The Drama Review , (T), Summer . Copyright New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The Wildest Showin the South

Tourism and Incarceration at Angola

Jessica Adams

Every Sunday in October for the past years, a rodeo has taken place in-side the gates of the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, one of the nationslargest maximum-security prisons. The contestants are all inmates, few ofwhom have even so much as ridden a horse before entering the rodeo ring.Since the rodeo has been open to the public, and each year seems to setnew attendance records, as crowds eagerly claim the rare privilege of attainingaccess to a place notorious for acts of violence and desperation.

Angola is located, somewhat incongruously, at the end of a beautiful countryroad that winds quietly through the Tunica Hills north of Baton Rouge, pastpecan orchards and white-columned plantation homes set among groves of oldoaks. Indeed, Angola itself was once a plantation; its slave quarters have becomethe site of an inmate dormitory. Today the land is still farmed, and white guardson horseback continue to watch over fields worked mostly by black men.

Such scenes stage the history of prisons in the South, as the development ofpenal institutions is continuous here with the history of the plantation system.Indeed, it could be argued that the prison is a logical next step in the develop-ment of the plantation. As Matthew Mancini writes:

[...F]or half a century after the Civil War the southern states had no pris-ons to speak of and those they did have played a peripheral role in thosestates criminal justice systems. Instead, persons convicted of criminal of-fenses were sent to sugar and cotton plantations, as well as to coalmines,turpentine farms, phosphate beds, brickyards [and] sawmills. (:)

Convict labor became indistinguishable from slave labor as the plantationeconomy was converted into a prison economy.

Moreover, the particular history of Angola describes a cruelly ingeniousform of post-Emancipation slavery. While depriving inmates of social rightsand benefits, the government compelled them to supportin fact, turn aprofit forthe state. Until , Louisiana exempted itself from responsibilityfor inmates by leasing them to private companies and individuals, for whom

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they performed unpaid manual labor. In , a former Confederate officer,Major Samuel James, assumed control of the convict lease. Eleven years later,he brought convicts to work in the fields of his newly acquired ,-acreplantation, named Angola for the point of origin of its first slaves. Bordered onthree sides by the Mississippi River and on the other by the rough TunicaHills, the site would prove to be an ideal location for a prison. Public outcryin the s, sparked by accounts of the barbaric treatment of inmates takingplace under the convict lease system, eventually caused the state to rescind it.The Corrections Board purchased the plantation in , and resumed controlof inmate upkeep. Thus began a fitful series of attempts at reform that wouldextend far into the th century, prompted by bad press and inmate revolt.

Angola configures itself as a tourist site while simultaneouslyfunctioning as a penitentiary.

In the early s, the state obtained an additional , acres, bringingAngola to its current size. It now houses just over , inmates; roughly halflive in the main prison complex, the remainder in five fenced outcamps.The outcamps themselves are self-contained penitentiaries, spread out amongacres of flat fields planted with corn and soybeans, okra, cabbage, and water-melon. This huge, isolated place, long known as one of the nations most bru-tal prisons (and indeed, it was only in that a judge finally released Angolafrom federal scrutiny [Office of the Deputy Warden ]), now actively in-vites visits by the publicalbeit under carefully controlled circumstances. Amuseum with displays that tell the prisons history opened two years ago in asmall former bank branch just outside the prison gatesone of the wardenspet projects, intended to educate visitors about Angolas role in Louisiana his-tory. Bus tours featuring the prisons grim highlightsthe former and currentsites of executionare available during the biannual Arts and Crafts Festival;local families bring their children to witness the machinery of justice. Andof course, every year the rodeo draws spectators, as the prison brochureproudly states, from all over the world (Office of the Deputy Warden:) to view the event that Angola promotes as The Wildest Show in theSouth. It seems to function as a kind of public fantasy in which the other-wise segregated bodies of societys violent alter ego are displayed, linkingmythos and pathos as it alludes to and reproduces familiar images of the fron-tier inside the confines of the prison.

A number of defunct prisons and other sites of incarceration in the UnitedStates opened to tourists during the th century, capitalizing on public im-pulses such as, for example, an attraction to sites of historical interest (as JohnDorst has demonstrated in his analysis of the Wyoming Territorial Park[]), or to the thrill of the macabre. Alcatraz, perhaps the most prominentexample of this conversion from scene of punishment to scene of pleasure, be-came a tourist attraction in and is now a staple on the itineraries of visi-tors to San Francisco. Unlike Alcatraz, however, Angola configures itself as atourist site while simultaneously functioning as a penitentiary.

