Lecture event at Evergreen—Friday, May 23 @ 1pm
The Speculative Archive of Prison Abolition
Prison is more than a place of punishment: it is also a site of knowledge production. From sentencing reports and parole files to lawsuits, the prison is constantly producing and ordering artifacts. It is, in other words, an archive. The archive is shaped both by the government, which oversees prisons, and by incarcerated people themselves, whose diverse forms of resistance generates a parallel counter-archive. This talk explores the archival dimensions of prison, with particular attention to the archives that incarcerated people generate. Through an exploration of the digital archive Washington Prison History Project, Dan Berger shows how abolitionists have turned the conditions of confinement into a space to imagine freedom--a speculative archive.
Dan Berger is professor of comparative ethnic studies at the University of Washington Bothell and founder of the Washington Prison History Project. He is the author or editor of several books, including Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era and Stayed on Freedom: The Long History of Black Power Through One Family's Journey.
Sponsored by the Malcolm Stilson Archives and Special Collections and the Evergreen Liberation Education Network, with support from the Daniel J. Evans Reading Series.