CTSJ 305 Carceral Aesthetics and Abolitionist Poetics
This course examines how poetry, visual art, and cultural production both expose and resist the logics of the U.S. carceral state. Moving between prison writing, performance, film, and community-based creative work, we will explore how artists inside and outside prisons represent captivity, policing, surveillance, punishment, and the everyday practices of care and survival under conditions of unfreedom. Drawing from abolitionist feminist theory and praxis, Black studies, queer and trans studies, students will read works by writers, artists, and theorists engaging with the carceral state. Through close reading, collaborative analysis, and creative-critical experimentation, we will ask: How does art and poetry make the carceral visible and how does it make freedom imaginable? How do abolitionist aesthetics refuse representational norms? What new sensory, affective, and political practices emerge when those most impacted by the prison regime represent and theorize of their own lives? Students will analyze how carceral aesthetics are deployed in popular culture and public policy, and how abolitionist poetics imagine alternative social worlds beyond punishment.
Readings include the writings of incarcerated poets and thinkers, including works by Assata Shakur, George Jackson, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Joy James, Audre Lorde, Robin D.G. Kelley, Dylan Rodríguez, Gwendolyn Brooks, Terrace Hayes, Wanda Coleman, Nicole Fleetwood, and more. For these thinkers, the aesthetic realm is not a retreat from politics, but a potent (and fraught) strategy for perceiving, challenging, and reworking dominant forms of power.