Pedagogical Encounters in Soledad Brother

George Jackson (1941–1971) was an African American prison-made revolutionary and a key intellectual in the Black Power Movement. At the age of eighteen, Jackson was sentenced to serve an indeterminate sentence of one year to life inside California’s maximum-security prisons, where he was killed by a tower guard. His revolutionary knowledge exited the prison space through his letters and reached the wider public when published in 1970 as Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson. This paper proposes a reading that centralizes epistolarity, embarking from the hypothesis that Soledad Brother is a series of multidirectional pedagogical encounters during which knowledge emerges and develops in conversation with multiple addressees and in relation to multiple moments in Jackson’s ongoing prison time. The first section examines Jackson’s parole board hearings as nodal points in his indeterminate incarceration and as learning occasions of difficult knowledge. The second section charts three praxes of allyship that can be drawn from the epistolary confrontations between Jackson and the intended recipients of his letters. The coda engages with the politics of publication and reception implicated in Soledad Brother, situating the publication within the Black print culture of the Long Sixties and highlighting the response of its multiple reading publics

Brother · Conversation · Memphis · Prison · Autobiographical and Biographical Writing · Latin American and Latino Studies · Race, History, and American Society