Q&A with Margaret Price

Margaret Price is Associate Professor of English at Ohio State University and author of Crip Spacetime, which intervenes in the competitive, productivity-focused realm of academia by sharing the everyday experiences of disabled academics.

When I think about access in academia, I often start from my own experiences. I work from the minoritized position of a disabled, genderqueer faculty member, but also from the privileged position of a white faculty member with tenure. I arrived at Ohio State in 2016, after having taught at a liberal-arts school, Spelman College, for twelve years. Spelman is a small, private, historically Black college for women; Ohio State is a gigantic, public, predominantly white research university. To say that change was a shock is an understatement. I had an extremely difficult transition, and yet, what exactly made it difficult was hard for me to figure out for quite some time.

This book began with your own experiences as a disabled academic. What is it about those experiences that necessitated the writing of this book?

During my hiring process at Ohio State, I talked candidly about my disabilities. I continued to talk about them after I arrived on campus. Yet at no point did anyone ask me about my access needs, either through formal or informal channels. The atmosphere wasn’t at all unwelcoming or hostile—rather, I was often told, “Just let us know if you need anything.” I felt generally deeply welcome, and specifically deeply unclear on exactly what form this welcoming might take, especially if I were in need of something other than targeted advice (“here’s how to use the printer”) or general goodwill (“we are glad you’re here”).

Unfortunately, the support I had wasn’t enough to get me through that first semester as I attempted to navigate dozens of doctor’s appointments with new caregivers, figure out OSU’s health-care infrastructure, and manage my increasing debilitation. Four months after my arrival, one of my doctors sent me to the emergency room in an ambulance, and after several days in the hospital and yet more meds, I was sent home.

Shortly thereafter, I went to see the ADA Coordinator at OSU, Scott Lissner. The agenda of our meeting was not my own accommodations; in fact, I didn’t even know, at that point, that he was the person in charge of faculty accommodations at OSU. All I knew was that I desperately needed help and was afraid to admit it. When Scott asked me how I was doing, I burst into tears and said something like, “I don’t know what to do, I am failing at my job.” It was a tremendous stroke of luck—and again, privilege—that Scott is not only such a kind person, but also happened to be the one responsible for assisting faculty with disabilities. He helped me figure out what accommodations I needed, and began putting them in place right then and there.

What’s most striking to me about this story is not that I fell through the cracks of the many services available at Ohio State. That happens all the time. What really strikes me is that a person could hardly have been better resourced, or more knowledgeable, about disability in higher education, than me. (I literally wrote the book on it.) Furthermore, I had already been teaching at colleges and universities for over twenty years; I am tenured, white, speak English as my first language, and am familiar with the landscape of academia; and at the time I went to see Scott, I had just been enthusiastically recruited into my job. And yet, there I was, trying to struggle through, and failing. The failure I was experiencing wasn’t any particular person’s “fault.” It emerged through the system I was in—and that I was part of.

Your book argues that the current system in place to achieve equal access in the academy – individual accommodations — doesn’t work. Can you describe what individual accommodations are, and why they don’t work?

An individual accommodation is designed to provide a fix for a problem. So this system imagines disability as the problem, with accommodation as the fix. For example, if a student processes information at a different speed than most of their peers, then the accommodation system imagines the student’s processing speed as a problem, with the “fix” as extra time to complete assignments or exams. While that can sometimes be effective, of course many issues arise with the problem / fix model. For example, it can be difficult or expensive to prove one’s disability exists; it can be difficult to actually arrange the accommodations; and so on.

However, Crip Spacetime argues that there’s a more fundamental issue at work, too. Accommodation implies (and, in everyday academic life, almost always requires) the ability to say, “I can tell you what I’m going to need—in an hour, in a week, next semester.” Thus, disabled people historically have tended to trade on whatever predictability we can muster—or masquerade—to gain access, often citing “rights” as we’ve done so. Unfortunately, identifying our needs and insisting on the “right” to have those needs met has also enabled the creation of a dividing line between those whose needs are stable enough, predictable enough, to benefit from the protections of institutionally sponsored accommodation—and those whose are not.

