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Book Carceral Fantasies

    Book Details:
  • Author : Alison Griffiths
  • Publisher : Columbia University Press
  • Release : 2016-08-23
  • ISBN : 0231541562
  • Pages : 467 pages

Download or read book Carceral Fantasies written by Alison Griffiths and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2016-08-23 with total page 467 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking contribution to the study of nontheatrical film exhibition, Carceral Fantasies tells the little-known story of how cinema found a home in the U.S. penitentiary system and how the prison emerged as a setting and narrative trope in modern cinema. Focusing on films shown in prisons before 1935, Alison Griffiths explores the unique experience of viewing cinema while incarcerated and the complex cultural roots of cinematic renderings of prison life. Griffiths considers a diverse mix of cinematic genres, from early actualities and reenactments of notorious executions to reformist exposés of the 1920s. She connects an early fascination with cinematic images of punishment and execution, especially electrocutions, to the attractions of the nineteenth-century carnival electrical wonder show and Phantasmagoria (a ghost show using magic lantern projections and special effects). Griffiths draws upon convict writing, prison annual reports, and the popular press obsession with prison-house cinema to document the integration of film into existing reformist and educational activities and film's psychic extension of flights of fancy undertaken by inmates in their cells. Combining penal history with visual and film studies and theories surrounding media's sensual effects, Carceral Fantasies illuminates how filmic representations of the penal system enacted ideas about modernity, gender, the body, and the public, shaping both the social experience of cinema and the public's understanding of the modern prison.

Book Metaphors of Confinement

Download or read book Metaphors of Confinement written by Monika Fludernik and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2019-08-13 with total page 841 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Metaphors of Confinement: The Prison in Fact, Fiction, and Fantasy offers a historical survey of imaginings of the prison as expressed in carceral metaphors in a range of texts about imprisonment from Antiquity to the present as well as non-penal situations described as confining or restrictive. These imaginings coalesce into a 'carceral imaginary' that determines the way we think about prisons, just as social debates about punishment and criminals feed into the way carceral imaginary develops over time. Examining not only English-language prose fiction but also poetry and drama from the Middle Ages to postcolonial, particularly African, literature, the book juxtaposes literary and non-literary contexts and contrasts fictional and nonfictional representations of (im)prison(ment) and discussions about the prison as institution and experiential reality. It comments on present-day trends of punitivity and foregrounds the ethical dimensions of penal punishment. The main argument concerns the continuity of carceral metaphors through the centuries despite historical developments that included major shifts in policy (such as the invention of the penitentiary). The study looks at selected carceral metaphors, often from two complementary perspectives, such as the home as prison or the prison as home, or the factory as prison and the prison as factory. The case studies present particularly relevant genres and texts that employ these metaphors, often from a historical perspective that analyses development through different periods.

Book City of Inmates

    Book Details:
  • Author : Kelly Lytle Hernández
  • Publisher : UNC Press Books
  • Release : 2017-02-15
  • ISBN : 1469631199
  • Pages : 312 pages

Download or read book City of Inmates written by Kelly Lytle Hernández and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2017-02-15 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Los Angeles incarcerates more people than any other city in the United States, which imprisons more people than any other nation on Earth. This book explains how the City of Angels became the capital city of the world's leading incarcerator. Marshaling more than two centuries of evidence, historian Kelly Lytle Hernandez unmasks how histories of native elimination, immigrant exclusion, and black disappearance drove the rise of incarceration in Los Angeles. In this telling, which spans from the Spanish colonial era to the outbreak of the 1965 Watts Rebellion, Hernandez documents the persistent historical bond between the racial fantasies of conquest, namely its settler colonial form, and the eliminatory capacities of incarceration. But City of Inmates is also a chronicle of resilience and rebellion, documenting how targeted peoples and communities have always fought back. They busted out of jail, forced Supreme Court rulings, advanced revolution across bars and borders, and, as in the summer of 1965, set fire to the belly of the city. With these acts those who fought the rise of incarceration in Los Angeles altered the course of history in the city, the borderlands, and beyond. This book recounts how the dynamics of conquest met deep reservoirs of rebellion as Los Angeles became the City of Inmates, the nation's carceral core. It is a story that is far from over.

