This course explores narratives of incarceration in the U.S. and Russia, from the nineteenth century to the present day. Our focus will be on prison memoirs by Black, Indigenous, and Asian American writers, alongside works by Russian and Soviet authors.

What might we gain by looking at the Soviet Gulag and American mass incarceration side-by-side? This course explores narratives of incarceration in the U.S. and Russia, from the nineteenth century to the present day. Our focus will be on prison memoirs by Black, Indigenous, and Asian American writers, alongside works by Russian and Soviet authors. To frame our discussions, we will read historical and theoretical texts on the development of the Russian, Soviet, and American penal systems, as well as theories of prison abolition. We will work to understand the specificities of these carceral histories, while also paying attention to the dynamics that have driven both: settler colonialism, extraction of natural resources, mass forced-labor projects, and the persecution of political activists and revolutionaries. We will analyze these works as rich literary texts, but also as primary documents that grant us insight into historical events, such as the internment of Japanese Americans, the Indigenous occupation of Alcatraz, Black Power organizing in prisons, and forced labor in the Soviet Gulag. Some of the topics we will consider are the ethics and aesthetics of writing about prison, the relationship between captivity and creativity, the uses of documentary versus fictional forms, the sociology of prison subcultures, philosophies of punishment and justice, and practices of resistance. We will examine how the experience of imprisonment is shaped by categories like race, nationality, gender, and class. Our readings cover a range of genres (autobiographies, novels, short stories, poetry, graphic memoirs) by authors including: Angela Davis, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Vera Figner, Martin Luther King, Jr., Miné Okubo, Leonard Peltier, Varlam Shalamov, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Lev Tolstoy, and Malcolm X.

Repeat Rules

Course is not repeatable for credit.

Requirements class fulfills