So in effect, no matter how well designed, well funded, and compassionate a system of accommodation might be, it will always create that two-tier effect. The more-privileged tier will be able to predict and articulate their needs well enough to implement accommodations. The less-privileged tier will not. And that less-privileged tier—those of us with disabilities that aren’t as predictable, or aren’t as (apparently) easily explained, or perhaps aren’t even regarded as disabilities at all—are much less likely to be able to survive in academe, either as students or as employees.

What would a better system for supporting access look like?

A better system for access would begin from the assumption that the community or group working toward access is working collectively, and is accountable to one another. Of course, that doesn’t always happen, especially in a competitive and productivity-driven world like academe. Thus, one of the big questions that Crip Spacetime left me with is, “What does collective accountability in academe—or in any institutional context look like?” I’m still working on that question.

In your book, you introduce the titular idea of “crip spacetime.” What is crip spacetime, and how does it manifest in academia?

Crip spacetime is a kind of reality that a person (or animal, or object) inhabits. When you are in, or a part of, crip spacetime, you have a visceral sense of the costs, geographies, temporalities, and relations that come with being disabled. It’s more all-encompassing than just having a particular point of view. It’s the actual reality you’re living in. A rough analogy might be putting on a VR headset and a full VR suit—it swallows up all other perception. But you can’t remove crip spacetime the way you can a VR suit.

You don’t have to be disabled to exist in—or be able to perceive and understand—crip spacetime. The close friends and family members of disabled people often have a strong, visceral understanding of this reality. Also, being disabled doesn’t mean you’ll necessarily perceive crip spacetime the way I describe it in the book. You may experience very little sense of difference from being disabled; in which case, your reality likely doesn’t include the sense of cost, time, space, and relationality that crip spacetime does.

One of the hallmarks of crip spacetime is that it can be very hard to understand from a different reality. For example, a person who has been living in crip spacetime may have very little patience left for conversations about why the elevator doesn’t work. They may shout or start to cry as soon as it happens. From a non-crip-spacetime reality, that reaction doesn’t make any sense. It seems to be coming out of nowhere. But that’s because the person in crip spacetime knows, both in terms of past experience and in terms of ability to predict the likely future, that a broken elevator means frustration, humiliation, wasted time, fruitless arguments, and a general sense that no one particularly cares. In this way, it’s similar to other kinds of minoritized realities: emotions or concerns that don’t seem “logical” or “warranted” from a more privileged reality.

How did you navigate weaving your personal experience with research and theoretical work when writing Crip Spacetime?

I’ve been a creative writer since I was a kid, and I earned an MFA before my PhD. Writing from my own experience—in poetry, fiction, and especially in nonfiction—has always felt more natural to me than pretty much any other medium, including talking out loud. So for me as an academic writer, the question has always been how to include enough markers of “academic” writing so that my work is recognizable to readers as research in addition to being recognizable as creative writing. The two have always seemed to go hand-in-hand to me.

Many of my fellow creative/academic writers have provided brilliant examples of how to weave together personal and academic writing. Some of my favorites include Jo Hsu, Moya Bailey, Ellen Samuels, and Jay Dolmage. I especially like to study the forms these writers use—how they weave in interludes or short chapters, how they write poetry as well as prose, and how they use online as well as print-based forms to express their experiences.

What should other academics reading this book take away in terms of how they can best support their disabled colleagues and students?

If we understand “disability” and “access” as relational and emergent, then we need to accept that enacting access in specific circumstances will require different moves in different circumstances. You may already know a great deal about universal design, or models of disability, or being disabled—and all of these are useful things to know. But bear in mind that there’s always more to learn.

At the same time, there are some general ideas that folks can educate themselves about. These are not rules; they’re more like conversation starters, or questions to explore. Here are a few places to look for those conversations: The National Center for College Students with Disabilities, including their resources for faculty and instructors; The Disability Visibility Project, including their podcast series; Disability, Opportunities, Internetworking, and Technology (DO-IT) at the University of Washington; The Composing Access Project from the Conference on College Composition and Communication.

Finally, I’d recommend that folks recognize that, while asking questions and participating in dialogues is a great way to learn, move forward with care. Don’t waylay a colleague and ask them about their disability when they’re not expecting it. And don’t assume you’re entitled to someone else’s story or expertise.