In the following pages, I examine the significance of this convergence ofleisure and imprisonment. While I look primarily at the rodeo, I also considerthe related experiences of the prison museum and prison tours. What emergesfrom this examination presents a challenge to Foucaults widely influentialtheory of the social significance of prison. The carceral network, in its com-

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pact or disseminated forms, with its systems of insertion, distribution, surveil-lance, observation, has been the greatest support, in modern society, of thenormalizing power, Foucault writes in Discipline and Punish (:).Through the normalization process, he argues, social divisions are generated bydiscourses with vested interests in the maintenance of a particular hierarchy;moreover, normalization causes these divisions to appear natural ([]:), the means of their fabrication concealed. I will argue, however, thatwhen Angola becomes a tourist space, the fabricated nature of the social hier-archy that it constructs is exposed; and the convergence of display and con-cealment, freedom and incarceration, frontier and foreclosed horizons enactedhere speaks to profound contradictions contained within social processes.

Taken as a whole, prison performance at Angola compels a reconsiderationof the foundation of Foucaults thesis because it presents the spectacle of socialorder as constantly endangered at the very site of its enforcement. The inter-actions between the prison context and free citizens do not produce images ofsmoothly functioning, contiguous power and knowledge. What appears in-stead is a powerful disturbance of the supposed naturalness of the separationbetween imprisoned and free subjects. Culture is no longer understood as anecessarily shared phenomenon, or one that possesses internal consistency.Likewise, the structures of power that produce culture are constantly endan-gered by various forms of passing across boundary lines of identity. Hence, Iwant to suggest, the need for unequivocal enforcements of such boundariesnot only to illustrate that they are worth maintaining, but to create the sensethat they exist at all.

Approaching Angola on my first visit to the rodeo, I abruptly became partof a traffic jam. Hundreds of others were heading in the same direction, and ittook minutes to travel the last mile to the prison gates. Inside, the land-scape presented a study in contrasts: a herd of black-and-white cattle grazedserenely in fields behind white wooden fences; the carefully maintained bor-ders of the road were blooming with brightly colored flowers. In the expansebehind them lay death row.

As I neared the rodeo grounds, the green fields and clear blue sky becamethe backdrop for a complex of long, low buildings enclosed in a dense web ofaccordion wire. I parked in a muddy grass lot that was already almost full andmade my way to the rodeo arenas entrance, where, along with all other in-coming spectators, I was searched by a guard for weapons, food, and drink be-fore approaching the ticket booth to pay the $ entrance fee. Once inside, Iwas overwhelmed by the smell of livestock mingling with the greasy aroma offries and onion rings at the concession stands. I entered the stadium itself toclaim a seat near the starting gate, but none were availablespectators hadbeen camped out for hours to make sure theyd get a good view of the action.

Near the entrance to the rodeo ring, a mock cell containing a bed and toi-let had been set up so free citizens could enter to have their pictures taken be-hind bars as a souvenir. A few yards away stood a wooden image of twoheadless prisoners in striped uniformsan unsettling, though no doubt un-conscious, allusion to capital punishment. For the rodeo, the stadium itself issurrounded on three sides by booths where prison organizations sell food cal-culated to appeal to a festival crowd, like fried cracklings and boiled peanuts,boudin sausage, nachos, and snow cones.

In a fenced area behind the arena, hobbycrafts (items made by inmates intheir leisure time) are displayed for sale; they are one of the rodeos main at-tractions. Tables are arranged along the high chain-link fence that separatesthe rodeo grounds from the spaces where medium security inmates remainconfined. The inmates line up on their side of the fence, watching closely as

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potential customers browse among their waresleather belts, ornate buckles,purses and wallets, key chains, paintings, and novelties. In order to purchaseany of these things, the customer must enter into negotiations with its makerbehind the fence. The money from these sales goes into the prisoners ac-counts and can be used to purchase cigarettes, food from the canteen, andother extras such as gifts for family members. The men not only have nothingto lose by aggressively pursuing customers, they have much to gain in thehard world of the prison. Although they are held at a remove from theirproducts, they are very vocal in urging people to buy, calling out a price forany object in which they observe even a vague interest expressed.

The rodeo began, as the program promised, at two oclock sharp. The war-den said a few words of welcome and the preacher prayed. The sun beatdown, and soft drink and hot dog vendors were doing a brisk business in thegrandstands. The inmate band struck up the familiar chords of the greatest

. Tourist photo opportuni-ties at the Louisiana StatePenitentiary rodeo allowvisitors to get shots of them-selves in a cell or with theirfaces peering over cutouts ofprison garb. (Photo by Jes-sica Adams)

. Tourists at the rodeobrowsing among the dis-plays of hobbycraftsmade by prisoners. (Photoby Jessica Adams)

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song the world has ever known, and the audience stood in unison. Manyplaced their hands over their hearts; men removed their hats. Drums rolled,the music rose, and riders burst from the gates. Careening into the arena atfull gallop, the inmate drill team, the Angola Rough Riders, sketched eques-trian patternscloverleaf, thread-the-needleand were soon followed by allthose who had contributed to putting on the rodeo and could handle a horse.Prison officials, local residents, prisoners, and professional cowgirls rode to-gether through the arena to the music of an inmate band.

