Organized by Naomi Paik, Ph.D. candidate in American Studies at Yale and IRGG Affiliate, “Plantation to the Prison” aimed to explore the history and cultural significance of incarceration in the United States over the last two centuries. The symposium was provoked in part by a sprawling domestic prison system and by the international scandals of Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, [the symposium sought] to build on a tradition of prison studies that took shape in the 1960s and 1970s, and especially to reconsider the long history of incarceration in light of present crises.”
Presentations thus examined “the prison outside the narrow framework of crime and punishment, hosting an interdisciplinary conversation that illuminates its relationships to legal, economic, and political history; race and gender; the evolving problem of citizenship; and literature and the arts.” Speakers for this event included Ruthie Gilmore, Joan (Colin) Dayan and Dylan Rodriguez.
Co-sponsored by the Marxist and Cultural Theory Working Group; Initiative on Labor and Culture