Suchergebnisse

Michelle Brown's second book of poetry, Swans, begins as a night out between three best friends at an eponymous watering hole before becoming a phantasmagorical coming-of-age fable by closing time. In between, memory shifts and poems shuffle like songs on a jukebox, detailing fraught female friendship, sexual awakening, alcohol abuse and abandon in the dying days of a decade of decadence. Swans is a whip-smart collection from one of Canada's catchiest lyric poets.

America is the most punitive nation in the world, incarcerating more than 2.3 million people—or one in 136 of its residents. Against the backdrop of this unprecedented mass imprisonment, punishment permeates everyday life, carrying with it complex cultural meanings. In The Culture of Punishment, Michelle Brown goes beyond prison gates and into the routine and popular engagements of everyday life, showing that those of us most distanced from the practice of punishment tend to be particularly harsh in our judgments.The Culture of Punishment takes readers on a tour of the sites where culture and punishment meet—television shows, movies, prison tourism, and post 9/11 new war prisons—demonstrating that because incarceration affects people along distinct race and class lines, it is only a privileged group of citizens who are removed from the experience of incarceration. These penal spectators, who often sanction the infliction of pain from a distance, risk overlooking the reasons for democratic oversight of the project of punishment and, more broadly, justifications for the prohibition of pain

With its foundations of injury, harm, and pain, the sociology of punishment is poised to give attention to the role of empathy at precisely those instances of social experience where human connection, understanding, and social knowing are destroyed, avoided, prohibited, or simply impossible. I explore this predicament through a specific case drawn from fieldwork in a geriatric prison, where institutional and intersubjective relations established by prison workers challenge empathic connections. The 'graying' of the prison population, one of mass incarceration's unanticipated consequences, brings issues of pain, death, and dying to the fore. The majority of research to date on aging and dying in prison has had an important descriptive and policy orientation. There has been less of an emphasis upon the theoretical underpinnings of such a turn and the nature of intersubjective relations at the intersection of care and punishment. There have been no intensive ground-level analyses of aging in prison against the backdrop of mass incarceration in the contemporary era. This study seeks to fill that vacuum while offering a more complex understanding of the relevance and limits of empathy to the study of punishment.

When one thinks of early modern dramatic examples of revenge, the first titles that spring to mind may include Titus Andronicus, Hamlet, and The Spanish Tragedy. These three and others adhere to a rough template: first, the play begins with social or political unrest; second, the conflict comes to a head through the action of the play; and third, the conflict is resolved by the final act, often with few survivors. You may even be familiar with the phrase: "In the Fourth Act the die is cast. In the Fifth Act the cast dies." These qualities can be anticipated in tragedies, but can also be found as tragic elements encompassed within other genres. Revenge can be found in comedies alongside other stereotypes and expectations: the restoration of social order and a marriage or at least the implication or anticipation of a marriage (Hopkins 16). Dramatic expectations and stereotypes were formed through years of perfecting and use by Renaissance dramatists; however, as soon as they were established, playwrights began to break with dramatic expectations and blur the lines between tragedy and comedy. Shakespeare created plays like The Tempest in which both tragic and comic circumstances fuel the plot and the conclusion includes both a death, as Prospero abandons his magic, and an impending marriage between Ferdinand and Miranda. Ben Jonson, too, contributed to this new genre and engaged tragic themes within comedy.

At the core of this (re)coded comic holotrope are two concepts: game as world (re)mapping (rather than game as text) and the relationality and connections that reverberate through multiple realms. Indigenous use of digital media warrants engagement of indigenous theorists and scholars to this digital realm - Gerald Vizenor and Mishuana Goeman's work on political and literary analysis to explore the concepts of Never Alone (re)mapping the comic holotrope of survivance. The portmanteau kinnections is introduced here to further articulate emergences of decolonial relations and kin-making practices.