The competition itself typically consists of events, a number of whichhave been created especially for this rodeo. The program often comments en-thusiastically on the uniqueness of Angolas contests, a uniqueness that is bornprimarily of the contestants lack of training and experience. In the first event,Bust Out, six inmate cowboys, as they are called, explode from the chutesmounted on bullsbut most are quickly thrown into the dirt. Next comesBareback Riding, in which men on the backs of bucking broncs enterthe ring individually, each attempting to remain on the horse for the requiredeight seconds, rolling their spurs with one hand held aloft.

When the ring has been cleared, six three-man teams enter and wait out-side the chutes for the Wild Horse Race. Six horses soon burst into thearena, dragging ropes from their halters. The goal is to subdue the horse longenough for one of the men to somehow mount and cross the finish line onthe animals backa feat that few achieve. The professional and amateur fe-male barrel racers who follow present the audience with a stark contrast to theawkward falls and false starts of the inmates.

Another rodeo standard, Bull-Dogging, is next; but instead of roping thesteer from horseback, the men form pairs and stand on either side of a chute.When the steers, each weighing at least pounds, are released, the men at-tempt to manhandle them to the ground and flip them onto their backs with-out trapping each other under their bulk.

An upturned oil barrel painted red, white, and blue is now placed at the endof the ring opposite the chutes in preparation for Buddy Pick-up. In thisevent, one man rides the length of the arena from the starting gate to the oilbarrel on which his waiting partner crouches. The man on the horse attemptsto maneuver his horse close enough so that the man on the barrel can leap ontothe back of the horse. If they are successful, both men stay on horseback,wheeling around and galloping back to the starting gate as fast as they can.

After the Bull Riding contest, another nod to rodeo tradition, six teams oftwo men each enter the arena and stand waiting outside the chutes. This time awild cow emerges. When it does, one man tries to grasp and hang on to a ropeattached to its neck, while the other attempts to maneuver close enough to itsudder to get some milk. The animal dodges and yanks them around the arena.The ridiculousness of Wild Cow Milking, the fact that it makes the inmateslook inept and silly, is seen as a key to its appeal. Why milk a wild cow? oneprison rodeo program asks. The answer is, because the fans love it.

The arena empties, and a card table and four chairs are set up in it forConvict Poker. Four men sit down in the chairs; a maddened bull is re-leased into the ring. A professional rodeo clown teases and provokes the bullto lunge at the mens backs, and, once incited, it does so violently and repeat-edly, at unpredictable intervals. One by one, the men are either injured or ex-perience near misses of the bulls horns. The man bold enough to withstandthe tension and remain seated longest is declared the winner.

Like Convict Poker, the rodeos grand finale, Guts and Glory, alludesto gladiatorial spectacles. All of the inmates competing in the rodeo enter thering with a bull that has been prodded into as much of a frenzy as possible byits handlers. On its forehead is a red chip, worth $. Emboldened by the

. Buddy Pick-up.The prisoner riding thehorse swings close to thebarrel, his waiting partnerleaps onto the horses back,and the two men prepare tomake a run for the exit.(Photos by Jessica Adams)

Tourism and Incarceration

prize money, the men attempt to get close enough tograsp and detach it while avoiding the maddenedbulls horns.

During my first visit to the rodeo, the announcer, aprofessional on the rodeo circuit, rode around the ringbefore and after the events, reining in his eager horsewith one hand as he gripped a large cordless micro-phone in the other. His magnified voice boomedthrough the arena, mellifluous and disembodied. Hecalled out the contestants names, often followed bythe word lifethe length of their sentences. Mostof these men would die at Angola, one way or an-other; in Louisiana, as the well-worn local saying goes,Life means life.

At first glance, the Angola prison rodeo is a spec-tacle of a clearly defined and enforced social hierar-chy. It is viewed by authorities as a means of control;as current warden Burl Cain has declared, It takesfour things to run a good prison: good playing, goodpraying, good food and good medicine. This is goodplaying (Bragg :A). The rodeo is thus offi-cially intended as a recreational form of subjugation.Neither audience members nor the prisoners them-selves are permitted to forget that the men in the ringare convicts; this became quite obvious as the an-nouncer made reference to the time they were doingeven as they attempted to do their best time in rodeocompetitions, and through the listing of the lengthsof their sentences beside their names in the programs.While it provides a break from the otherwise relent-less punishment by timetable, this rodeo holiday isnevertheless inextricable from temporal measure-ments of human worth, combining time as censurewith the spectacle of the criminalized body underduress. Images of social order asserted, or reasserted,are generated through the fusion of these two modesof punishment. We watch the inmate cowboys some-times succeed in their timed quests for mastery, butmore often we see them made vulnerable, falling vic-tim to brute forces beyond their control, as we mayimagine their victims did. The impulse toward thevisible enactment of punishment that is evident herealmost reinvents public torture, an aspect of the ro-deo that becomes especially clear during the Con-vict Poker and Guts and Glory events.

