Agency, resistance, and alienation: the carceral geographies of art in the American prison system
In the contemporary era of neoliberal incarceration, when marginalized populations are considered surplus (Gilmore in Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California, University of California Press, 2007) and are ‘disappeared’ from urban space, they are treated by be...
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| Tipo de documento: | Print Artículo |
| Lenguaje: | Inglés |
| Publicado: |
2024
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| En: |
Justice in the age of agnosis
Año: 2024, Páginas: 45-72 |
| Verificar disponibilidad: | HBZ Gateway |
| Palabras clave: |
| Sumario: | In the contemporary era of neoliberal incarceration, when marginalized populations are considered surplus (Gilmore in Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California, University of California Press, 2007) and are ‘disappeared’ from urban space, they are treated by being geographically relocated to carceral environments (Wacquant in Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity, Duke University Press, 2009). Yet while those marginalized populations that are predatorily incarcerated are victims of state violence, many incarcerated individuals and groups engage in activity that is an alternative to that totalizing nature (Goffman in Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates, Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, 1961) of incarceration, notably through the form of artistic practice and performance. While incarcerated artists engage in aesthetic endeavors as an alternative to being dispossessed by the state, (Fleetwood in Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration, Harvard University Press, 2020; Harbert and Gaines 2016), many others simultaneously are more passively engaged in their art, and do not exhibit interest in adopting a more self-imagined subversive identity in their artistic pursuits. Through a series of ethnographic methods I investigate how and why participants in several prison arts programs (music, theater, and visual art) come to view their artistic performance and consumption as active resistance, while others see their art more as agency and are more indifferent about artistic opportunities to resist state power. I argue that while individuals and groups may engage in artistic pursuits in carceral space, artistic discovery often ignores and is agnostic to the structural causes of confinement, distracting incarcerated populations from why they are incarcerated and operating instead as mode of pacification and discipline in the prison. |
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| Notas: | Literaturverzeichnis: Seite 70-72 |
| Descripción Física: | Illustrationen |
| ISBN: | 9783031543531 |
