Um coral de vozes: um estudo de Live From Death Row, de Mumia Abu-Jamal

Abstract

Wesley Cook, internationally known as Mumia Abu-Jamal, was member of the Black Panther Party, one of the most important revolutionary associations in the history of the United States, and is also a prolific writer. His work discusses the prison system and the political debates of his time, relevant themes to one of the oldest political prisoners in human history. The aim of our research is to discuss one of his books, Live from Death Row, from the perspective of prison literature, a literary genre that invokes multiple voices that make up the prison system and, in particular, the author’s own experience. For the theoretical analysis of the book as prison literature, we relied on contributions by Lukács (2010), responsible for establishing relationships between history and literary practice, Coutinho (1976), who demonstrates the nuances of fictional exercise and Friedman (2002) to understand more deeply the narrative process experienced by Abu-Jamal. Thus, we demonstrate how the author’s history and several other elements of the prison system can generate a unit of testimony and fiction, two characteristics of prison literature.