Instead, ask if they’re up for that conversation. And take opportunities to educate yourself. Attend a disability-studies talk online or at your own university / college / workplace. Browse the articles in disability-studies journals. Follow up with people who do offer to engage in conversation. There’s no checklist for the “right” way to support access. As I say when I give talks, “Access is all our work.”

Crip Spacetime is available in an open access edition, or you can save 30% on the paperback with coupon E24PRICE.

New Books in April

April showers bring plenty of opportunities to curl up inside with a new book. Check out the great new titles we have coming out this month!

In The Art of Remembering art historian and curator Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw engages in the process of “rememory”—the recovery of facts and narratives of African American creativity and self-representation that have been purposefully set aside, actively ignored, and disremembered.

In The Fold, Laura U. Marks offers a practical philosophy and aesthetic theory for living in an infinitely connected cosmos. With this guide for living within the enfolded and unfolding cosmos, Marks teaches readers to richly apprehend the world and to trace the processes of becoming that are immanent within the fold.

Incommunicable by Charles L. Briggs examines the long-standing presumptions that medical discourse translates easily across geographic, racial, and class boundaries.

Bombarded with the equivalent of one Hiroshima bomb a day for half a century, Pacific people have long been subjected to man-made cataclysm. In The Ocean on Fire, Anaïs Maurer analyzes the Pacific literature that incriminates the environmental racism behind radioactive skies and rising seas. 

In Third Worlds Within, Daniel Widener expands conceptions of the struggle for racial justice by reframing antiracist movements in the United States in a broader internationalist context.

The contributors to Psychiatric Contours, edited Nancy Rose Hunt and Hubertus Büschel, investigate new histories of psychiatry, derangement, and agitated subjectivities in colonial and decolonizing Africa.

In Crip Spacetime, Margaret Price intervenes in the competitive, productivity-focused realm of academia by sharing the everyday experiences of disabled academics. Price boldly calls for the university to move away from individualized models of accommodation and toward a new system of collective accountability and care.

In The Theological Metaphors of Marx, Enrique Dussel provides a groundbreaking combination of Marxology, theology, and ethical theory. Marx’s thought, impact, and influence cannot be fully understood without Dussel’s historic reinterpretation of the theological origins and implications of Marx’s critiques of political economy and politics. Translated by Camilo Pérez-Bustillo, the book includes a foreword by Eduardo Mendieta.

The Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano is widely considered to be a foundational figure of the decolonial perspective grounded in three basic concepts: coloniality, coloniality of power, and the colonial matrix of power. Aníbal Quijano, edited by Walter D. Mignolo, Rita Segato, and Catherine E. Walsh, is not simply an introduction to Quijano’s work; it achieves one of his unfulfilled goals: to write a book that contains his main hypotheses, concepts, and arguments. 

In Making Value, Timothy D. Taylor examines how people’s conceptions of value inform and shape their production and consumption of music. Drawing on anthropological value theory, Taylor theorizes music’s economic and noneconomic forms of value both ethnographically and historically.

Made in Asia/America, edited by Christopher B. Patterson and Tara Fickle, explores the key role video games play within the race makings of Asia/America. Its fourteen critical essays on games examine the historical entanglements of games, Asia, and America, and reveal the ways games offer new modes of imagining imperial violence, racial difference, and coalition.

The contributors to Situation Critical argue for the continued importance of critique to early American studies, pushing back against both reductivist neo-empiricism and so-called postcritique. Bringing together a diverse group of essays, editors Max Cavitch and Brian Connolly demonstrate that critique is about acknowledging that we are never simply writing better or worse accounts of the past, but accounts of the present as well. 

Yan Lianke is a world-renowned author of novels, short stories, and essays whose provocative and nuanced writing explores the reality of everyday life in contemporary China. Encapsulating his perspectives on life, writing, and literary history, Sound and Silence includes an introduction by translator Carlos Rojas and an afterword by Yan.

In Against Extraction Matt Hooley traces a modern tradition of Ojibwe invention in Minneapolis and St. Paul from the mid-nineteenth century to the present as that tradition emerges in response to the cultural legacies of US colonialism. 