The strategy of making good playing a tenet ofprison administration is particularly effective becauseit creates a space of timelessness within the contextof measured time. Even as they serve as a means ofdisciplining and containing bodies, rodeo days alsoprovide a form of escape for prisoners. As one mansaid of his desire to participate, I just want to feel it,feel free for just a little while. Maybe itll take mymind off this years I got (Bragg :A). For

Jessica Adams

inmate cowboys, the rodeo ring provides some release from the enduringweight of their sentences. In addition, the skills they attempt to demonstratein rodeo competitions, however undeveloped, serve as surrogates for the im-perfectly executed skills that resulted in their incarcerationoutlaw be-havior is recast as heroism. According to a spokeswoman for the prison,prisoners always vigorously defend the rodeo against charges that they are be-ing exploited by it in any way ( Jett ).

By presenting the spectacle of prisoners being publicly punished in the formof a gladiatorial contest, without betraying the nature of the spectacle to theperformers themselves, the rodeo displays for both free citizens and the prisoncommunity the morality of this particular prison, as well as the apparent right-ness of the existing social order; convicted men appear to willingly condonetheir own censure. Furthermore, involving tourists as witnesses to and partici-pants in the enforcement of social order itself enables the smooth reproduc-tion of the status quo. Even as they are subject to the social rules that producethe prison, tourists here view the event from a position of power. Thus theirvested interest in the maintenance of the social order is reinforced.

Tourist performance at Angola, however, enacts not only the formation butalso the deformation of collective identity through various modes of visibility.In April , the states governor cut the ceremonial ribbon officially opening

the prison museum. The exhibit space has recently been expanded and now in-cludes a cell in the center of the exhibit room where visitors can have theirphotos taken for a $ feeanother site where free citizens can not only surveybut also physically connect with the transgressive. Like the rodeo, the museumexerts a powerful tourist draw. I tell you, I cannot get over the response wehave had, just overwhelming! its curator gushed to a New Orleans newspaperreporter (Rose :F). The museum contains historical photographs, portraitsof former wardens, and various artifacts confiscated from prisoners, includingnumerous improvised weapons made from objects harmless in other contextsa typewriter carriage, the glass tube of a coffeemaker. A bag labeled Yeast satalone in a case; even this apparently innocent substance had become contra-band, as a home-brew ingredient, in the milieu of prison. A Bible in which asmall icepick had been stashed, a toothbrush filed into a knife, a smooth plasticdepartment store model clothed in a striped prison uniformcommonplace,innocuous objects in everyday life outside, refracted through the lens of prisonlife, present images of the disturbing possibilities inherent within them.

These artifacts of prisoners lives are displayed in concert with implementsof state-sanctioned violence, which also appear both strange and familiar.Louisianas original electric chair has been placed behind glass in a small room;the scene is labeled Execution in a large museum font. The leather hood,sponges for conducting the maximum electric current to the temples, and theleather cuffs that restrained the prisoners arms rest on either side of the chair.On the wall behind it hang a phone for last-minute reprieves, however un-likely; a replica of the original fanfor the smell; and a clock to determinethe moment that voltage would surge through the body of the condemned.

Tourism and Incarceration

When the museum first opened, a large poster presenting mug shots of the men and woman executed here gazed out over the scene of their death. Thechair does not so much provide a contrast to the weapons made by prisonersas it does a continuation of their theme; violence conducted by the state ap-pears more like than unlike the violence of those it is intended to punish.

On one visit to the museum, this instability between agents of law and orderand transgressive subjects was further underscored by the guide herself. Speakingto a young couple staying at a nearby bed-and-breakfast, she volunteered thatshe could tell them a story about their hostess, a woman who had been marriedto one of Angolas wardens. At some point during their relationship, he had shother almost fatally, and only her desperate performance had saved her life: Theysay if she hadntve played dead, she would have been dead, our guide in-formed the couple. The lingering sense that those entrusted with enforcing thelaw may themselves be its violators is reflected in repeated charges of police bru-tality and other crimes such as drug trafficking and even rape in the UnitedStates law enforcement system at large. It becomes difficult to distinguish be-tween signs of order and disorder. Tourists at the museum regard evidenceof power exercised upon the criminalized other from a position that is appar-ently safely outside the economy of prison life. But rather than unequivocallyreinforcing it, the fragments displayed here possess the capacity to disturb the

publics security in its own collective knowledge and power, if only on the levelof the collective unconscious. Indeed, I suspect that it is the connection be-tween order and disorder, the titillating similarity between normative and trans-gressive, that imbues these fragments with their power to fascinate.

