African slavery provided the foundation for modern Brazil, even more so than in the United States. Ten times as many enslaved Africans were trafficked to Brazil as to the United States. Today over just over half of Brazil’s population is either black or of African descent. (More…)
Susan Burton’s autobiography Becoming Ms. Burton: From Prison to Recovery to Leading the Fight for Incarcerated Women, written with Carl Lynn, provides a necessary counter-history, describing an early adult life in and out of prisons and her subsequent anti-incarceration work. (More…)
Last year I was moderating a panel discussion on prison writing when I heard the phrase “system-impacted people” for the first time. The panellist objected to my use of the term “prisoners” and preferred this substitute. The term’s shift in responsibility is striking. It indicts society for crime rather than acknowledge any element of individual responsibility. (More…)
For better or worse, usually the latter, there is a rule of thumb in US higher education: what happens at Harvard gets noticed. (More…)
If all follows plan, an Israeli space project will land in early April on the moon’s Mare Serenitatis, the Sea of Serenity. Somewhere here there is an unintended comment on the distance needed to travel for Middle East peace. The Beresheet lander may achieve escape velocity from earth orbit, but it will not escape Middle East politics. (More…)
One measure of twentieth-century conceptual conflict over comics in China lies between the positions of literary critic Hu Feng and Mao Zedong. Hu Feng, an inheritor of the May 4th revolutionary tradition, argued that individual subjectivity provided the basis for responding to popular sentiment and political will. (More…)
Sometimes I wish the United Kingdom would finish its prolonged post-imperial suicide. Divide the kingdoms and make Cornwall great again. (More…)
Where does prison literature begin and where does it end? At the prison gates? Only with jailed writers? Given the sprawling impact of prisons on American society, no definition of prison literature will hold. (More…)
One night on a kibbutz in the early 1970s, a German volunteer named Wolfgang turned up at my door asking for assistance. He’d climbed over a high gate returning from Tel Aviv, fell, and had a nasty cut across his palm. I took him to the clinic while a friend fetched the kibbutz nurse, a concentration camp survivor with a tattoo on her arm. (More…)
On 11 December, the UK parliament will vote on the EU withdrawal treaty. The May government is at imminent risk of collapse should parliament fail to ratify the Brexit treaty. All of this matters in Arizona and every other US state. (More…)
Some of my best students are sex offenders. These are the untouchable lepers of US prison systems. (More…)
Slave narratives are working-class literature in extremis. They relate an existential struggle for possession of self and labour. Failure to wrest control away from a master or to effect escape often means traumatic depression. The slave narrative is predicated on the eventual success of that struggle. Stripped to its essence, a slave narrative is a working-class fight to the death. (More…)