I received the following email today. I’m still looking into the details of the story and may post further thoughts later, but needless to say it is extremely troubling.
From Dr. Alf Gunvald Nilsen:
Dear Friends
I’m writing to call your attention to a recent incident at the University of Nottingham, where a one of our Graduate Students at the School of Politics and International Relations and an administrative member of staff at the Department of Engineering were arrested by armed police under the Terrorism Act of 2000. Their alleged “crime” was that the graduate student had downloaded an Al-Qaeda training manual from a US government website for research purposes, as he’s writing his MA dissertation on Islamic extremism and international terrorist networks. He had then sent this to his friend in the Department of Engineering for printing. The printed material had been spotted by other staff and reported to the University authorities who passed on the information to the police. The two were then arrested by armed police on May 14 and held for six days without charge, before being released without charge on May 20. During the six days they were imprisoned, the men had their homes raided and their families harassed by the police. It is worth noticing that in talking to one of my colleagues, a police officer remarked that the incident would never have occurred if the persons involved had been “blonde, Swedish PhD students” (the two men were of British-Pakistani and
Algerian backgrounds respectively).
The incident was recently reported in the Times Higher Education Supplement online. [click
here.]
Needless to say, this raises hugely important issues both about academic freedom and civil liberties. Obviously, there is the issue that for those of us involved in research on contentious issues we will by necessity have to consult primary materials of a controversial nature, and the fact that the material is controversial should not lead to it being deemed as illegitimate research material. Moreover, we should not under any circumstances have to fear for infringements upon our civil liberties as a consequence of doing our jobs. Moreover, it goes without saying that the university should guarantee the academic freedom, freedom of speech and expression, and civil liberties of all members of staff and students, irrespective of ethnic and religious background or political beliefs!
I would be most grateful if you could circulate this e-mail as widely as possible in the interest of raising awareness and attention about this incident and the wider issues of academic freedom that it gives rise to, to as many of your friends and colleagues as possible! I would of course also be very grateful if any of you would be willing to write to the University of Nottingham to express your concern about this issue. If you are willing to do so, please contact me as soon as possible.
A panel I put together and submitted to the upcoming
ATHE (Association for Theatre in Higher Education) conference was accepted. Details follow.
Title::
(Im)Prison(ment) and/as Performance
Abstract:
An exploration of prison performances in the information age: from Oklahoma, to the Philippines, to Northern Ireland. Issues of agency, rehabilitation, and the exoticization of the prisoner are examined.
Rationale
Foucault and others have framed changes in post-Enlightenment penal systems as a move from the spectacle of punishment to the containment of the self, a process that takes place behind forbidding walls and locked gates, invisible to the public. Prison architecture tends always to be forbidding and monolithic, signifying omnipotent systems of control and impenetrable borders.
What happens, though, when prisoners and/or prison officials stage imprisonment itself as public spectacle? While most “prison theatricals,” (Goffman) are either for prisoners and guards alone or for a small invited audience, the events examined by this panel are intended for public consumption.
Noe Montez examines the Oklahoma State Penitentiary Rodeo, an annual event that brings thousands of audience members inside the walls of a maximum security prison to witness prisoners riding bulls and racing horses. Jules Odendahl-James unpacks the recent YouTube performances of the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center in the Philippines. Under the direction of “security consultant” Bryan Garcia, 1500 Filipino prisoners danced to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” and other songs, garnering international attention both online and in the mainstream “Western” media. Laura Hope discusses Margaretta D’Arcy, a playwright turned IRA activist who conceives of her protests and subsequent imprisonments as an extension of her theatrical activities, calling them “loose theatre.”
These papers interrogate notions of agency, rehabilitation, and the exoticization of the prisoner body as they explore what happens when prison gates become theatre curtains and the surveillance technology of the panopticon meets the entertainment technology of the information age.
I’m not presenting a paper of my own because the panel went in a somewhat different direction than I had initially expected. Some of you may remember the CFP I put out late last year:
Call for Papers
In April, 1910, British Home Secretary Winston Churchill attended a performance of John Galsworthy’s Justice, a play focusing on the criminal justice system in general and the psychological results of solitary confinement in particular. The following July, Churchill, in a fiery speech to the House of Commons, proposed a complete overhaul of the UK penal system.
John Herbert’s Fortune and Men’s Eyes opened in New York on February 23, 1967. During one Tuesday night post-show discussion, an audience member challenged the play’s accuracy, claiming that prison life could not be as brutal and degrading as depicted in the play. Another audience member, former convict Peter McGarry responded with a description of prison life that lasted more than half an hour, painting a picture at least as bleak as that in the play. Producer David Rothenberg shortly thereafter founded The Fortune Society, an organization devoted to giving former offenders a public voice and to helping them rebuild their post-prison lives. Today, The Fortune Society serves over 4,000 ex-prisoners annually and employs a staff of 175 people, seventy percent of whom are former offenders.
The Culture Project’s 2002 production of The Exonerated, Jessica Blank and Erika Jensen’s docudrama about wrongfully convicted death row inmates, enjoyed sold-out houses in New York and toured the United States. Less than a month after seeing the production, Governor George Ryan commuted all existing death row sentences in the state of Illinois and instituted a statewide moratorium on the death penalty. The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers presented the writers, director and producer of the play their Champion of Justice Award.
In these and other (sometimes less uplifting) instances, prison plays have attempted to render the invisible visible by representing the usually hidden world of prison life under the glare of stage lights. Given the theme of this year’s ATHE conference (”Difficult Dialogues: Theatre and the Art of Engagement”), I am interested in forming a panel focusing on representations of prison, imprisonment, and incarceration in drama, theatre, and performance. How do these texts engage, catalyze, or simulate a “dialogue” about incarceration? How do theatrical representations of imprisonment vary from cinematic and televised representations? How are identity processes impacted, interrupted, and reconfigured by prisons, theatres, and prisons-within-theatres? What are the potential pitfalls of these representations?
Other possible topics/questions include:
The efficacy of prison plays.
Metatheatrical prison plays.
Prison and theatre as “queer spaces.”
The panopticon and the theatron
The exoticization of the prisoner.
Theatrical responses to Abu Ghraib and/or Guantanamo.
“Western” representations of “other” prison systems (Latin America, Turkey, the Middle East, Africa)
Prison musicals and/or operas.
Prisons as tourist attractions.
Representations of rehabilitation.
Geopolitical prison plays.
Prison as a function of national identity.
Traveling prison plays: how does a play about a specific prison or prison system change when it is performed for an audience unfamiliar with that system?
Giving voice to prisoners: Who can, or should be able to, claim that right?
Etc. There are myriad possibilities.
As is probably clear from the above, I’m interested in prisons themselves but my focus is on the representation of imprisonment on stage and in dramatic literature. The most interesting abstracts that were submitted, though, shared a somewhat different focus, so I adjusted the panel and decided not to include myself.
Still, I’m very much looking forward to it. I think all of the presentations sound fascinating and I’m excited that people are doing this kind of work.
Over the next couple of days I should work on submitting one of my papers for an “emerging scholars” panel at the same conference. Two birds/one stone and all that.
If you’re going to be in Denver in early August, let me know…
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