Katherine Brewer Ball explores the American fascination with the escape story in The Only Way Out. Drawing on Black studies, queer theory, and performance studies, she examines a range of works, and throughout, escape emerges as a story not of individuality but of collectivity and entanglement.

In Disability Worlds, Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp’s conversations with diverse New Yorkers reveal the bureaucratic constraints and paradoxes established in response to the disability rights movement, as well as the remarkable creativity of disabled people and their allies who are opening pathways into both disability justice and disability futures.

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Arts in a Changing America: The Weekly Read

The Weekly Read is FUTURE/PRESENT: Arts in a Changing America, edited by Daniela Alvarez, Roberta Uno, & Elizabeth M. Webb. Building on five years of national organizing by Arts in a Changing America, an artist-led initiative that challenges structural racism in the art world, the book includes a range of poetry, essays and criticism, visual and performance art, artist manifestos, interviews, and reflections on community practice. Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation, writes that “FUTURE/PRESENT is an essential testament to the crucial work that artists, thinkers, and organizers are doing to work toward a more equitable future.” Daniela Alvarez is REFRAME editor and Research Manager at Arts in a Changing America, and Public Programs Coordinator at the Getty Museum. Roberta Uno is a theater director and Founding Director of Arts in a Changing America. Elizabeth M. Webb is an artist and filmmaker and Senior Creative Producer at Arts in a Changing America. Read this fascinating collection now for free! This title is made open-access due to funding from ArtChangeUS.

The Weekly Read is a weekly feature in which we highlight articles, books, and chapters that are freely available online. You’ll be able to find a link to the selection here on the blog as well as on our social media channels. Enjoy The Weekly Read, and check back next week for something new to read for free.

Q&A with Reiko Hillyer

Reiko Hillyer is Associate Professor of History at Lewis & Clark College and the author of Designing Dixie: Tourism, Memory, and Urban Space in the New South. In her new book A Wall Is Just a Wall: The Permeability of the Prison in the Twentieth-Century United States, she examine the origins and decline of practices that allowed incarcerated people to transcend prison boundaries.

You describe U.S. prisons as being “permeable” prior to 1990. Can you talk about what that means?

Last summer I helped to facilitate a theater piece written in part by incarcerated people, and that piece was adapted by professional actors and performed in a public theater. There was absolutely no consideration of whether any of the incarcerated authors could be temporarily released from prison to attend the opening night of the play. Such a suggestion would be considered completely outrageous. But fifty years ago, this would not have been exceptional.

Furloughs were routine in nearly all 50 states, even for those convicted of murder. There was a case in the late 1960s in which incarcerated people were allowed to attend a local high school basketball game in civilian clothes, accompanied by the warden, also in civilian clothes. Leaving prison temporarily was seen by corrections professionals, the public, academics, and governors as an essential vehicle for reintegrating incarcerated people back into society. Reintegration was taken for granted as an aspirational goal, even for those serving life sentences.

For much of the twentieth century, life sentences did not exceed fifteen years, and governors freed hundreds of incarcerated people through their clemency powers each year without political controversy. In Louisiana, governors regularly granted commuted the sentences of people serving life sentences after 10 years and six months. Permeability doesn’t just refer to people’s ability to get out of prison, but also, the ability of free people to enter. Just a few decades ago, in states as diverse as Mississippi and New Mexico, prison authorities allowed the spouses of incarcerated people to visit for several days in relative privacy. In short, what I mean by permeability is that people—both incarcerated and free—used to move in and out of the prison more fluidly and regularly than they do now.

Why did permeability disappear in the 1990s in particular, and what did that change look like for incarcerated people?

Scholars, journalists, and activists have documented the wave of legislation in the 1980s and 90s that led to a growth in incarceration; this growth was the result of a bipartisan effort that waged the war on drugs, created three-strikes laws, and mandatory minimums — all of which put more people in prison for longer periods of time. As incarcerating people became more aggressive and sentencing less forgiving, prison conditions and potential for release became less forgiving as well.