Book Reverse Colonization

Download or read book Reverse Colonization written by David M. Higgins and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2021-09 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Reverse colonization narratives are stories like H. G. Wells's War of the Worlds (where technologically superior Martians invade and colonize England) that ask Western audiences to imagine what it's like to be the colonized rather than the colonizers. In this book, David M. Higgins argues that although some reverse colonization stories are thoughtful and provocative (because they ask us to think critically about what empire feels like from the receiving end), reverse colonization fantasy has also led to the prevalence of a very dangerous kind of science fictional thinking in our current political culture. Everyone, now (including anti-feminists, white supremacists, and far-right reactionaries) likes to imagine themselves as the Rebel Alliance fighting against the Empire (or Neo trying to escape the Matrix, or Katniss Everdeen waging war against the Capitol). Reverse colonization fantasy, in other words, has a dangerous tendency to enable white men (and other subjects of privilege) to appropriate a sense of victimhood for their own social and political advantage"--

Book Prison Truth

    Book Details:
  • Author : William J. Drummond
  • Publisher : University of California Press
  • Release : 2020-01-07
  • ISBN : 0520298365
  • Pages : 339 pages

Download or read book Prison Truth written by William J. Drummond and published by University of California Press. This book was released on 2020-01-07 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: San Quentin State Prison, California’s oldest prison and the nation’s largest, is notorious for once holding America’s most dangerous prisoners. But in 2008, the Bastille-by-the-Bay became a beacon for rehabilitation through the prisoner-run newspaper the San Quentin News. Prison Truth tells the story of how prisoners, many serving life terms, transformed the prison climate from what Johnny Cash called a living hell to an environment that fostered positive change in inmates’ lives. Award-winning journalist William J. Drummond takes us behind bars, introducing us to Arnulfo García, the visionary prisoner who led the revival of the newspaper. Drummond describes how the San Quentin News, after a twenty-year shutdown, was recalled to life under an enlightened warden and the small group of local retired newspaper veterans serving as advisers, which Drummond joined in 2012. Sharing how officials cautiously and often unwittingly allowed the newspaper to tell the stories of the incarcerated, Prison Truth illustrates the power of prison media to humanize the experiences of people inside penitentiary walls and to forge alliances with social justice networks seeking reform.

Book Metaphors of Confinement

Download or read book Metaphors of Confinement written by Monika Fludernik and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-08-13 with total page 768 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Metaphors of Confinement: The Prison in Fact, Fiction, and Fantasy offers a historical survey of imaginings of the prison as expressed in carceral metaphors in a range of texts about imprisonment from Antiquity to the present as well as non-penal situations described as confining or restrictive. These imaginings coalesce into a 'carceral imaginary' that determines the way we think about prisons, just as social debates about punishment and criminals feed into the way carceral imaginary develops over time. Examining not only English-language prose fiction but also poetry and drama from the Middle Ages to postcolonial, particularly African, literature, the book juxtaposes literary and non-literary contexts and contrasts fictional and nonfictional representations of (im)prison(ment) and discussions about the prison as institution and experiential reality. It comments on present-day trends of punitivity and foregrounds the ethical dimensions of penal punishment. The main argument concerns the continuity of carceral metaphors through the centuries despite historical developments that included major shifts in policy (such as the invention of the penitentiary). The study looks at selected carceral metaphors, often from two complementary perspectives, such as the home as prison or the prison as home, or the factory as prison and the prison as factory. The case studies present particularly relevant genres and texts that employ these metaphors, often from a historical perspective that analyses development through different periods.

