Prisons, race, and masculinity in twentieth-century U.S. literature and film

Resource Information

The work Prisons, race, and masculinity in twentieth-century U.S. literature and film represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in University of Missouri-St. Louis Libraries. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

Prisons, race, and masculinity in twentieth-century U.S. literature and film

Statement of responsibility

Peter Caster

Title variation

Prisons, race and masculinity in twentieth-century United States literature and film

Creator

• Caster, Peter, 1972-

Subject

• American literature -- 20th century -- History and criticism
• American literature -- Film adaptations
• Executions and executioners in literature
• Imprisonment in literature
• Imprisonment in motion pictures
• Masculinity in literature
• Masculinity in motion pictures
• Motion pictures and literature -- United States
• African Americans -- Race identity

Language

eng

Summary

In Prisons, Race, and Masculinity, Peter Caster demonstrates the centrality of imprisonment in American culture, illustrating how incarceration, an institution inseparable from race, has shaped and continues to shape U.S. history and literature in the starkest expression of what W. E. B. DuBois famously termed "the problem of the color line." A prison official in 1888 declared that it was the freeing of slaves that actually created prisons: "we had to establish means for their control. Hence came the penitentiary." Such rampant racism contributed to the criminalization of black masculinity in the cultural imagination, shaping not only the identity of prisoners (collectively and individually) but also America's national character. Caster analyzes the representations of imprisonment in books, films, and performances, alternating between history and fiction to describe how racism influenced imprisonment during the decline of lynching in the 1930s, the political radicalism in the late 1960s, and the unprecedented prison expansion through the 1980s and 1990s. Offering new interpretations of familiar works by William Faulkner, Eldridge Cleaver, and Norman Mailer, Caster also engages recent films such as American History X, The Hurricane, and The Farm: Life Inside Angola Prison alongside prison history chronicled in the transcripts of the American Correctional Association. This book offers a compelling account of how imprisonment has functioned as racial containment, a matter critical to U.S. history and literary study

Member of

• Black performance and cultural criticism

Cataloging source

DLC

Dewey number

810.9/3556

Government publication

government publication of a state province territory dependency etc

Illustrations

illustrations

Index

index present

LC call number

PS228.I66

LC item number

C37 2008

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

bibliography

Series statement

Black performance and cultural criticism