In a discussion of ethnographic museums, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett ar-gues that displays of an others quotidian reality serve to reinfuse their viewerswith an interest in what was heretofore commonplace by providing the con-trast of an unfamiliar groups mundane things (). Decontextualized andplaced within the frame of an exhibit, these artifacts, which she calls objectsof ethnography, lose their mundane quality, their air of usefulness, and be-come exotic. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett suggests that engagement with such frag-ments defamiliarizes and thus revalues the ordinary objects of viewers ownlives; they come to recognize themselves differently through witnessing dis-plays of other cultures, and imagining their own cultures similarly displayed.The simultaneous differentiation from and identification with an other thusfunctions as a powerful means of establishing the contours of social norms.

The prison as tourist site inevitably exists as such a series of fragmented im-ages, experiences, and objects, due to the way in which its mechanisms ofconfinement divide the prison into discrete units, as well as the fact that accessavailable to outsiders is limited and partial. In addition to the selective bustours at the Spring and Fall Arts and Crafts Festivals, group tours are availableby appointment, but only if the wardens office determines that the reasonsfor requesting access are valid.

Throughout the course of my tours of Angola, as at the museum, the familiarrepeatedly cohabited with the bizarre, as ordinary things from life outside ap-

. Convict Poker.The bull, incited by rodeoclowns, rushes toward theseated men. Finally, onlyone remains unharmed.(Photos by Jessica Adams)

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peared in odd and sometimes grotesque variations. Inthe execution chamber, the lethal injection table lookslike a padded black vinyl cross, upon which the con-demned is strapped down with restraints that closelyresemble seatbelts in an American economy car. Twoidentical red phones hang side by side on the wall,both of their handsets askew at precisely the sameangle. Objects and experiences usually concealed fromview are exposed forcomment during the tour; forexample, in the dormitory for trusty inmates, touristsstand around amidst the mens beds and personalbelongings, and peer into their bathroom, a wide hall-way lined on one side with gleaming stainless steeltoilets, and on the other with shining sinks. No amount

of good behavior is enough to earn privacy.The panoptic gaze continually monitors tourists and inmates alike while

they inhabit prison space, although tourists have been sanctioned as legitimatevoyeurs in the otherwise concealed machinery of the state. This unsettlingtension between being scrutinized and being privileged lookers is a perpetualelement of visits to the prison, even as such visits appear to promise the rein-forcement of distinctions between inside and outside. By the end of thetours, these displays of fragments of prison life had defamiliarized my ownsense of freedom. As I left Angola after my first visit, the guide accompaniedme out of the gates, then turned to go back inside. As I drove back down thecountry road away from this place of at once many and yet so few walls, I feltthat I was committing an illicit act in broad daylight. I seemed to be gettingaway with it. But through this engagement with the spectacle of prison, myidentity had become not only an object of renewed interest to me, it was alsorevealed as a locus of disturbing slippage. In the context of prison, the self-surveillance that constructs collective identity occurs through encounters withsubjects whom the state has determined to be violent transgressors of socialnorms. Images of the self are thus generated through an identification withoutcasts, with those who have been classified as social waste.

This merging of opposites foundational to social structuresfreedom andincarceration, waste and useis publicly enacted in the most overt scene ofinterchange between prisoners and tourists: the hobbycrafts bazaar. Through

. Louisianas originalelectric chair is displayed inthe prison museum. (Photoby Jessica Adams)

. The panoptical guardtower surveils tourists andprisoners alike. (Photo byJessica Adams)

Tourism and Incarceration

the recognition of their labor, prisoners are, in a sense, reintroduced into aneconomy from which they have been banished. Prison labor is employed tomake items used constantly in daily lifeAngola makes all of Louisianas li-cense plates, for example. But this labor goes uncredited and virtuallyunremarked. License plates seem to simply appear, like natural outgrowths ofgovernment. During the rodeo, however, such forced vanishing is partiallyremedied as, in their frank regard of their free spectators, prisoners at Angolabecome, like them, subjects as well as objects of knowledge. Spectators areunable to simply look at the goods on display; instead, they are interpellatedby the spectacle. The unrelenting, appraising stares of the men behind thefence, as they observe every move made by potential buyers, conveys the im-pression that we are as much an exhibit for them as they are for us. The nor-mative finds itself appraised by that which it has deemed transgressive.