Book The Afterlives of Kathleen Collins

Download or read book The Afterlives of Kathleen Collins written by L. H. Stallings and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2021-12-07 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An absorbing portrait of a groundbreaking Black woman filmmaker. Kathleen Collins (1942–88) was a visionary and influential Black filmmaker. Beginning with her short film The Cruz Brothers and Miss Malloy and her feature film Losing Ground, Collins explored new dimensions of what narrative film could and should do. However, her achievements in filmmaking were part of a greater life project. In this critically imaginative study of Collins, L.H. Stallings narrates how Collins, as a Black woman writer and filmmaker, sought to change the definition of life and living. The Afterlives of Kathleen Collins: A Black Woman Filmmaker's Search for New Life explores the global significance and futurist implications of filmmaker and writer Kathleen Collins. In addition to her two films, Stallings examines the broad and expansive and varying forms of writing produced by Collins during her short life time. The Afterlives of Kathleen Collins showcases how Collins used filmmaking, writing, and teaching to assert herself as a poly-creative dedicated to asking and answering difficult philosophical questions about human being and living. Interrogating the ideological foundation of life-writing and cinematic life-writing as they intersect with race and gender, Stallings intervenes on the delimited concepts of life and Black being that impeded wider access, distribution, and production of Collins's personal, cinematic, literary, and theatrical works. The Afterlives of Kathleen Collins definitively emphasizes the evolution of film and film studies that Collins makes possible for current and future generations of filmmakers.

Book Movie Minorities

    Book Details:
  • Author : Hye Seung Chung
  • Publisher : Rutgers University Press
  • Release : 2021-08-13
  • ISBN : 1978809646
  • Pages : 317 pages

Download or read book Movie Minorities written by Hye Seung Chung and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2021-08-13 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rights advocacy has become a prominent facet of South Korea's increasingly transnational motion picture output, and today films about political prisoners, undocumented workers, and people with disabilities attract mainstream attention. Movie Minorities offers the first English-language study of Korean cinema's role in helping to galvanize activist social movements across these and other identity-based categories.

Book Epistemic Communities at the Boundaries of Law

Download or read book Epistemic Communities at the Boundaries of Law written by Cecilia Blengino and published by Ledizioni. This book was released on 2019 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “As richly described in the various chapters of this book, we see that clinics can act as a window to the functioning of law and the legal system. Clinics allow students and faculty to see how laws and the legal system are functioning for groups of people who otherwise likely would not be a part of the common experience of professors and their students: poor people generally, migrants and refugees, women and children exploited by trafficking, people with disabilities, ethnic minorities, prisoners, and so on. Legal systems the world over tend to give less care and attention to the problems of the poor and other disempowered groups, and such people usually lack access to well-educated legal advocates to help them fight to make the legal system work for them. Through clinic cases, students and faculty see the day-today lives of people marginalized by the society, see how the law affects and influences their lives, and see how it serves or fails to serve them. For law professors involved in clinical education, such as the authors of this book, heightened awareness of the law’s operation for poor people adds another important perspective to the subjects of their research and work as commentators on the law. Students can also be inspired to select topics for research papers, master or PhD theses by exposure to problems in the law and legal system as it functions for their clients.” (Dall’introduzione)

Book Handbook on the Consequences of Sentencing and Punishment Decisions

Download or read book Handbook on the Consequences of Sentencing and Punishment Decisions written by Beth M. Huebner and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-08-06 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Handbook on the Consequences of Sentencing and Punishment Decisions, the third volume in the Routledge ASC Division on Corrections & Sentencing Series, includes contemporary essays on the consequences of punishment during an era of mass incarceration. The Handbook Series offers state-of-the-art volumes on seminal and topical issues that span the fields of sentencing and corrections. In that spirit, the editors gathered contributions that summarize what is known in each topical area and also identify emerging theoretical, empirical, and policy work. The book is grounded in the current knowledge about the specific topics, but also includes new, synthesizing material that reflects the knowledge of the leading minds in the field. Following an editors’ introduction, the volume is divided into four sections. First, two contributions situate and contextualize the volume by providing insight into the growth of mass punishment over the past three decades and an overview of the broad consequences of punishment decisions. The overviews are then followed by a section exploring the broader societal impacts of punishment on housing, employment, family relationships, and health and well-being. The third section centers on special populations and examines the unique effects of punishment for juveniles, immigrants, and individuals convicted of sexual or drug-related offenses. The fourth section focuses on institutional implications with contributions on jails, community corrections, and institutional corrections.

