Rccs 9698
Rccs 9698
120 | 2019
Número semitemático
Electronic version
URL: http://journals.openedition.org/rccs/9698
DOI: 10.4000/rccs.9698
ISSN: 2182-7435
Publisher
Centro de Estudos Sociais da Universidade de Coimbra
Printed version
Date of publication: 1 December 2019
Number of pages: 107‑116
ISSN: 0254-1106
Electronic reference
Elisa Scaraggi, Daniel Lourenço, Susana Araújo and Cristina Martínez Tejero, « Tracing the Contexts of
Imprisonment: Perspectives on Incarceration between the Human and Social Sciences. An
Introduction », Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais [Online], 120 | 2019, Online since 12 December 2019,
connection on 25 September 2020. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/rccs/9698 ; DOI : https://
doi.org/10.4000/rccs.9698
Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais, 120, dezembro 2019: 107‑116
1
This essay was first published in L’autre journal in 1990 and was re‑published in Pourparlers
in the same year. It was later translated into English as “Postscript on the Societies of Control” and
published in the journal October in 1992.
108 | Elisa Scaraggi, Daniel Lourenço, Susana Araújo, Cristina Martínez Tejero
2
The project was supported under grant PTDC/CLE‑LLI/110694/2009(CILM1).
110 | Elisa Scaraggi, Daniel Lourenço, Susana Araújo, Cristina Martínez Tejero
which has, since then, developed three new lines of research under the plu‑
riannual funding of the Centre of Comparative Studies at the University
of Lisbon. CILM is concerned with figured and actual urbanscapes in the
contemporary post‑9/11, neoliberal societal paradigm and subtending
cultural narratives of terror, insecurity, fear and precariousness across
diverse regimes of representation. As part of CILM, this dossier is specifi‑
cally located within a research line entitled “Prison States and Narratives
of Captivity” which explores the material and discursive construction of
prisons and other carceral spaces and examines the historical, economic and
psychological contexts which shape the social and legal status of imprisoned
subjects. Within this approach, questions about representation are necessa‑
rily questions about subjectivity, sociality and hegemony as well. We depart
from the necessary politicization of cultural, literary and artistic studies to
ascertain how both our objects of study and our very own epistemic precepts
are engrained in wider architectures of power. It follows that our work is,
by necessity, interdisciplinary, multidimensional and multifocal: it is as
bound to texts as it is to contexts, and it is as motivated by the problematic
of the word as it is by the world as a problem.
In September 2017, we organized the international conference “Prison
States and Political Embodiment” at the School of Arts and Humanities,
University of Lisbon. Our aim was to question the political structures and
infra‑structures of carceral institutions and to stimulate a fruitful conversation
on subjection, embodiment and affectivity within contemporary prison con‑
texts. In doing so, we were concerned with the necessary work of institutional
critique as well as with rapports pertaining to the experiences, the emotions,
the relations, the impressions and ultimately the very narratives of incarcer‑
ated subjects themselves. We mobilized the concept of political embodiment
precisely to emphasize that corporeality is always already political, attentive to
how the subject’s making (and unmaking) as the effect of systemics of power,
governance and sovereignty remains an urgent question. Moreover, as the
legal scholar Muneer Ahmad suggests, the body is also the ultimate stage on
which the spectacle of dehumanization can be performed. Evoking Giorgio
Agamben’s notion of “bare life” and Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics to com‑
ment on the lack of rights and conditions experienced by the prisoners in
Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp, Ahmad states: “The site for confrontation
between the individual and the state is the body, for once the mediating force
of rights is removed, only the body remains” (2009: 1759).
The dossier that we present here follows through from the initiative of
the international conference, while taking a material form and internal logic
of its own. By calling attention to the inscription of the apparatus of power
Perspectives on Incarceration between the Human and Social Sciences. An Introduction | 111
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Elisa Scaraggi
Centro de Estudos Comparatistas (CEC), Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa (FLUL) |
Projecto CILM – City and Insecurity in Literature and Media, CEC‑FLUL
Alameda da Universidade, 1600‑214 Lisboa, Portugal
Contact: [email protected]
orcid: https://orcid.org/0000‑0002‑1411‑8929
Daniel Lourenço
Centro de Estudos Comparatistas (CEC), Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa (FLUL) |
Projecto CILM – City and Insecurity in Literature and Media, CEC‑FLUL
Alameda da Universidade, 1600‑214 Lisboa, Portugal
Contact: [email protected]
orcid: https://orcid.org/0000‑0003‑3359‑0820
Susana Araújo
Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Coimbra (FLUC) | Centro de Estudos Comparatistas (CEC),
Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa (FLUL) | Projecto CILM – City and Insecurity in
Literature and Media, CEC‑FLUL
FLUC, Largo da Porta Férrea, 3000‑530 Coimbra, Portugal
Contact: [email protected]
orcid: https://orcid.org/0000‑0002‑9046‑2211