Prisons, Race, and Masculinity in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Film

In Prisons Race and Masculinity Peter Caster demonstrates the centrality ofimprisonment in American culture illustrating how incarceration aninstitution insepar... » 

In Prisons Race and Masculinity Peter Caster demonstrates the centrality ofimprisonment in American culture illustrating how incarceration aninstitution inseparable from race has shaped and continues to shape U.S.history and literature in the starkest expression of what W. E. B. DuBoisfamously termed the problem of the color line. A prison official in 1888declared that it was the freeing of slaves that actually created prisons wehad to establish means for their control. Hence came the penitentiary. Suchrampant racism co ntributed to the criminalization of black masculinity in thecultural imagination shaping not only the identity of prisoners collectivelyand individually but also Americas national character. Caster analyzes therepresentations of imprisonment in books films and performances alternatingbetween history and fiction to describe how racism influenced imprisonmentduring the decline of lynching in the 1930s the political radicalism in thelate 1960s and the unprecedented prison expansion through the 1980s and 1990s.Offering new interpretations of familiar works by William Faulkner EldridgeCleaver and Norman Mailer Caster also engages recent films such as AmericanHistory X The Hurricane and The Farm Life Inside Angola Prison alongsideprison history chronicled in the transcripts of the American CorrectionalAssociation. This book offers a compelling account of how imprisonment hasfunctioned as racial containment a matter critical to U.S. history andliterary study. «