The Literature Police

The Literature Police
Author: Peter D. McDonald
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 432
Release: 2010-10-14
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0191615439

'Censorship may have to do with literature', Nadine Gordimer once said, 'but literature has nothing whatever to do with censorship.' As the history of many repressive regimes shows, this vital borderline has seldom been so clearly demarcated. Just how murky it can sometimes be is compellingly exemplified in the case of apartheid South Africa. For reasons that were neither obvious nor historically inevitable, the apartheid censors were not only the agents of the white minority government's repressive anxieties about the medium of print. They were also officially-certified guardians of the literary. This book is centrally about the often unpredictable cultural consequences of this paradoxical situation. Peter D. McDonald brings to light a wealth of new evidence - from the once secret archives of the censorship bureaucracy, from the records of resistance publishers and writers' groups both in the country and abroad - and uses extensive oral testimony. He tells the strangely tangled stories of censorship and literature in apartheid South Africa and, in the process, uncovers an extraordinarily complex web of cultural connections linking Europe and Africa, East and West. The Literature Police affords a unique perspective on one of the most anachronistic, exploitative, and racist modern states of the post-war era, and on some of the many forms of cultural resistance it inspired. It also raises urgent questions about how we understand the category of the literary in today's globalized, intercultural world.

The End of Policing

The End of Policing
Author: Alex S. Vitale
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 298
Release: 2017-10-10
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1784782904

The massive uprising following the police killing of George Floyd in the summer of 2020--by some estimates the largest protests in US history--thrust the argument to defund the police to the forefront of international politics. It also made The End of Policing a bestseller and Alex Vitale, its author, a leading figure in the urgent public discussion over police and racial justice. As the writer Rachel Kushner put it in an article called "Things I Can't Live Without", this book explains that "unfortunately, no increased diversity on police forces, nor body cameras, nor better training, has made any seeming difference" in reducing police killings and abuse. "We need to restructure our society and put resources into communities themselves, an argument Alex Vitale makes very persuasively." The problem, Vitale demonstrates, is policing itself-the dramatic expansion of the police role over the last forty years. Drawing on first-hand research from across the globe, The End of Policing describes how the implementation of alternatives to policing, like drug legalization, regulation, and harm reduction instead of the policing of drugs, has led to reductions in crime, spending, and injustice. This edition includes a new introduction that takes stock of the renewed movement to challenge police impunity and shows how we move forward, evaluating protest, policy, and the political situation.

Police Aesthetics

Police Aesthetics
Author: Cristina Vatulescu
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2010-10-25
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0804775729

The documents emerging from the secret police archives of the former Soviet bloc have caused scandal after scandal, compromising revered cultural figures and abruptly ending political careers. Police Aesthetics offers a revealing and responsible approach to such materials. Taking advantage of the partial opening of the secret police archives in Russia and Romania, Vatulescu focuses on their most infamous holdings—the personal files—as well as on movies the police sponsored, scripted, or authored. Through the archives, she gains new insights into the writing of literature and raises new questions about the ethics of reading. She shows how police files and films influenced literature and cinema, from autobiographies to novels, from high-culture classics to avant-garde experiments and popular blockbusters. In so doing, she opens a fresh chapter in the heated debate about the relationship between culture and politics in twentieth-century police states.

No More Police

No More Police
Author: Mariame Kaba
Publisher: The New Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2022-08-30
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1620977303

An instant national best seller A persuasive primer on police abolition from two veteran organizers “One of the world’s most prominent advocates, organizers and political educators of the [abolitionist] framework.” —NBCNews.com on Mariame Kaba In this powerful call to action, New York Times bestselling author Mariame Kaba and attorney and organizer Andrea J. Ritchie detail why policing doesn’t stop violence, instead perpetuating widespread harm; outline the many failures of contemporary police reforms; and explore demands to defund police, divest from policing, and invest in community resources to create greater safety through a Black feminist lens. Centering survivors of state, interpersonal, and community-based violence, and highlighting uprisings, campaigns, and community-based projects, No More Police makes a compelling case for a world where the tools required to prevent, interrupt, and transform violence in all its forms are abundant. Part handbook, part road map, No More Police calls on us to turn away from systems that perpetrate violence in the name of ending it toward a world where violence is the exception, and safe, well-resourced and thriving communities are the rule.

The Novel and The Police

The Novel and The Police
Author: D. A. Miller
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 248
Release: 1988
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780520067462

"With the appearance of D.A. Miller's remarkable book, the Victorian novel has its most dazzling critic in years. . . . Miller's subject is not so much the police in fiction as fiction and policing, narrative as a conservative function of the polis. Tracking diverse strategies of surveillance and incarceration into the confines of the fictional institution itself, Miller investigates Victorian novels as the often unconscious agent of a disciplinary culture. He thus reads fiction reading us, keeping a public in its private place. His mastery of an intricate, layered, and sinuous argument is stunning, the writing no less than superb. For all the book's overarching debt to Foucault, D.A. Miller 'do the police' in a voice all his own."—Garrett Stewart, author of Death Sentences: Styles of Dying in British Fiction

