Prisons, Race, and Masculinity in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Film (review)

The ever-growing field of prison literature studies focuses attention on a number of social issues that affect the way we read American literature. Class, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and religion are just some of the lenses that provide insight into American literature, and they fuse together into a magnifying glass when we read prison literature. When we look through this glass, we see aspects of our world invisible to the naked eye, and we also realize quickly that, when we shine a light through a magnifying glass long enough, things tend to smolder, or to burst into flames. Prison literature is both something we need to scrutinize and something that is potentially incendiary.

Peter Caster's new study, Prisons, Race, and Masculinity, is aware of both of these aspects of prison literature, and is cautious to separate literary and cinematic representations of prison from actual prison experiences. Part of the reason this literature can be incendiary is related to the mysteriousness of its subject: if prisons represent sites of fear and depravity for non-incarcerated citizens, then fictional renditions of prisons can easily become sensational and, gradually, damaging to those who inhabit them, or who once inhabited them. The fact that a wildly disproportionate number of United States prisoners are black males presents a real-world problem that is reinforced by distorted representations of prisons in literature and film: as Caster says, "Those not themselves incarcerated look to popular and provocative projections" of the prison experience, and "the sheer number of imprisoned black men is both a cause and a consequence of an expectation of criminality" (xii, xiii). This expectation is reinforced, in his argument, throughout the twentieth century in fiction and in film.

Caster's method is clear and consistent; he incorporates "tactics of psychoanalysis with the larger strategy of historically accounting for the production and reception of these books, films, and performances" (2). This is cultural criticism done very well, drawing from psychology, history, statistical analysis, the proceedings of the American Correctional Association for over thirty years, legal studies, and foundational studies in prison literature. This pluralistic approach does not distract from Caster's careful, original readings of texts: he impressively and deftly moves between his readings and his critical methodology, producing a clear study that will prove invaluable to scholars in the field of prison literature as well as those interested in the individual texts and authors he studies.

After thoroughly critiquing the relationship between imprisonment in history and in the popular imagination in his opening chapter, Caster's study contains seven chapters that progress roughly chronologically. The first three involve literary analysis; the subjects are three Faulkner novels, Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice, and Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song. The next three chapters scrutinize wide-release films of the 1990s: American History X, The Hurricane, and The Farm. A final chapter considers two live performances. This arrangement acknowledges the uniqueness of prison texts which may be rooted in a literary tradition, but which have adapted to other dramatic representations as the century has progressed.

The three chapters on film are quite thorough and, taken together, impressively coherent in both their approach to black male subjects and their critique of films that blur the boundary between imagined and real imprisonment. Caster is remarkably adept at critiquing film effectively in written analysis, and while he continues to develop his context in these chapters through statistics and other source materials, he focuses in depth on the films themselves. He boldly points to a "fallacy" in these three films: "The fallacy of these prison films' redemption narratives lies in their implicit endorsement of the legal system that they suggest unjustly imprisons, but nevertheless improves, black men" (108). The relationship between history and the imagination in these films is "vexed" in his view, and his analysis of them is convincing. Although the three films were produced for different audiences, under different circumstances, with vastly different budgets, and with...