Browsing by Subject "Prison abolition"
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Item Fragments of carceral memory : abolitionist narrative work in literature and penal heritage commemoration(2020-08-17) Reyes, Michael; Wilks, Jennifer M., 1973-; Salgado, César A; Wettlaufer, Alexandra K; Arroyo, JossiannaFragments of Carceral Memory weaves through interconnections between race, colonialism, and criminalization. I use a twofold approach to studying African-American, Caribbean, and French carceral narratives alongside penal heritage commemoration practices, with a primary focus on Guyane’s penal colony. Firstly, my analyses of anti-carceral literary texts includes dramas by Jean Genet and Lorraine Hansberry, an epic poem by Reinaldo Arenas, photo-texts by Eduardo Lalo and Patrick Chamoiseau, and a James Baldwin novel. Secondly, I address a discursive gap between colonial era prison tropes that characterize penal heritage sites and contemporary social movements aimed at abolishing prisons. This research conjoins a broad range of narrative work being created at individual, collective, and institutional levels—from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first—to explain how stories (both personal and imperial) must undergird public understanding of what I term a “colonial-carceral nexus.” Using disciplinary conventions in comparative literature to place Caribbean studies and carceral studies in dialogue, I trace how histories of targeted criminalization and pervasive imprisonment are recalled in literature, re-imagined through memory, and relived through legal systems. My research finds that institutional practices of penal heritage commemoration, in contrast to anti-carceral narratives authored by writers who have either been imprisoned or subjected to prolonged targeted surveillance, tend to view imprisonment in a favorable light. I propose some solutions to bridging this discursive gap and shifting the tenor of institutionally narrativized discourse. In conclusion, I contest the presumed incompatibility of carceral commemoration and prison abolition by raising a parting question: What if a tour in a former prison could become an educational opportunity for encouraging abolitionism?Item Geographies of confinement : America's carceral bulwark, 1973-2022(2022-11-28) Barber, Judson Grant; Thompson, Shirley Elizabeth; Hoelscher, Steven D; Meikle, Jeffrey L; Smith, Mark CThis study examines two distinct planes along which prisons have become naturalized in the United States during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, paying special attention to the ways in which the carceral institution has been used to generate capital value. Focusing on museums and tourist attractions, narrative fiction, visual media, and real estate development in rural California, this study considers the prison’s novel importance to the cultural and economic function and survival of the state and nation at-large. The proliferation of the prison, in both real space and the cultural imaginary, has produced barriers to abolition that now appear indestructible and insurmountable. The primary attempt in this study is to demonstrate why and where these barriers now exist, and to consider what cultural and economic revolutions must occur for the prison to be supplanted by more productive, equitable, and just alternatives as activists and academics have championed for decades. The prison, like taxes or insurance, is one of many things we have come to assume the existence and necessity of in American culture. This assumption is so deeply rooted that we’ve lost the ability to analyze its integrity objectively and critically. This interdisciplinary project contributes to discourses in cultural geography, museum studies, and carceral studies by examining the prison as a broad cultural event rather than as a narrow social or political issue, locating the crux of abolition most prominently in economic dependence and cultural assumption.Item “Imagination is excess” : dreaming and building queer and trans abolitionist possibilities through art and community organizing(2022-05-06) Benavides Villamizar, Paula; Smith, Christen A., 1977-; Minich, JulieThis thesis discusses the prison abolitionist cultural productions of queer and trans of color artists and theorists who have in some way engaged with the University of Texas at Austin’s Center for Women’s and Gender Studies. I argue that with the use of storytelling and dreamwork methodologies, each of these artists and thinkers enacts an abolitionist worldbuilding that proves us with a blueprint for how to enact a non-carceral queer and trans futurity. The thesis discusses two films, Criminal Queers and Major!, to think about the ways that queer and trans people of color engage in fugitive and errant moves to circumvent carceral logics and the surveillant gaze of the state. I later discuss the archival works of Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley in connection with abolitionist theorizing by Mariame Kaba and José Esteban Muñoz. Throughout the thesis I ask questions about futurity and healing, and position artists within and outside the academy as both producing rich and destabilizing theory that helps us better understand prison abolition as a methodology and a dream.