The present panel proposal gains significance against the background of rising global authoritarianism and the role of prisons in suppression of dissent and political opposition. All three presenters on the proposed panel will discuss historical texts and social movements from the last fifty years.
There have been substantial cross-disciplinary discussions of social coercion through the continued expansion of carceral states that rely on mass incarceration, military and police violence, fortified borders, and terror exercised against women, sexual minorities, and racialized subalterns (Falcón 2001; Mandela 2008; Gordon 2008; Sjoberg 2016; CeCe McDonald 2017; Ferreira 2021, 2014). In many societies, prisons and their menace set the terms and limits of citizenship or non-citizenship. The threat and frequency of incarceration express state antagonism towards democratic participation in social decision-making. As Vesla Weaver and Amy Lerman (2010) argued in reference to the United States, the proliferation of carceral contacts with individual citizens and their families has deeply detrimental and suppressive effects on democratic inclusion in society, a conclusion that also has been instanced forcefully elsewhere in the world.
This panel looks at a counter-force, the power of carceral narratives to shape critical public understanding of social oppression and to explain the origins and growth of opposition. Judith Tauber (Cornell University) bases her paper on extensive research into the Red Brigades' 1970-1988 activities and discourses on capitalist and revolutionary methods of incarceration. She relies on the autobiography Un contadino nella metropoli (2006) -- written by a key figure of the Red Brigades, Prospero Gallinari -- to analyze how prisons act as sites of consensus, violence, and anti-state opposition. Basuli Deb (University of London / Columbia University / Rutgers University) engages with Ken Saro-Wiwa’s posthumous prison diaries, A Month and a Day (1995), in order to provide a transnational reading, one that links land dispossession in Nigeria to US petro-imperialism. Deb’s reading incorporates Africa and African environmentalism into contemporary Black Lives Matter political consciousness. In a final paper, Nada Ayad (Cooper Union) addresses two Egyptian women’s texts, Nawal El Saadawi’s Memoirs of the Women’s Prison (1985) and Salwa Bakr’s The Golden Chariot (1995), in order to discuss the inscription of repressive external social hierarchies on prison administrations alongside the resistant solidarity and kinship of incarcerated women.
These three papers and the following Q&A will engage the audience in a discussion of the role of carceral literature as a counter-force to global authoritarianism.