No Hostages through These Doors”
Thomas Bartlett Whitaker’s “Hell’s Kitchen” and the Politics of PEN
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8895658 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Ira Wells (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2014 |
| Volume | 44 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 471-499 |
| Publication date | 2014-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Canadian Review of American Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0007-7720 • E-ISSN: 1710-114X |
| Publisher | University of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.3138/cras.2014.001 |
| OpenAlex | W2029249767 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 15 |
PEN International, one of the world’s first human rights organizations, has long defended the free speech of persecuted writers. The PEN Prison Writing Program, however, has a slightly different agenda, which is to help convicted criminals become writers. The PEN Prison Writing Program “believes in the restorative and rehabilitative power of writing” and encourages “the use of the written word as a legitimate form of power.” But what is the nature of the “power” of the written word? And what, moreover, will this power restore and rehabilitate? When PEN proclaims the “power” of the written word, are they honouring an important strand of America’s liberal intellectual heritage? Are they pledging allegiance to a romantic coupling of art and freedom? Are they inadvertently helping to bind prisoners ever more insidiously to the carceral regime? Or are they claiming something that is actually true? This article addresses these questions through a reading of Thomas Bartlett Whitaker’s prize-winning essay “ Hell’s Kitchen ” and finds that the power of Whitaker’s prison writing resides in its capacity to shock readers into a sensory appreciation of the radical strangeness of life lived in a state of civil death
Allegiance · Art · Incantation · Literature · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Prison · Reading (process · Sociology · State (computer science · Computer Science · Hannah Arendt's Political Philosophy · Law · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism
Twice the work of free labor
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
The State of Exception
Reading Is My Window
The Prison and the American Imagination
The Collapse of American Criminal Justice
The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity
Prison Time
Inventing America
The Victim as Criminal and Artist
The philosophical discourse of modernity
Philosophy in a Time of Terror
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |