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The Department of English Congratulates Peter Caster
Prisons, Race, and Masculinity In Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Film
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 co ntributed 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. (Amazon.com Book Description)
"This is an unusually valuable contribution to our understanding of a crucial subject for contemporary America." -H. Bruce Franklin, author of Prison Literature in America and editor of Prison Writing in 20th-Century America
"Peter Caster's new book moves smartly from textual analysis to larger social and historical study, balancing with dexterity the texts and contexts of fictive representation and historical recollection. Prisons, Race, and Masculinity offers significant insight into a modern American culture increasingly divided (and defined) by incarceration." -Jon Lewis, editor of the Cinema Journal and author of Hollywood v. Hard Core: How the Struggle over Censorship Saved the Modern Film Industry
"Peter Caster makes a sophisticated argument about the importance and centrality of race and penal culture in U.S. deomcracy. Caster is shrewd in his observations, which are based on strong scholarship." -Joy James, John B. and John T. McCoy Presidential Professor of Africana Studies & College Professor in Political Science at Williams College
Peter Caster is a recent graduate of The University of Texas at Austin, Department of English PhD program. He is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of South Carolina Upstate in the Department of Languages, Literature, and Composition.