety-nine U.S. adults and more black men than had been enslaved in 1850.

It is Alexander’s contention that in Lesson, Gaines—through his depiction of an astute critic of the justice system who also happens to be a wrongfully-convicted black death row prisoner—introduces to the field of African American fiction what Dylan Rodríguez has theorized in critical prison studies scholarship as an imprisoned radical intellectual. By examining the extensive, largely unexplored process that Gaines went through to create this death-sentenced protagonist—including Gaines’s repeated requests while writing Lesson to visit with a man on death row at Angola/Louisiana State Penitentiary; his witnessing of imprisonment on death row and the execution of prisoners as a young writer; and his prolonged reflection on the botched electrocution and re-execution of Willie Francis, a black adolescent from his home state of Louisiana—Alexander makes the case that Gaines remembers and amplifies the voices of a growing body of intellectuals behind razor wire who expose and oppose slavery’s vestiges in the prison system, vestiges that show up as racial bias, prisoner abuse, and premature death.

Alexander is co-founder of the University of Mississippi Prison-to-College Pipeline Program, a university-community engagement initiative that promotes higher education in prison in response to the ongoing need for increased access to educational opportunities in the state of Mississippi. Before joining the faculty at the University of Mississippi, Alexander co-founded and directed Stepping Stones, an award-winning academic enrichment program for imprisoned students based in North Carolina. The PTCPP, winner of the 2018 Humanities Educator Award from the Mississippi Humanities Council, currently offers on-site, humanities-based, for-credit college courses for imprisoned men at Parchman/Mississippi State Penitentiary and for imprisoned women at Central Mississippi Correctional Facility. A specialist in African American literature, 19th-century American literature, and critical prison studies, Alexander is author of From Slave Ship to Supermax: Mass Incarceration, Prisoner Abuse, and the New Neo-Slave Novel (Temple University Press, 2017).

This talk is presented by UNC Asheville’s Department of English, the university’s Honors Program, and its Higher Education in Prison Faculty Learning Circle. For more information, visit english.unca.edu.