Chapter 1. Probing the Intersections of Human Rights, Suffering, and Aesthetics in Political Prison Narratives: An Introduction Chapter 2. Reviving Muted Voices: Rhizomatous Forces in Political Prison Literature Chapter 3. Surviving Traumatic Captivity, Arriving at Wisdom: An Aesthetics of Resistance in Chinese Prison Camp Memoir Chapter 4. The Argument From Silence: Morocco's Truth Commission and Women Political Prisoners Chapter 5. The Persistence of Spectacle in PRC Modes of Punishing Criminality and Deviance Chapter 6. The Cocoons of Language: Torture, Voice, Event Chapter 7. A Primer for the Politics and Literature of Resistance: Apparitional Subjectivity in The Collective Autobiography of the New York 21 Chapter 8. Remembering Pain in Uruguay: What Memories Mean in Carlos Liscano's Truck of Fools Chapter 9. Deviating from the Norm? Two Easts Testify to a Prison Aesthetics of Happiness
Yenna Wu is a distinguished teaching professor at the University of California, Riverside. Simona Livescu is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Interest in prisons, particularly in the US, has been increasing in
the past ten years or so, but for the most part the interest has
led to scholarly or popular books detailing the extent of
incarceration. Works devoted to prison writing have tended to be
anthologies--among the recent ones, Bell Gale's Doing Time (2011).
The current volume is surprising in that Wu (comparative and
Chinese literature, Univ. of California, Riverside) and Livescu
(PhD candidate, UCLA) focus on the aesthetics of past and present
political prison literature, from Mao's forced-labor camps to
Morocco's gender-biased justice system. The "aesthetics" in
general--whether marked by decentered "rhizomatous forces" (to
quote Wu) or articulating a quest for freedom--is seen in relation
to the central problem of the material: the inexpressibility of the
political prisoner's experience. Steering clear of broad
sociological theories about repression or authoritarianism, the
essays have a laudable sobriety, treating prison writings as
imperfect evocations of torture, attempts at resistance, and even
expressions of happiness in captivity. The wide geographical scope
of the volume adds to the sense of objectivity. A fascinating and
welcome book. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower- and
upper-division undergraduates; faculty; general readers.
*CHOICE*
The anthology is a good basic resource on political prison
narratives. Of particular interest to researchers might be the way
in which the narratives in this collection share dissidence as a
theme that conforms neither to the state discourse on the events
that took place, nor to the clinical and documentary report format
that is necessary to document human rights abuses.
*Interactions: UCLA Journal of Education & Information Studies*
Yenna Wu and six distinguished authors offer analysis and
perspectives on what one can learn from the writings of political
prisoners. This is rich territory: the beginnings of political
wisdom is seldom reached more dramatically than through the
experiences of the victims of political persecution.
*American Journal of Chinese Studies*
Presented with a human rights report from one repressive regime or
another, most readers will first comment on the horrors encountered
without grasping the enormity of resistance calling for such
repression. Characterized by a healthy mix of more established and
younger scholars, this volume paves the way for such a
transformation, for an understanding that prison memoirs are not
lamentations but forceful political facts whose deeper effects on a
society are pervasive. In opening literary criticism and cultural
studies to the urgency of writing by political prisoners across a
wide geographical and generic spectrum, these engaged essays delve
into essential texts and historical moments in Asia, the Middle
East, Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and the Americas, North and
South. Of particular note are the superb contributions on too
little known figures from Syria, Morocco, Uruguay, and the United
States. One hopes that the kind of work collected in Human Rights,
Suffering, and Aesthetics in Political Prison Literature is the
harbinger of further nuanced, contextualized, and informed
presentations as essential texts excavated from the human depths of
our repressive time find a wider and more general readership.
*Ammiel Alcalay, Queens College/CUNY Graduate Center*
This powerful volume theorizes late twentieth century political
detainees' narratives from China, Egypt, Morocco, Syria, Romania,
Russia, Uruguay, and the U.S. Authors reveal how these documentary
and literary narratives frame a rights discourse and play a
critical role in uncovering the mechanisms of silencing and
dehumanization practiced across the globe that would otherwise
continue sub rosa. Was it not the stories of the Egyptian women and
men thrown into jail after the April 2008 uprising that launched
the 2011 revolution? A highly engaging collection of essays about
testimonials, memoirs and works of fiction, Human Rights,
Suffering, and Aesthetics in Political Prison Literature will not
allow us to forget the brave women and men around the world who are
prepared to pay for their demands that the truth be brought to
light and justice be served.
*Miriam Cooke, Duke University*
This volume brings together a broad collection of scholarly essays
that remind us that, while cruelty is a shared human trait, so too
is the human capacity for creativity, eloquence, and courage in the
face of such cruelty. These studies treat the aesthetics of the
prison experience in the most sensitive and erudite terms. Focusing
on the Middle East, North Africa, central Europe, Asia, and the
Americas, the high level of scholarship of this work provides the
historian, the activist, the literary critic, and the humanist with
the means for better understanding genres of prison writing from
around the world.
*Alexander Elinson, Hunter College of the City University of New
York*
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