New York University 4 credits Core: Colloquium
Does anyone deserve to be unfree? What does captivity tell us about freedom? Does incarceration evidence a move away from cruel punishment in modern times? Is confinement always about punishment? Is punishment a universal component of justice? This course tracks the history of captivity, confinement and incarceration. We examine laws and literatures of captivity in ancient Rome and the medieval Islamic world through to humanitarian debates around slavery and modern prisons and the political economy of successive wars on Crime, Poverty, Drugs, and Terror in the Americas. Our protagonists range from anti-colonial nationalists in Kenya and Chinese indentured laborers, to prisoners of the Russo-Ottoman wars and convict laborers in Australia. Through the writings of captives, lawmakers, architects, and activists we explore the personal and political consequences of incarceration in sites such as prisons, ships, penal colonies, POW camps, asylums and detention centers. We interrogate how class, gender and race co-determine who ends up in these sites, and how different carceral regimes shaped local environments and global relations of power, production, trade, mobility and culture. Prerequisites: Must be at least Sophomore Standing.
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