Life of Paper
Letters and a Poetics of Living Beyond Captivity
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 19976137 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Sharon Luk (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2017 |
| Pages | 328 |
| Publication date | 2017-11-10 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | BOOK |
| Venue | The Life of Paper (SOURCE_BOOK) |
| Publisher | University of California Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1525/california/9780520296237.001.0001 |
| OpenAlex | W4250083606 |
| Open Library | OL27409196M |
| ISBN | 9780520296237 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 5 |
This book explores the life-worlds sustained through letter correspondence within the evolution of racism and mass incarceration in California history. Across three cases, this investigation uncovers how letter correspondence facilitates a form of communal life for groups targeted for racialized confinement in different phases of development in the U.S. West: “Detained” focuses on migrants from Southern China during peak years of U.S. Chinese Exclusion; “Interned” focuses on families of Japanese ancestry during the WWII period; and “Imprisoned” focuses on socialities of Blackness in the post-Civil Rights era. This study clarifies how mass incarceration functions as a process of systematic social dismantling, situating research on letters within global capitalist movements, multiple racial logics, and overlapping modes of social control that have taken distinctive form in California. Framing letters within this political violence that qualifies them, this book examines how the structural, physical, ideological, and affective labor internalized in the letter creates alternative conditions to reinvent people’s own ways of life: a “poetics” or art of becoming, mediated in and through the letter and the interaction of literature with history, that prioritizes the dynamics of creative essence to generate an other kind of social power bound to the unfathomable
Art · China · Framing (construction) · Ideology · Literature · Poetics · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Race (biology) · Racialization · Racism · Sociology · Gender Studies · History · Law · Race, History, and American Society · African americans · California · Chinese Americans · emigration and immigration · Imprisonment · Japanese americans · Prisoners · united states
| Unique citing works | 5 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,63 |
| Citation span | 2018 - 2024 (7) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 5 |