BY SHARON LUK, Assistant Professor, University of Oregon, Department of English 
Writing and rewriting my book has been a slow burn—as the case may be, too, for those who will kindly read it. On the one hand, to myself and to those 
who have shared their stories with me (and probably also to others still holding 
their stories close to themselves), the central argument of my research is obvious, 
almost too obvious to necessitate book-length explanation: this is, simply, that 
letters can mean the world to the people attached to them, and distinctively so 
for communities ripped apart by incarceration. In the first and final instance, this 
is a formulation of “the life of paper” that you must accept at face value in its 
plenitude, a plenitude that is all but better represented by understatement rather 
than long-winded analysis. If one does not accept, chances are that no amount of 
research could effect otherwise because the problem would not have been a matter 
of fact, even if it becomes so profoundly one of logic. 
Yet, on the other hand, I have nevertheless felt compelled to corroborate the 
existence of such a phenomenon, plain as it may be. And once I committed to 
doing so by giving it name, the self-evidence of all meaning seemed to vanish. 
And so, each and every time I come to the page, my own creativity always begins 
at a loss.
Part of the problem I experience with narrating this life of paper is, indeed, an 
effect of my object of study, the letter itself; in turn, my issues become productive 
of the very means through which I problematize the letter for the sake of study, too. Assumptions of both the 
transparency and the significance of the letter have long captured civic imagination. Conveyed, for example, by 
H. T. Loomis’ introduction to his textbook, Practical Letter Writing (1897), the ultimate function of an education 
in the “neatness, correct forms, and established customs in writing letters” seems to reside less in the use-value or 
objectivity of the letter as commodity than in the object the letter itself produces: Western civilization as such—
its embodiment in and through “correct and incorrect 
positions” (Figure 1), acquisition of proper habits, 
abilities, intelligence, and business tact, achievement of 
general mastery over the affairs of life.
If, indeed, the epistolary thus mediates man’s 
becoming at this most essential scale of economy, 
then my own questions become: what is a letter, what 
does it do and how does it work, on the other side of 
human mastery—thought and learned, written and 
read, sent and received from an other side of history? 
What vitalizes human relationships to the letter when 
the human embodies the crisis rather than cultivation 
of man and the mortal stakes of the problem of 
representation? In three parts, The Life of Paper hence 
deals with these questions at the interstices of aesthetic, 
racial, geographic, and ontological form: exploring 
  
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The Life of Paper, a Poetics: Letters and 
Mass Incarceration in Global California
This book aims not only to denaturalize the geographic borders, political-economic laws, 
and civic norms that expose people to state-sanctioned violence but, more critically, to 
privilege a sense of the activities and worldviews of disenfranchised populations who 
struggle to transform existing conditions. 
Continued on other side
Sh
ar
on
 L
uk
Research MattersCENTER FOR THE STUDY OF WOMEN IN SOCIETY
ascesis
involved in writing
my history
i've been waking in
night sweats &
it's not the sheets,
those things in-
side are
burning out
of love
17 june 2009
Fig. 1: H.T. Loomis, Practical Letter Writing (Cleveland, OH: The Practical 
Textbook Co., 1897), 6. Original caption reads: “Correct and Incorrect positions.”
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ReseaRch MatteRs is published three times per year by 
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Research Matters
the life-worlds maintained through letter correspondence 
within particular contexts of racism and mass incarceration 
in California history. Tracing the contradictions of modernity 
that inhere in as well as mobilize around the letter itself, its 
mediation of social struggles to define “Western civilization” 
as well as its reinvention of ways of life that the latter cannot 
subsume, this investigation unfolds in three cycles to uncover 
how letters facilitate a form of communal life for groups 
targeted for racialized confinement in different phases of 
development in the U.S. West. 
This perspective afforded by the investigation of the 
letter contours the central contribution of my research to 
contemporary discourse on mass incarceration: namely, the 
analytic it offers to understand the “prison industrial complex” 
as foremost a problem of civilization rather than punishment 
and, as such, a priority of social reproduction—or, the 
practices through which things (including people) stay alive—
which cannot be fully rationalized through logics of capitalist 
production alone. In perhaps unexpected ways, then, and 
given its regional scope that is inextricable yet distinguishable 
from historiographies drawn from the U.S. Southern and 
Atlantic regions, The Life of Paper addresses conflicting 
characterizations of mass incarceration as either a slave labor 
regime or as a new caste system, both frames imbued with 
tremendous rhetorical and affective force and yet ultimately 
inconsistent or limited in their explanatory potential. 
Specific to the U.S. West, and beginning with the 
domination of planetary “white only” settler colonial and 
Free Soil movements at the moment of California statehood, 
Part I, “Detained,” examines movements of regional migration 
and localized containment, moreso than criminal justice 
policy or early construction of jails, as critical to the history 
of racism and mass incarceration in the region. “Detained” 
thus focuses on migrants from Southern China during peak 
years of U.S. Chinese Exclusion (1890s-1920s) and elaborates 
the distinct pathways that detained communities forged—in 
and through letters—to rearticulate emergent infrastructures 
defining an epoch of global imperialist expansion, capitalist 
industrialization, and nation-state formation predicated on 
exclusions understood in terms of “racial” distinction.
Part II, “Interned” focuses on families of Japanese ancestry 
during the WWII period (1930s-1940s) and examines interned 
communities’ processes of aesthetic production through letters, 
in dialectic with the development of a modern security state 
and its systems of censorship and surveillance. 
Part III, “Imprisoned” focuses on socialities of Blackness in 
the post-Civil Rights era (1960s-present): interrogating how the 
Black radical tradition has vitalized practices of re-embodying 
the human as imprisoned communities of different ethno-racial 
heritage engage letter correspondence to survive collectively 
through dramatic restructurings of global capitalism, U.S. 
apartheid, and racial order that all bond societies in California 
and beyond to prisons as anchoring institution of civic life.  
Framing letters within the political violence that conditions 
them, my work ultimately explores how the mundane 
activities of communities to sustain themselves, as manifest 
in letter correspondence, emerge discernibly as constitutive of 
social life rather than seemingly adjunct to it. Invested with the 
urgency of communities’ struggles to survive, I argue that the 
production and circulation of letters open real and imaginative 
possibilities, both engrained in the letter and in excess of it. 
Thus, in “the life of paper,” I interrogate the processes that 
connect paper objects to historical human identity and being. 
I also analyze how these forms of connection—structural, 
physical, ideological, and affective labor internalized in the 
letter—create alternative conditions that both ground and 
animate endeavors to reinvent people’s own means of living. 
As such, these acts of self-making provide a glimpse into how 
communities under such constraint can reproduce themselves 
at every scale of existence, from bodily integrity to subjectivity 
to collective and spiritual being. I hence call the life of paper 
a “poetics”: an art of becoming, mediated in and through 
the letter and the interaction of literature with history, that 
prioritizes the dynamics of creative essence to generate an 
other kind of social power bound to the unfathomable.    ■
— Sharon Luk received a CSWS research grant in 2015-16 to support 
this research. Her book manuscript is under review and scheduled for 
publication in 2018. Dr. Luk is currently an assistant professor in English 
and participating faculty in Ethnic Studies, Women and Gender Studies, 
and Clark Honors College.
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