A World Without Police

A World Without Police
Author: Geo Maher
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2022-11-08
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1839760060

If police are the problem, what’s the solution? Tens of millions of people poured onto the streets for Black Lives Matter, bringing with them a wholly new idea of public safety, common security, and the delivery of justice, communicating that vision in the fiery vernacular of riot, rebellion, and protest. A World Without Police transcribes these new ideas—written in slogans and chants, over occupied bridges and hastily assembled barricades—into a compelling, must-read manifesto for police abolition. Compellingly argued and lyrically charged, A World Without Police offers concrete strategies for confronting and breaking police power, as a first step toward building community alternatives that make the police obsolete. Surveying the post-protest landscape in Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Oakland, as well as the people who have experimented with policing alternatives at a mass scale in Latin America, Maher details the institutions we can count on to deliver security without the disorganizing interventions of cops: neighborhood response networks, community-based restorative justice practices, democratically organized self-defense projects, and well-resourced social services. A World Without Police argues that abolition is not a distant dream or an unreachable horizon but an attainable reality. In communities around the world, we are beginning to glimpse a real, lasting justice in which we keep us safe.

Policing a Class Society

Policing a Class Society
Author: Sidney L. Harring
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2017
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9781608468546

An in-depth critical analysis of how ruling elites use the police institution in order to control communities.

The Memory Police

The Memory Police
Author: Yoko Ogawa
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2019-08-13
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1101870613

Finalist for the International Booker Prize and the National Book Award A haunting Orwellian novel about the terrors of state surveillance, from the acclaimed author of The Housekeeper and the Professor. On an unnamed island, objects are disappearing: first hats, then ribbons, birds, roses. . . . Most of the inhabitants are oblivious to these changes, while those few able to recall the lost objects live in fear of the draconian Memory Police, who are committed to ensuring that what has disappeared remains forgotten. When a young writer discovers that her editor is in danger, she concocts a plan to hide him beneath her f loorboards, and together they cling to her writing as the last way of preserving the past. Powerful and provocative, The Memory Police is a stunning novel about the trauma of loss. ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR THE NEW YORK TIMES * THE WASHINGTON POST * TIME * CHICAGO TRIBUNE * THE GUARDIAN * ESQUIRE * THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS * FINANCIAL TIMES * LIBRARY JOURNAL * THE A.V. CLUB * KIRKUS REVIEWS * LITERARY HUB American Book Award winner

Vagrant Figures

Vagrant Figures
Author: Sal Nicolazzo
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2021-01-05
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0300255705

How vagrancy, as legal and imaginative category, shaped the role of policing in colonialism, racial formation, and resource distributionIn this innovative book demonstrating the important role of eighteenth-century literary treatments of policing and vagrancy, Nicolazzo offers a prehistory of police legitimacy in a period that predates the establishment of the modern police force. She argues that narrative, textual, and rhetorical practices shaped not only police and legal activity of the period, but also public conceptions of police power. Her extensive research delves into law and literature on both sides of the Atlantic, tracking the centrality of vagrancy in establishing police power as a form of sovereignty crucial to settler colonialism, slavery, and racial capitalism. The first book in several generations to address policing and vagrancy in the eighteenth century, and the first in the field to center race and empire in its account of literary vagrancy, Nicolazzo’s work is a significant contribution to the field of eighteenth-century literary and cultural studies.

Fatal Fictions

Fatal Fictions
Author: Alison L. LaCroix
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2017
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0190610786

Writers of fiction have always confronted topics of crime and punishment. This age-old fascination with crime on the part of both authors and readers is not surprising, given that criminal justice touches on so many political and psychological themes essential to literature, and comes equipped with a trial process that contains its own dramatic structure. This volume explores this profound and enduring literary engagement with crime, investigation, and criminal justice. The collected essays explore three themes that connect the world of law with that of fiction. First, defining and punishing crime is one of the fundamental purposes of government, along with the protection of victims by the prevention of crime. And yet criminal punishment remains one of the most abused and terrifying forms of political power. Second, crime is intensely psychological and therefore an important subject by which a writer can develop and explore character. A third connection between criminal justice and fiction involves the inherently dramatic nature of the legal system itself, particularly the trial. Moreover, the ongoing public conversation about crime and punishment suggests that the time is ripe for collaboration between law and literature in this troubled domain. The essays in this collection span a wide array of genres, including tragic drama, science fiction, lyric poetry, autobiography, and mystery novels. The works discussed include works as old as fifth-century BCE Greek tragedy and as recent as contemporary novels, memoirs, and mystery novels. The cumulative result is arresting: there are "killer wives" and crimes against trees; a government bureaucrat who sends political adversaries to their death for treason before falling to the same fate himself; a convicted murderer who doesn't die when hanged; a psychopathogical collector whose quite sane kidnapping victim nevertheless also collects; Justice Thomas' reading and misreading of Bigger Thomas; a man who forgives his son's murderer and one who cannot forgive his wife's non-existent adultery; fictional detectives who draw on historical analysis to solve murders. These essays begin a conversation, and they illustrate the great depth and power of crime in literature.