Post date: May 31, 2017 8:52:0 AM
September 7-8, 2017 [see conference website]
Centre for Comparative Studies, Faculty of Arts, University of Lisbon
Prisons are commonly considered institutions of secondary importance, as something that stays on the fringes of society rather than being an integral part of it. If prisons offer «a grotesque mirror of society» (Bernault 2003), the image they reflect is one that many people do not wish to look at. Carceral architecture contributes to this perception since, despite some exceptions, prisons are usually built far from the populace. As a matter of fact, not only does imprisonment extirpate detainees from the body of society, but it also conceals them from its view, so that citizens can live virtually ignoring them and the institution that keeps them in custody.
Yet, in spite of the apparent invisibility of the prison in the public sphere, its spectre haunts the collective imaginary and it does materialise frequently in visual and literary contemporary culture. What is more – and certainly more important –, numbers on imprisonment worldwide show a shocking reality of mass incarceration, further worsened by the fact that rates keep on growing appallingly fast. In the United States, for example, the rate of incarceration more than quadrupled since 1970, while in Brazil there was an increase of 1306% between 1969 and 2006 and the trend upward has not been reverted in the past ten years.
Academia has shown an increasing interest on the subject in the last decades, especially since Michel Foucault launched his work on the birth of the prison in 1975. Discipline and Punish had the merit of fostering the study of prisons as modern institutions: since its publication, more and more scholars of different areas have engaged in historical, sociological, political and cultural analysis of prisons. Powerful critical accounts have additionally emerged from the work of canonical critical thinkers such as Deleuze (with his reflection on the society of control), Derrida (with his writings on the death penalty) or Loïc Wacquant, among others. Despite the different questions which these studies add to the overall discussion, they all counteract the popular perception that prisons are marginal or minor institutions. The prison is still a potent instrument for the maintenance of state power and social hegemony.
A critique and a reappraisal of the work of Foucault and his peers is vital for the further theoretical and political development of carceral studies. To generate a more complete and potent canon of critical literature, attentive to various intersecting political issues, it is necessary, for instance, to consider the history of practices of punishment in colonial territories and those practices’ relation with the institution of slavery, and to acknowledge the importance of African American anti-racist intellectuals, such as Angela Davis, whose thought had a large influence on Foucault (Weheliye 2014). This will also imply renewing our awareness of how carceral institutions and practices have actively contributed to the oppression and exclusion of people not conforming to the social, economic and political norm, including the poor, non-white people, LGBTQ subjects and political dissidents of various kinds – to name but a few examples. In fact, the establishment of detention as the primary form of punishment has been essential to nurture the interests of dominant social groups and to determine their success. This has only been intensified by the economic interests that characterise contemporary carceral institutions, especially given the visible trend towards privatisation, which reinforces the social structure of mass incarceration with notable social and political consequences.
The primary aim of this seminar is to critically discuss the role(s) of prison and of prison-like institutions, such as asylums, reformatories, centres for the detention of immigrants and so on. We wish to focus on the bodily experiences of people caught up in the carceral system, drawing particular attention to dissident subjects who materially and discursively embody modes of resistance to it. In fact, although the purpose of the prison is to create disciplined, ‘docile and submissive bodies’ (Foucault 1975), inmates have always put into action multiform practices of resistance and dissidence. Art, music and literature originated in the prison, for example, have reached the outside public and spread throughout society, attesting to inmates’ capacity to resist and survive carceral logics. We thus hope to complement critical and theoretical depictions of the carceral space with a keen sense of the precarious and dissident voices which affectively, somatically and creatively articulate themselves from within it.
Key-note speakers:
Ruth Gilmore Wilson (The City University of New York)
Zakaria Rhani (Université Mohamed V of Rabat)
We welcome papers from various disciplines and topics including, but not limited to, the following:
• Theories of political embodiment: the politics of the incarcerated body.
• Logics of punishment: violence, incarceration and other forms of penalty.
• Aesthetics of the carceral: representations of the prison and the prison-like in contemporary visual and literary culture.
• Prison writings: writing of and beyond the self
• Embodiment and affectivity in the carceral space: experiences and narratives of resistance.
• Carceral culture and racism: race, biopolitics and incarceration.
• Same-gender dynamics: homosociality, homosexuality and homoeroticism in the carceral space.
• The gendered logics of incarceration: male contexts, female contexts, and the struggles of transgender subjects.
• Refugee and migrant detention camps in the European context: the politics of policing borders and bodies.
• The colonial history of practices of bodily monitoring and repression: experiences, trajectories, transports in and out of the metropolis
The Conference’s working language is English.
Please send the Organizing Committee 300-word abstracts for 20-minute presentations, as well as a brief biographical note (circa 200 words), to prisonstatecilm@gmail.com by July 1st 2017, Notification of acceptance will be given by July 24th 2017.
Price for participation: 35 Euros (includes coffee breaks, one lunch, handbook & conference kit as well as certificate of participation).