Book Demystifying the Big House

Download or read book Demystifying the Big House written by Katherine A Foss and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 2018-07-06 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays in this volume illustrate how shows such as Orange Is the New Black and Oz impact the public’s perception of crime rates, the criminal justice system, and imprisonment. Contributors look at prison wives on reality television series, portrayals of death row, breastfeeding while in prison, transgender prisoners, and black masculinity. They also examine the ways in which media messages ignore an individual’s struggle against an all too frequently biased system and instead dehumanize the incarcerated as violent and overwhelmingly masculine. Together these essays argue media reform is necessary for penal reform, proposing that more accurate media representations of prison life could improve public support for programs dealing with poverty, abuse, and drug addiction—factors that increase the likelihood of criminal activity and incarceration. Scholars from cultural and critical studies, feminist studies, queer studies, African American studies, media studies, sociology, and psychology offer critical analysis of media depictions of prison, bridging the media’s portrayals of incarcerated lives with actual experiences and bringing to light forgotten voices in prison narratives.

Book The Palgrave Handbook of Incarceration in Popular Culture

Download or read book The Palgrave Handbook of Incarceration in Popular Culture written by Marcus Harmes and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-02-03 with total page 785 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Handbook of Incarceration in Popular Culture will be an essential reference point, providing international coverage and thematic richness. The chapters examine the real and imagined spaces of the prison and, perhaps more importantly, dwell in the uncertain space between them. The modern fixation with ‘seeing inside’ prison from the outside has prompted a proliferation of media visions of incarceration, from high-minded and worthy to voyeuristic and unrealistic. In this handbook, the editors bring together a huge breadth of disparate issues including women in prison, the view from ‘inside’, prisons as a source of entertainment, the real worlds of prison, and issues of race and gender. The handbook will inform students and lecturers of media, film, popular culture, gender, and cultural studies, as well as scholars of criminology and justice.

Book Lesbian Potentiality and Feminist Media in the 1970s

Download or read book Lesbian Potentiality and Feminist Media in the 1970s written by Rox Samer and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2022-02-04 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Lesbian Potentiality and Feminist Media in the 1970s, Rox Samer explores how 1970s feminists took up the figure of the lesbian in broad attempts to reimagine gender and sexuality. Samer turns to feminist film, video, and science fiction literature, offering a historiographical concept called “lesbian potentiality”—a way of thinking beyond what the lesbian was, in favor of how the lesbian signified what could have come to be. Samer shows how the labor of feminist media workers and fans put lesbian potentiality into movement. They see lesbian potentiality in feminist prison documentaries that theorize the prison industrial complex’s racialized and gendered violence and give image to Black feminist love politics and freedom dreaming. Lesbian potentiality also circulates through the alternative spaces created by feminist science fiction and fantasy fanzines like The Witch and the Chameleon and Janus. It was here that author James Tiptree, Jr./Alice B. Sheldon felt free to do gender differently and inspired many others to do so in turn. Throughout, Samer embraces the perpetual reimagination of “lesbian” and the lesbian’s former futures for the sake of continued, radical world-building.