The display of surplus cash spent by tourists results in the forging of ties be-tween the prison and the outside world. As one prisoner demanded, urging a po-tential customer to purchase his handiwork, the profits of which would go to hislegal fund: Dont you want to see me out of here someday? The answer is al-most surely no; yet this moment speaks succinctly to the underlying significanceof these interactions between free and imprisoned, to the way in which, throughparticipation in the actual and representational economies of the rodeo, the freespectator troubles the boundaries between incarcerated and nonincarcerated, be-tween normative and transgressive. The breakdown of barriers between pris-oner and citizen is furthered by the fact that some of the intermediaries in thecommodity exchange are themselves prisoners lacking signs of their status: anumber of the men stationed among the tables to assist customers are trusty in-mates who have been permitted to perform this function. The outsiders gaze isthus rendered impotent, unable to determine with certainty where we end andthey begin, as those who have been segregated now move through the crowdunmarked.

The configuration of surveillance and spectacle that occurs at the prison rodeodoes not so much construct an orderly populace as it does destabilize the notionof a clearly defined social order, as the normative is rendered unable to recognizeitself as such. In fact, distinctions between law-abiding citizens and those deemedviolent criminals must be stringently enforced by social structures precisely be-cause they are not necessarily visible. The eyes inability to make reliable distinc-tions between what is dangerous and what is safe often results in the reduction of

. Prisoners watch frombehind a high chain-linkfence while potential cus-tomers browse among theirwares. (Photo by JessicaAdams)

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this difference to racial difference; as Angela Davis writes, Within the U.S.and increasingly in postcolonial Europethe disproportionate presence of peopleof color among incarcerated populations has acquired a self-evident character(:). The rodeo, however, refuses the application of this criterion. In myexperience, despite the prisons black majority the prisoners on display are aslikely to be white as black. Participants in the rodeo are selected at random froma pool of trusty inmates who have expressed their desire to compete. Thus, de-spite the fact that it actually enacts a disparity between white and blackbasedon the evidence of the spectacle itself, more whites than blacks seem to becometrustysthe rodeo presents an (illusory) image of an odd form of equality, asboth whites and blacks appear to be capable of becoming the best of a bad lot.

Communities constitute their identities not only by embodying what theybelieve themselves to be, but also what they believe that they are not (Roach). The paradox of collective identities lies in the fact that the embodi-ment of otherness crucial to self-recognition actually produces powerful anxi-eties at the level of society and culture. Collective identities are thus alwaysnegotiated within what Peter Stallybrass and Allon White term a heteroge-neous, dangerously unstable zone (:). The spectacle of a violentother as us provokes the question of what the term normative can mean,when it is so intimately linked to the transgressive.

Paradoxically, the fragility of social order is displayed within acontext where it should be most clearly evident, as apparentlyrecognizable markers of identity have become alarmingly fluid.

Mainstream society tends to retrieve what it has rejected, to develop apowerful interest in what lies, often literally, on the other side of the tracks.

This tendency is evident in an array of cultural productions; for example, theastronomical success of Al Jolsons blackface performances and the cult ofElvis Presleyin some ways another blackface entertainer sans greasepaintrepresent the way in which a group subject to multiple modes of exclusion si-multaneously becomes an object of adulation as it is reflected by white bodies.The ever-increasing crowds of free citizens at the rodeo, who spend theirSunday holiday in prison, further attest to the compelling nature of that whichhas been expelled from the social center.

And indeed, the tourist photo opportunities at Angolathe prison cell fortourists and the wooden cutout that enabled them to wear prison garb, in avirtual senseopenly display an intimacy between these almost always segre-gated groups. Normative societys struggle to exclude what it has defined asother results here not so much in a more clearly demarcated sense of identityas it does in a production of hybrids, an intermingling of identities at the levelof the collective unconscious. As tourists stand in the cell or behind the partialwooden effigy, their own heads completing the prisoners bodies, they play-fully enact the fractured continuity of subject positions that at the same timeprovokes fear over the boundaries of identity. This image of the inextricabilityof different levels of social hierarchy illuminates the difficulties involved in themaintenance of social order. It is a project more challenging than structuressuch as the prison, as well as the notion of the carceral, would suggest.

Out of the confluence of opposites at the rodeo, a fantasy of merging appearedduring the rodeo event called Buddy Pick-up. Here, nonincarcerated specta-tors could be seen as party to the dismantling of their own privilege. In onesense, they represented agents of confinement, the force of prosecution and con-viction; but in another, they functioned as means of liberation, albeit partial and

Tourism and Incarceration

contingent. Given the context, the scenario of this eventthe man rescuinghis waiting partner and dashing toward the point of escapeechoes a getawayfrom the scene of a crime. The most interesting moment here occurs as the manon the horse approaches the barrel. At this point, tension in the audience risespalpably. As the critical juncture arrives, the audience shouts, Jump! in unison.The waiting man leaps, and the two prisoners rush headlong toward the exit, togreat cheering if they succeed in getting there without either man falling off, andto audible disappointment if they fail. Spectators become complicit here in animagining of a union between freedom and incarceration. As they eagerly antici-pate the prisoners leap and escape, they participate inand, by virtue of the factthat none of this would be played out without witnesses, they enablethe returnto circulation of that which has been segregated as waste. Caught within thestructure of the performance, audience members root for the subversion of a sys-tem upon which their daily lives depend. In this contact zone (Pratt :), so-cial order overturns itself at the level of the imaginary.

