Race and Masculinity in Contemporary American Prison Novels

ISBN-13: 9780415975704 / Angielski / Twarda / 2005 / 158 str.

Auli Ek

Opis

Prison narratives are an invaluable source for the study of minority positions or discourses of otherness in US culture. Particularly in the discourses of the US criminal justice system, politics and the visual media, criminals are represented as the other, from the perspectives of race, sexuality and moral inferiority. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, this compelling study analyzes how American prison narratives reflect and produce ideologies of masculinity in the United States. For the first time, this book puts various subgenres of prison narratives into a dialogue in order to demonstrate a polar dichotomy in the institutional and public discourses of criminality. It draws together fascinating materials that have rarely, if ever, received careful attention and examines popular culture to demonstrate the profound ways in which implicit understandings of prison life shape all Americans, and their reactions to people both incarcerated and not.

Spis treści

Acknowledgments Representing Criminals: An Introduction Chapter One The Future of Imprisonment: Contemporary Science Fiction and Documentary Film Chapter Two African American Prison Autobiography: From Racial to Sexual Politics Chapter Three Divide and Conquer: Racialized Hierarchies in the Contemporary Prison Novel Chapter Four Surveillance and Prisoner Identity: Imprisoned Bodies as the American Other Epilogue: Global Effects of U.S. Discourses of Imprisonment Notes Bibliography Index

O autorze

Auli Ek is currently a lecturer in the UC Santa Barbara Writing Program. She is the recipient of the American Council of Learned Societies American Studies Program Fellowship in 1994-95 and the Academy of Finland Fellowship in 1995-1999. Her research interests include African American literature and film, Chicano/a literature, women's literature, and interdisciplinary approaches to race, gender, class, and sexuality in contemporary American cultural texts.