Book Death by Laughter

    Book Details:
  • Author : Maggie Hennefeld
  • Publisher : Columbia University Press
  • Release : 2024-03-19
  • ISBN : 023155981X
  • Pages : 634 pages

Download or read book Death by Laughter written by Maggie Hennefeld and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2024-03-19 with total page 634 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can you really die from laughing too hard? Between 1870 and 1920, hundreds of women suffered such a fate—or so a slew of sensationalist obituaries would have us believe. How could laughter be fatal, and what do these reports of women’s risible deaths tell us about the politics of female joy? Maggie Hennefeld reveals the forgotten histories of “hysterical laughter,” exploring how women’s amusement has been theorized and demonized, suppressed and exploited. In nineteenth-century medicine and culture, hysteria was an ailment that afflicted unruly women on the cusp of emotional or nervous breakdown. Cinema, Hennefeld argues, made it possible for women to laugh outrageously as never before, with irreversible social and political consequences. As female enjoyment became a surefire promise of profitability, alarmist tales of women laughing themselves to death epitomized the tension between subversive pleasure and its violent repression. Hennefeld traces the social politics of women’s laughter from the heyday of nineteenth-century sentimentalism to the collective euphoria of early film spectatorship, traversing contagious dancing outbreaks, hysteria photography, madwomen’s cackling, cinematic close-ups, and screenings of slapstick movies in mental asylums. Placing little-known silent films and an archive of remarkable, often unusual texts in conversation with affect theory, comedy studies, and feminist film theory, this book makes a timely case for the power of hysterical laughter to change the world.

Book The Palgrave Handbook of Digital and Public Humanities

Download or read book The Palgrave Handbook of Digital and Public Humanities written by Anne Schwan and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-11-04 with total page 542 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This handbook brings together recent international scholarship and developments in the interdisciplinary fields of digital and public humanities. Exploring key concepts, theories, practices and debates within both the digital and public humanities, the handbook also assesses how these two areas are increasingly intertwined. Key questions of access, ownership, authorship and representation link the individual sections and contributions. The handbook includes perspectives from the Global South and presents scholarship and practice that engage with a multiplicity of underrepresented ‘publics’, including LGBTQ+ communities, ethnic and linguistic minorities, the incarcerated and those affected by personal or collective trauma. Chapter “The Role of Digital and Public Humanities in Confronting the Past: Survivors’ of Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries Truth Telling’” is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Book Romantic Outlaws  Beloved Prisons

Download or read book Romantic Outlaws Beloved Prisons written by Martha Grace Duncan and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 1999-09 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Emerging from her fascination with anarchists while studying political science at Columbia, Duncan (law, Emory U.) explores the paradoxes of crime, such as law-abiding citizens who like to commit violent criminal deeds, convicts who find beauty in their prison yards, and wardens who lose their jobs because they are actually succeeding at rehabilitating their charges. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Book Ghost Channels

    Book Details:
  • Author : Amy Lawrence
  • Publisher : Univ. Press of Mississippi
  • Release : 2022-03-08
  • ISBN : 1496838122
  • Pages : 186 pages

Download or read book Ghost Channels written by Amy Lawrence and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2022-03-08 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through American history, often in times of crisis, there have been periodic outbreaks of obsession with the paranormal. Between 2004 and 2019, over six dozen documentary-style series dealing with paranormal subject matter premiered on television in the United States. Combining the stylistic traits of horror with earnest accounts of what are claimed to be actual events, “paranormal reality” incorporates subject matter formerly characterized as occult or supernatural into the established category of reality TV. Despite the high number of programs and their evident popularity, paranormal reality television has to date received little critical attention. Ghost Channels: Paranormal Reality Television and the Haunting of Twenty-First-Century America provides an overview of the paranormal reality television genre, its development, and its place in television history. Conducting in-depth analyses of over thirty paranormal television series, including such shows as Ghost Hunters, Celebrity Ghost Stories, and Long Island Medium, author Amy Lawrence suggests these programs reveal much about Americans’ contemporary fears. Through her close readings, Lawrence asks, “What are these shows trying to tell us?” and “What do they communicate about contemporary culture if we take them seriously and watch them closely?” Ridiculed by nearly everyone, paranormal reality TV shows—with their psychics, ghost hunters, and haunted houses—provide unique insights into contemporary American culture. Half-horror, half-documentary realism, these shows expose deep-seated questions about class, race, gender, the value of technology, the failure of institutions, and what it means to be American in the twenty-first century.