The fragility of the normalization process conceived by Foucault becomesevident in the way in which the coming together of opposites in prison pro-duces evidence not so much of their fundamental irreconcilability, as of theirconnectedness. Like slavery, incarceration causes, in Orlando Pattersonsphrase, social death (); but because of the instability inherent in socialcategories, this kind of death does not necessarily turn out to be permanent.As the existence of the Angola Rodeo makes clear, social waste, in the formof men identified as violent criminals, has become a productand more thanthis, a commodity in high demand.

The appeal of obsolescence is in fact fundamental to rodeo itself. The exist-ence of rodeo competition depends upon talents with rare opportunity forcontemporary use. The cowboy developed into such a compelling figure inAmerican popular culture that, as anthropologist Beverly Stoeltje notes, Astage and an audience for cowboy performance were available even whencowboy work was not (:). The skills displayed in rodeo thus evolvedas performance at least in part because of their superfluousness; rodeo en-shrined the cowboy as cultural icon even as his social utility atrophied. Therodeo cowboy and the prisoner are linked not only by the practice of vio-lence, but by their status as social excess.

Frontier hero and outlawroles that rodeo cowboy and prisoner have inher-itedmerge in the mythology of the frontier, as men like Jesse James andButch Cassidy gained their mythic stature by operating violently outside thelaw. Hero and outlaw come together once again in Angolas inmate cow-boys. As it re-creates images of frontier violence enacted by social outcasts, theAngola rodeo depicts the convergence of waste, violence, and the frontier. Jo-seph Roach argues that the bounty of the New World created a fear of super-abundance which is at the root of what he calls the performance of waste, aprocess which deflects the anxieties produced by having too much of every-thingincluding material goods and human beingsonto specially nominatedsurrogates (:). The rodeo, a conspicuous consumption of ritualizedviolence as a tourist production within prison, is an almost overdetermined per-formance of waste. It is made possible by the superabundance of the frontier,historically channeled through the figures of cowboys whose skills have becomeunnecessary, and enacted in the present moment by men who have been putaway, often for lifethemselves embodiments of superfluousness.

Several of the objects that I noticed during the course of one visit to thehobbycrafts tables at Angola deftly condensed the way in which the rodeo as awhole described a continuity between the socially constructed opposites of wasteand use. The items for sale were made from the refuse of the prisoners dailylives, which had been radically transformed. In one case, a beautifully constructedjewelry box and a heart-shaped picture frame were made solely out of meticu-

Jessica Adams

lously folded Camel cigarette packs; a little fartherdown, two wooden cabinets were covered entirelywith an elaborate design of used wooden matchsticks,their burnt ends barely visible. Actual trash was herebyrecommodified, reentered into circulationonce againmade useful. In a similar way, prisoners themselveshave reentered the economy, existing simultaneously associal waste and valued tourist commodity.

Categories of waste and value are unstable in partbecause of societys voracious appetites. Despite theenforced segregation of the mass of useful free citi-zens from those who have been stripped of socialvalue, a continuity between the two persists, as wasteitself is continually welcomed back into the realm ofwhat is considered useful. Cultures have alwayssought to declare their wealth through the ritualizedconsumption of excess, whether in the form of pot-latch, wedding festivals, fashion shows, or countlessother manifestations of superabundance. In ,faced with grandiose public spectacles of wealth pro-

duced by the Industrial Revolution, Thorstein Veblen declaimed, Through-out the entire evolution of conspicuous expenditure, whether of goods or ofservices or human life, runs the obvious implication that in order to be repu-table it must be wasteful ([] :). In a capitalist economy, con-sumptionand moreover, the freedom to wasteare inseparable fromidentity. But the prison transformed into a tourist attraction illustrates the wayin which things that have already become waste are themselves also conspicu-ously consumed.

