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Incarceration Documentaries after the Curious Eclipse of Prison Ethnography

  • Lee A. Flamand

    Lee A. Flamand is Postdoctoral Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter (Postdoctoral Research Associate) in American Studies at Ruhr University Bochum. He holds degrees from the University of California, Berkeley and Freie Universität Berlin and is the author of American Mass Incarceration and Post-Network Quality Television: Captivating Aspirations (Amsterdam University Press, 2022).
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Narratives of Confinement in American Popular Culture
This chapter is in the book Narratives of Confinement in American Popular Culture

Abstract

Two decades have passed since Loïc Wacquant called for sociologists to spend less time intervening in debates surrounding mass incarceration and more time gaining access to prisons. The intervening years have witnessed not only an increase in ethnographic treatments of life behind bars, but also a veritable boom in incarceration documentaries. Viewing the prison as a narrato-praxeological complex of individual and mass confinement, this chapter examines two documentaries, The House I Live In (2012) and Solitary: Inside Red Onion State Prison (2016), which stage explorations of American incarceration through competing and contrasting models of investigation. It finds that while audiences have more exposure to the vaunted realities of incarceration than ever before, such “access” remains both distorted by ever-proliferating narratives of confinement and policed by fraught questions of convention, authority, and the prerogatives of the media industries.

Abstract

Two decades have passed since Loïc Wacquant called for sociologists to spend less time intervening in debates surrounding mass incarceration and more time gaining access to prisons. The intervening years have witnessed not only an increase in ethnographic treatments of life behind bars, but also a veritable boom in incarceration documentaries. Viewing the prison as a narrato-praxeological complex of individual and mass confinement, this chapter examines two documentaries, The House I Live In (2012) and Solitary: Inside Red Onion State Prison (2016), which stage explorations of American incarceration through competing and contrasting models of investigation. It finds that while audiences have more exposure to the vaunted realities of incarceration than ever before, such “access” remains both distorted by ever-proliferating narratives of confinement and policed by fraught questions of convention, authority, and the prerogatives of the media industries.

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
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111474137-010

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
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