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Carceral Liberalism

Carceral Liberalism

Name: Carceral Liberalism
Author: Shreerekha Pillai
ISBN: 9780252054556

Feminist Voices Against State Violence

Edited by Shreerekha Pillai

Introduction by Shreerekha Pillai

Foreword by Demita Frazier

Contributions by Cassandra D Little, Shailza Sharma, Shreerekha Pillai, Joanna Eleftheriou, Beth Matusoff Merfish, Francisco Arguelles Paz y Puente, Autumn Elizabeth, Zarinah Agnew, D Coulombe, Tria Blu Wakpa, Jennifer Musial, Maria F Curtis, Marta Romero-Delgado and Alka Kurian

Published by: University of Illinois Press

Imprint: University of Illinois Press

288 Pages

Digital download
9780252054556
Published: August 2023

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One of Ms. Magazine's Most Anticipated Books of 2023

Carceral liberalism emerges from the confluence of neoliberalism, carcerality, and patriarchy to construct a powerful ruse disguised as freedom. It waves the feminist flag while keeping most women still at the margins. It speaks of a post-race society while one in three Black men remain incarcerated. It sings the praises of capital while the dispossessed remain mired in debt.

Shreerekha Pillai edits essays on carceral liberalism that continue the trajectory of the Combahee River Collective and the many people inspired by its vision of feminist solidarity and radical liberation. Academics, activists, writers, and a formerly incarcerated social worker look at feminist resurgence and resistance within, at the threshold of, and outside state violence; observe and record direct and indirect forms of carcerality sponsored by the state and shaped by state structures, traditions, and actors; and critique carcerality. Acclaimed poets like Honorée Fanonne Jeffers and Solmaz Sharif amplify the volume's themes in works that bookend each section.

Cutting-edge yet historically grounded, Carceral Liberalism examines an American ideological creation that advances imperialism, anti-blackness, capitalism, and patriarchy.

Contributors: Maria F. Curtis, Joanna Eleftheriou, Autumn Elizabeth and Zarinah Agnew and D Coulombe, Jeremy Eugene, Demita Frazier, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, Alka Kurian, Cassandra D. Little, Beth Matusoff Merfish, Francisco Argüelles Paz y Puente, Shreerekha Pillai, Marta Romero-Delgado, Ravi Shankar, Solmaz Sharif, Shailza Sharma, Tria Blu Wakpa and Jennifer Musial, Javier Zamora

Foreword Demita Frazier

Acknowledgments

Introduction Shreerekha Pillai

Part One: Carceral Narratives and Fictions

Poems: Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, "Pantoum for a Black Man on a Greyhound Bus" and "Lost Letter #27: John Peters, Boston-Gaol to Phillis Wheatley Peters, Boston, December 3, 1784″

1. Carceral Trauma at the Intersections of Race, Class, Gender, Sexuality, and Maternity

Cassandra D. Little

2. Prisons and Politics: Conceptualizing Prison Memoirs

Shailza Sharma

3. Seeing Orange: Mediatizing the Prison Empire

Shreerekha Pillai

4. Emptied Chairs and Faceless Inmates: A Critical Analysis of the Texas Prison Museum

Beth Matusoff Merfish

Poems: Ravi Shankar, "Against Innocence" and "Sunday School" The Stories that will not be Confined

Poems: Solmaz Sharif, "Reaching Guantánamo"

Part Two: Carceral Bodies and Systems

Poem: Jeremy Eugene, "Space"

5. These Stories Will Not Be Confined

Joanna Eleftheriou

6. Cornered: Day Laborers, Criminalization and Rituals of Democracy in Texas

Francisco Argüelles Paz y Puente, aka Pancho

7. Resisting Criminalization: Principles, Practicalities, and Possibilities of Alternative Justices Beyond the State

Autumn Elizabeth, Zarinah Agnew, D Coulombe

8. Going Carceral? Analyzing Written and Visual Representations of Prison Yoga Programs

Tria Blu Wakpa and Jennifer Musial

9. Vacant Refuge, Unfinished Resettlement: Gendered Nativism and the Experience of Ambivalence among Displaced Syrian Iraqi and Women and Children in Houston, Texas

Maria F. Curtis

10. Gendered Punishment and Social Control: Silenced Memories of Women in Wartime Peru

Marta Romero-Delgado

11. Bad Girls of Pindra Tod

Alka Kurian

Poem: Javier Zamora, "Citizenship"

Contributors

Index

Shreerekha Pillai is a professor of humanities at the University of Houston, Clear Lake. She is the author of Women Writing Violence: The Novel and Radical Feminist Imaginaries.

"A uniquely valuable intervention. Those of us--and I would say that is the majority of us who live our lives 'in freedom'--are importuned by the book's address, to wake up, to care, because what we perceive as our 'freedom' made available, so we think, as a consequence of living in the crucible of liberal ideals and beliefs--is inextricably bound up with the logics of incarceration."--Fawzia Afzal-Khan, author of Siren Song: Understanding Pakistan Through its Women Singers

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