You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
At 2.26 million, incarcerated Americans not only outnumber the nation’s fourth-largest city, they make up a national constituency bound by a shared condition. Fourth City: Essays from the Prison in America presents more than seventy essays from twenty-seven states, written by incarcerated Americans chronicling their experience inside. In essays as moving as they are eloquent, the authors speak out against a national prison complex that fails so badly at the task of rehabilitation that 60% of the 650,000 Americans released each year return to prison. These essays document the authors’ efforts at self-help, the institutional resistance such efforts meet at nearly every turn, and the impact...
Liquid Metal brings together 'seminal' essays that have opened up the study of science fiction to serious critical interrogation. Eight distinct sections cover such topics as the cyborg in science fiction; the science fiction city; time travel and the primal scene; science fiction fandom; and the 1950s invasion narratives. Important writings by Susan Sontag, Vivian Sobchack, Steve Neale, J.P. Telotte, Peter Biskind and Constance Penley are included.
Sparking a discussion of the importance of creativity for the well-being of society, this book highlights and argues for the potential of those in prison to learn and exercise the skills of writing, visual arts, and music; to protect their intellectual property; and to distribute their works to the public, and the consequent benefits of their creative contribution to wider society. Focused on the premise that a nation’s well-being and competitive advantage in innovation are advanced by promoting the creative efforts of all its citizens without exclusion, including those residing in prisons, this book uses the United States as a case study to illuminate the potential among any nation’s pr...
This book incorporates literary works, testimonies, autobiographies, women's resistance movements, and films that add to the conversation on the resilience of women in the global south. The essays question historical accuracy and politics of representation that usually undermine women's role during conflict, and they reevaluate how women participated, challenged, sacrificed, and vehemently opposed war discourses that work on obliterating women's role in shaping resistance movements.
A writer of children's books delights his readers, yet his work fills him with despair. Then he meets a troubled 13-year-old girl.
A major reappraisal of crime and punishment in America The huge prison buildup of the past four decades has few defenders, yet reforms to reduce the numbers of those incarcerated have been remarkably modest. Meanwhile, an ever-widening carceral state has sprouted in the shadows, extending its reach far beyond the prison gate. It sunders families and communities and reworks conceptions of democracy, rights, and citizenship—posing a formidable political and social challenge. In Caught, Marie Gottschalk examines why the carceral state remains so tenacious in the United States. She analyzes the shortcomings of the two dominant penal reform strategies—one focused on addressing racial disparities, the other on seeking bipartisan, race-neutral solutions centered on reentry, justice reinvestment, and reducing recidivism. With a new preface evaluating the effectiveness of recent proposals to reform mass incarceration, Caught offers a bracing appraisal of the politics of penal reform.
Two thousand years ago, Ovid asked his readers to imagine metamorphoses in which men and women became flowers and beasts. Today, before our cinema-savvy eyes, people melt and re-form as altogether new creatures: they "morph." This volume explores what digital morphing means -- both as a cultural practice specific to our times and as a link to a much broader history of images of human transformation. Meta-Morphing ranges over topics that include turn-of-the-century "quick-change" artists, Mesoamerican shamanic transformation, and cosmetic surgery; recent works such as Terminator 2, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Heavenly Creatures, and Forrest Gump; and the transformations imagined by Kafka, Proust, and Burroughs. The contributors look not only at the technical wizardry behind digital morphing, but also at the history and cultural concerns it expresses.
In The Beautiful Prison incarcerated Americans and prison critics seek to imagine the prison as something better than a machinery of suffering. From personal testimony to theoretical meditation these writers explore and confront the practical and cultural limits the prison places on its transformation into a socially constructive institution.
Canada’s criminal justice system reinforces dominant relations of power and further entrenches the country in its colonial past. Through the mechanisms of surveillance, segregation, and containment, the criminal justice system ensures that Indigenous peoples remain in a state of economic deprivation, social isolation, and political subjection. By examining the ways in which the Canadian justice system continues to sanction overtly discriminatory and racist practices, the authors in this collection demonstrate clearly how historical patterns of privilege and domination are extended and reinforced.
Returning to some of the issues in his now classic book The Absent Body published by this Press in 1990, philosopher and physician Drew Leder turns his attention in his new book to distressed bodies the experience of illness and pain, and a variety of medical responses thereto; the experience of being imprisoned in our age of mass incarceration; and also the mis-treatment of animal bodies, as in modern factory farms. Yet this book is not just about suffering, but the healing of suffering. Each chapter takes up a single topic -- be it the experience of pain, the use of pills in medicine, organ transplantation, or factory farming employing interpretive tools appropriate to the issue. At the sa...