Prison reentry as a rite of passage for the formerly incarcerated

American prison systems may be shifting away from warehousing towards prisoner rehabilitation. California’s corrections policy, for example, has changed dramatically in response to a variety of pressures budgetary, operational and judicial. What might such changes mean for prisoner rehabilitation and the chances of formerly incarcerated persons leading meaningful, contributing lives? This is an exploratory essay on the possibility of a formerly incarcerated person finding himself through prison work. My primary concern is with understanding and utilizing current shifts in correctional philosophies and practices to create healing alternatives and a more inclusive justice, one with room for my own healing. I pursue this inquiry through the use of an autoethnographic approach to legal storytelling.     

“But how to speak of such things?”: decolonial love,the coloniality of gender,and political struggle in Francisco Goldman's The Long Night of White Chickens (1992) and Jennifer Harbury's Bridge of Courage (1994) and Searching for Everardo (1997)

This article presents an analysis of works by Francisco Goldman and Jennifer Harbury, which deal with “cataclysmic moments” of recent Guatemalan history. It explores gender relations in these works with reference to three themes: storytelling, communication and affective relationships. Conceptually, I draw on the notions of decolonial love, the coloniality of gender, and the world gender order as categories of analysis. I take Chela Sandoval's methodology of the oppressed as a guideline for my analysis, and look at the ways in which different types of storytelling perpetuate or question the coloniality of gender, at the consequences of intercultural misunderstandings produced by different readings of the coloniality of gender and the world gender order, and at the significance of a critical and liberatory practice of gender roles for decolonial love. The practice of decolonial love is an alternative to what Tzvetan Todorov has called “the dreadful concatenation,” which is a result of cultural encounters during the conquest of the Americas and which conceptualizes as “love” a feeling that sidesteps equality, an exercise in destruction and possession. The coloniality of gender and decolonial love are explored through their interactions with masculinities and femininities across the different case studies.     

The Story Slam Model: Leveraging Autobiography in Participatory Arts for Audience Diversification

ABSTRACT

The Story Slam is a trending model in participatory arts programming. This case study of the Philadelphia-based organization First Person Arts (FPA) examines the value of the Story Slam, both for individual audience members and for organizational audience development and engagement efforts. Findings explore the connection between creative agency in arts programming and audience loyalty, and between autobiographical programming and experiences of authenticity. This study ultimately examines a lack of socioeconomic and ethnic diversity in FPA's audiences, depicts how the Story Slam model naturally lends itself to the cultivation of a diverse community, and makes programming recommendations for increasing audience diversity.     

Of storytelling and the slippery medium of clay: Babette Wainwright's Image of the Women at the Diasporic Crossroads

Abstract

The paper seeks to explore the art historical dimension of Babette Wainwright's artistic preoccupation as it intersects with the emerging field of African diaspora and visual culture studies. To those unfamiliar with the visual vocabulary of Babette Wainwright's artistic preoccupation, her evocative and visually compelling imagery can be alienating. It is a scopic event of phenomenal dimension. One is either drawn by its charming and intriguing nature or one is simply repelled by it. It is an experience that compels the viewer to participate in its ‘communal visuality’, thus involving a tripartite dialogue between the gallery space, the work and the viewer. Right there in the middle of gallery, Wainwright suspended three wrecked ceramic boats in mid air, attached with the aid of a fishing string to the ceiling of the exhibition space. And on the floor, she displayed remnants of lost humanity, severed limbs, wreckages of ship and cargo, amidst the detritus of wasted lives, the gripping evidence of the white sand on the gallery floor. The entire atmosphere is very eerie and surreal. By one magical command, we are transported to the bottom of the ocean to view the evidence of man's inhumanity in its genocidal dimensions. Taken together, these material remains, represent vestiges and echoes of a bygone era. Here in poignant manner she has captured and immobilized more than three hundred years of the dispersal, enslavement, and catastrophic arrival of peoples of African descent in the Western Hemisphere.