Confinement Studies in American Popular Culture

Chapters in this book

1. Acknowledgments 5
2. Table of Contents 7
3. Confinement Studies in American Popular Culture 1
4. Part I: Confinement Narratives on the Screen
5. Cinema and TV Series
6. The Individual vs. the Institution: Narratives of Confinement in New Hollywood Cinema 15
7. Trapped in Bluebeard’s Castle: Disney’s Beauty and the Beast as a Self-Contradictory Story of Empowerment and Imprisonment 31
8. (Dis)‌ableing the Confinement: Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water and Mark Medoff’s Children of a Lesser God 47
9. Transformative Power of Confinement and Subversion of Identity in The Experiment (2010) 63
10. “Where the City Started and the Suburbs Ended”: The (Sub)‌urban Confinement of Post-Industrial America in David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows 87
11. Never Let Me Go: Home, Family, and Confinement in Umma 103
12. Confinement and Consciousness: Exploring the ‘ Nomadic Consciousness’ in Maid 117
13. Documentaries
14. Incarceration Documentaries after the Curious Eclipse of Prison Ethnography 133
15. Dream in Place: Understanding Confinement through the Tactics of Fiction in Crystal Moselle’s The Wolfpack 151
16. Part II: Confinement Narratives from/about American Prisons
17. Claudia Jones and Angela Davis: Literature in Confinement 171
18. Confined to the Margins: Necropolitics, American Identity, and Racial Separation in Assata by Assata Shakur 185
19. Into the Lone Star Labyrinth: Texas Prison System Reflects The Death Gate Cycle Prison 201
20. Our Time on the Rock: Narrating Voluntary Confinement in Tommy Orange’s There There 217
21. “Have You Ever Seen a More Focused Killing Machine?” The Extreme Spectacle of Carceral Punishment in Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s Chain-Gang All-Stars 235
22. Part III: Confinement Narratives within Performances
23. Taylor Swift’s American Retreat: Covid, Cardigans, and Confinement in folklore 253
24. In The Devil's Grip: Competing Narratives of Confinement in X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X Opera 269
25. Index