Prisoners of Conscience: Moral Vernaculars of Political Agency by Gerard A. Hauser (review)

In his poignant new book, Prisoners of Conscience: Moral Vernaculars of Political Agency, Gerard A. Hauser explains that nongovernmental organizations like Amnesty International understand prisoners of conscience (POCs) to be those who are "imprisoned and/or persecuted for the nonviolent expression of consciously held beliefs" (17). Hauser's conceptualization of POCs draws a wider net to include violence used by political dissidents, although he makes a firm distinction between political prisoners and prisoners of conscience. The status of political prisoner indicates that one has been jailed for the threat of his or her beliefs. A political prisoner becomes a POC based on "the choices made in prison out of conscience to continue their resistance in prison and through vernacular expressions of resistance and identity that carry moral force within their national community" (7). Hauser explains how POCs use vernacular rhetoric to maintain their humanity and achieve political agency.

The book's chapters may be broken into two sections, with the first (chapters 1, 2, 3, and 9) orchestrating the theoretical framework of the book and the second (chapters 4-8) offering case studies of rhetorical criticism centered on the vernacular rhetoric of several POCs. Two key ideas stand out in section 1, namely the performance of the POC living in the truth and the thin and thick moral vernaculars of human rights. Hauser explains that the "POC's most fundamental commitment is to live in truth," which "reflects a commitment not to accept the terms of bare life regardless of the consequences" (15). This commitment makes them the "quintessential parrhesiastes," or archetypes of fearless speech (13). Drawing on the work of Czech dissident Vaclav Havel, Hauser explains that "living within the truth" has an existential dimension of "returning humanity to its inherent nature," a noetic dimension of "revealing reality as it is," a moral dimension that sets "an example for others," and a political dimension that invokes human dignity to combat posttotalitarian regimes of power that divide persons from themselves (17).

The second key idea from section 1 involves divergent moral vernaculars of human rights that Hauser labels thin and thick. The thin moral vernacular of human rights is exemplified by discourses about human rights such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights invites an abstract discourse of absolute human rights while inviting a state of affairs in which "all nations profess to honor human rights, but on their own terms" (25). Hauser argues that this thin discourse reduces "vernacular" to the language used by powerful parties to speak about abstract ideals on behalf of oppressed peoples to their oppressors who are beholden only to their own national laws. Hauser is instead interested in examining a thick moral vernacular of human rights discourse that both addresses the "implied virtues of rights holders and vices of rights withholders" and indicts the venality of oppressors out of a commitment to personal dignity, self-respect, and ordinary virtues (45).

Section 2 involves a markedly different set of critical writing practices in which Hauser bears witness to the rhetorical agency of POCs while offering his readers a heartfelt call to conscience. The great difficulty of this type of a project would be locating evidence of a sufficient quantity and quality to sustain analyses that do justice to the particular case while providing insight into realms, including the political, philosophical, and rhetorical. Hauser chose a broad and provocative set of topics, including apartheid, prison memoirs, the Provisional Irish Republican Army's 1981 Hunger Strike, and the visual rhetoric of Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse.

The issues addressed in the chapters on POCs include the following: the practices of parrhesia by the men held at Robben Island in South Africa for their opposition to apartheid (chapter 4); the rhetoric of indirection through Ukrainian dissident poet Irina Ratushinskaya's prison memoir Grey is the Color of Hope (chapter 5); the passive aggression of prison protests performed by...