This wave of legislation — the peak of which was the federal crime bill of 1994 — depended on fearmongering about crime, about the poor, and about drug users. The same anti-welfare language that was used to demonize the racialized poor also cast incarcerated people as permanent degenerates who enjoyed “country club” conditions. Permeability disappeared because incarcerated people were increasingly perceived as beyond redemption; best practices such as furloughs and conjugal visits were thus seen as risky indulgences coddling an undeserving population; and politicians used fear to convince much of the public that they were both under the constant threat of violence and entitled to foolproof protection from any possibility of danger, no matter how remote.

For people who were incarcerated during this pivotal decade, both their daily conditions and broader life trajectories changed dramatically. For example: In Louisiana, even those convicted of violent crimes routinely left prison to play in sporting events, perform music at charity fundraisers, or go home for the weekend for much of the 20^th century. These furloughs nourished social identities beyond that of “prisoner”; they helped keep relationships intact; they offered opportunities for proving one’s growth. In the 1990s, these practices generally ended. Someone who had had the expectation that he could conceive a child while on furlough, visit his family on weekends, or speak to schoolchildren on their campuses could no longer experience any of those things. This was a devastating loss. 

Before the 1990s, people incarcerated in Louisiana not only left prison regularly, they also had a reasonable expectation of freedom. As I said before, even if they were serving a life sentence, governors customarily commuted the sentences of prisoners after ten years and six months as long as they kept a good prison record. In many cases, these people pled guilty with the understanding that they had a good chance of release. Incarcerated people conducted their lives and hinged their hopes upon the assumption that their demonstrable growth while in prison would amount to a second chance.

In the 1990s, with “tough-on-crime” legislation resulting in the greater use of life-without-parole (LWOP), clemency became the only means to avoid dying in prison. But just as temporary release has disappeared, governors have gone from treating clemency as a fundamental feature of the criminal justice system to a political third rail only to be used in the most extraordinary of circumstances, if at all. In Louisiana where clemency had been routine, incarcerated people recognized its demise as a revolution. What this looks like concretely for incarcerated people serving long sentences is that the likelihood of dying in prison far outweighs the likelihood of getting free. In 1970, just 143 people were serving LWOP sentences in Louisiana, most of whom would have those sentences commuted. Now there are over 4,000 people serving LWOP in Louisiana.

You say that the prison system in Massachusetts was, in many ways, a laboratory of experimentation. Can you talk about what those experiments were and how they have impacted the current state of incarceration in MA?

Massachusetts prisons, like many around the country, were in upheaval in the 1960s and 70s due to poor conditions and prisoners’ movements to improve them. Prisoners who engaged in work strikes and peaceful demonstrations got the attention of a sympathetic governor: Francis Sargent, a liberal Republican invested in reforming the prison system. Incarcerated people also had the sympathy of the public, with whom prisoners organized across the walls. For a short period after a guard walkout, prisoners actually ran the prison themselves. Sargent responded by firing the progressive-minded head of corrections, Charles Boone. This had a chilling effect on reforms.

But even then, the state prison system in Massachusetts was much more permeable than it is today. Until the 1990s, incarcerated people were regularly granted furloughs — even if they were serving life sentences for murder — and this system, which was 97% successful, was understood as producing public safety instead of threatening it. By the sensationalized Willie Horton scandal of the late 1980s, the political climate had shifted. His case was used as evidence of the supposed danger of being “soft on crime.” Successful furloughs provided key evidence of rehabilitation in commutation petitions, and the same punitiveness that destroyed furloughs destroyed clemency. In the 1970s, Massachusetts governors issued 83 commutations. In the 1980s, 21; in the 1990s, 7.

This decline of mercy was institutionalized in changing clemency guidelines. When considering clemency in the past, governors were supposed to foreground the growth and rehabilitation of the petitioner; by the late twentieth century, clemency guidelines gave the “nature of the offense” as the most paramount consideration. Thankfully, current Massachusetts governor Maura Healy has recently stated that her new guidelines will treat clemency as a vehicle for addressing unfairness in the criminal justice system and will consider the petitioner’s efforts at rehabilitation. This is a huge and important step, and one that harkens not that far back to an earlier norm where compassion was common sense.

How does your book relate to ideas expressed in other books about the history of incarceration such as The New Jim Crow?

