Year: 2020
Type: article
Abstract: Using critical archival studies as a methodological frame, this paper applies theories of the carceral archive to two historic legal cases: the Ala Moana Boys and the Central Park Five. Through these two cases I demonstrate that engaging the three primary underpinnings of the carceral archive—documentary records, narrative construction, and Foucauldian conceptions of “the carceral”—can critically expose, complicate, and unsettle carceral narratives, providing a new theoretical framework for troubling what Nigerian author Chimamanda Adichie calls “the danger of a single story” in the historical record. Finally, I argue that it is through disrupting carceral narratives and centering more liberatory counter-narratives that archives might envision and promote themselves as sites replete with emancipatory impulses and ripe with liberatory potential.
Source: Open Information Science
Author: Tonia Sutherland
Institution: University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa
Language: English
Subfield: Conservation
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W3082709194