The reconfiguration of marginalized, violent spaces as sites of pleasurableleisure is symptomatic of attempts to assuage anxieties associated not only withhaving too much of everything, but of having squandered too much of every-thing. The superabundance of the frontier disappeared long ago, and suchinterlinked crises as deforestation, urban sprawl, and global warming haunt theend of the th century and the beginning of the st. In this context, con-spicuous consumption functions not only as a means of managing fears pro-voked by superabundance, but also as a way to manage fears provoked bylack. In order to exist, a consumer society must make satisfaction elusive; ad-vertising, which has become ubiquitous, strives to convince the public thatwhatever one has is insufficient. Although the production of waste continuesto be a way to exhibit prosperity, at the same time, reclaiming waste as an ob-ject of consumption serves as a means of addressing doubts about collectiveand individual well-being. The prison as a tourist attraction presents a worldthat is emphatically and apparently securely structured, providing (false) assur-ance in explicit visual terms that societys ordering devices work.

Acts of conspicuous consumption engaged in by tourists at the rodeo dis-play not only their material wealth, which affords them the leisure time inwhich to be tourists, but also their freedom. In this way, they reinforce theirstatus as outsiders in terms of the prison economy, a gesture that seems to playout an unarticulated suspicion that they are not actually living in a world ofchoice, that they are not in fact as free as they would like to imaginea suspi-cion, in essence, that they inhabit a carceral society. But at the same time,through this gesture, the limitations of the process of normalization are illumi-nated. The normalizing discourse is prone to collapse when taken to its logicallimits; the coming together of free citizen and prisoner creates images of theinstability of basic terms in the social lexicon. In turn, this instability suggeststhat internalized disciplinary mechanisms and the postmodern fragmentation

. A cabinet made by oneof the inmates is covered ina design of used woodenmatchsticks. (Photo byHannah Steindler)

Tourism and Incarceration

of self exist in a conflicted relationship. Paradoxically, the fragility of social or-der is displayed within a context where it should be most clearly evident, asapparently recognizable markers of identity become alarmingly fluid.

The concept of freedom is always unrecognizable without the specterand thespectacleof its absence. Perhaps sensing this abstract truth, tourists at the rodeoappeared overcome with a desire to leave the prison grounds by the end of theday. Even before the rodeos final event had officially concluded, and with onlyscattered applause, the audience began to spring for the exits. These quickly be-came clogged. In the parking lot, the sense of panic rose as the large volume ofvehicles started to create bottlenecks. Some people left the defined route entirelyand drove through a deep ravine to escape, but were blocked by a slow, steadystream of cars from the other direction. As dusk began to fall, the crowd seemedunited in an accelerating urge to reclaim its position in the world beyond Angola.

It became apparent, however, that the confusion of subject positions exposedin the intermingling of imprisoned and free would not submit so easily to era-sure. Just as my car threatened to become immobilized in the roadways muddyruts, a uniformed guard began directing traffic. But I couldnt risk gettingstuckI swerved out into the path of the oncoming traffic behind me. Theguard became incensed. Its people like you, he shouted, who cause trouble!

Notes

. The event has become so successful that a new stadium has just been constructed toseat , spectators, more than double the capacity of its predecessor. The vast ma-jority of spectators are members of the general public. A few trusty inmates, thosewho have attained the prisons highest privileges through good behavior, sit in a segre-gated area, but otherwise, the closest prisoners can get to the action is through radiobroadcasts, or through seeing the crowds in the hobbycrafts bazaar.

. According to recent statistics, almost percent of Angolas inmates are African Ameri-can (Gabriel Films:).

. An interesting development in late-th-century tourism was the process of convertingformer sites of incarceration linked to racial strife, to tourist attractions, among themRobben Island in South Africa and slaveholding sites along Africas western coast.

. I describe the order of events at one of the rodeos I attended; this order can vary, butthe events remain the same.

. Such attempts often result in injuries. At one rodeo, I watched as a small white mangot caught on the bulls horns when he tried to leap out of its way. He crumpled to theground, but another contestant, a tall black man, quickly lifted him in his arms and car-ried him to safety, giving up his own chance at the prize.

. This part of the exhibit has since been modified to include photos of only six of thecondemned. The previous overwhelming presence of death is somewhat defusedper-haps in order to de-emphasize the similarity between the two agents of violence, stateand prisoner, on display here.

. Sometimes the goods made by prisoners seem to serve as substitutes for the men them-selves. At the most recent Arts and Crafts Festival, a prisoner had displayed a hauntingpainting that depicted death at Angola and burial in the prison cemetery. Affixed to it wasa note addressed to a friend or relative, imploring, if you see this please take it home.The artist remained at Angola, but he could hope that his work would be released.

. Following Peggy Phelan (), I use the term unmarked to describe the power ofwhat is not visible.

. [D]isgust always bears the imprint of desire, Stallybrass and White observe; [...] lowdomains, apparently expelled as Other, return as objects of nostalgia, longing, and fas-cination (:).

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Jessica Adams

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Jessica Adams recently completed a dissertation on violence and memory in th-cen-tury American culture at Tulane University. She is currently teaching in the EnglishDepartment and American Studies Program at Tulane.