The outpouring of excellent literature on mass incarceration has enriched us immensely, and I stand on the shoulders of this work.  Books such as The New Jim Crow help us understand the policies and ideologies that led to mass incarceration and to the collateral consequences of incarceration for returning citizens.

What I am trying to add to the picture is a closer look at how that punitive climate has affected penal practices themselves — in order to track prisoners’ lived experiences as those practices changed, but also to examine how “the war on crime” affected the relationships between prisoners and the free world both in fact and in the public imagination. Incarcerating people for longer periods of time, insisting on more isolating and austere conditions, and cutting off their connection to the outside world feeds an ideology that prisoners are irredeemable “others,” an ideology that needs to exist for such massive exile to be possible.

By looking closely at penal practices, I show how penal practices are imitated, adapted, and rationalized across time and space. A lot of literature on mass incarceration focuses either on crime policy at the federal level or on the scale of the individual state. I look at a circuitry of penal practices in states ranging from Louisiana and Mississippi to California and Massachusetts. For example, Mississippi State Penitentiary officials originally instituted conjugal visits as an incentive to extract labor from Black prisoners who were supposedly incapable of moral rehabilitation, but by the 1960s California governor Ronald Reagan looked to Mississippi as a model program to prevent homosexuality and keep families intact. By looking at how these practices travel and mutate, I illuminate the contingency and malleability of those practices. In other words, nothing about our current prison system should be considered “normal” — if there ever was such a thing. By looking at other times and places where our assumptions about prison and prisoners were fundamentally different, we can begin to unlearn much that we take for granted.

You talk about a backlash against the idea of a “rehabilitative promise.” Can you describe what that promise was and what form the backlash against it took?

There are a lot of problems with the concept of rehabilitation, not least of which is the fundamental assumption that someone who is convicted of a crime needs to be “rehabilitated.” This sidesteps questions about the root causes of crime, what we consider a crime in the first place, who gets criminalized, and what they are expected to be rehabilitated to. But the value I take from the language of rehabilitation is the belief that people change over time, and that bringing them from prison back into the community is a public responsibility.

The rehabilitative promise has been rejected in favor of tethering the convicted person ever more tightly to his crime. One concise example I can give is the changing eligibility standards for furloughs in Arizona. In 1988, furlough eligibility was based on the class and nature of the original offense rather than one’s institutional record for the first time. More consequentially, the same goes for clemency. Mandatory minimums and truth-in-sentencing laws, as well as the rise of LWOP, are based at least part on assumptions that longer sentences will reduce crime and that people who have committed crimes are a perpetual risk no matter what their behavior, remorse, or transformation.

To adapt Bryan Stevenson’s now-famous quotation, people are now branded by the worst thing they have ever done. For incarcerated people, the loss of hope and opportunity to actualize their personhood beyond captivity is an existential crisis. Kempis Ghani Songster, a formerly incarcerated prison activist, says that this means “we could always be chained and shackled to the worst moments of our lives.” Instead, Songster argues that “all humans have the inner capacity to forgive and be forgiven… All humans have the right to redemption.”

You teach in the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program where undergraduate are brought into prisons to study alongside incarcerated people. Has this experience changed the way you approach your research?

Absolutely. First of all, teaching the class is what raised the question that drives this book: The class is so special because an encounter between inside and outside is so rare. I wanted to know, has this always been the case? But even more than historicizing the current experience of my class, teaching Inside-Out has informed my research in at least two ways.

First, the class has confirmed the extent to which whatever the critiques incarcerated people may have of their situation — some are abolitionists, some say prison saved their lives, a few say both — they all have in common a sense of isolation from and hunger for contact with the free world. It is essential to their well-being in so many ways. I wanted to reckon with what it means to lose this contact and to lose the hope of freedom itself. Also, by getting to know individual incarcerated people and the varying ways they navigate life in prison I came to appreciate how incarcerated people use all the levers at their disposal to retain their humanity and pursue freedom.

I think another way to address your question is to reverse it; my research has renewed my commitment to the value of the Inside-Out class. For people who want to end mass incarceration, there is no end to what needs to be done. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore says, “Abolition requires that we change one thing. Everything.” Included in that “everything” is that we need to change society’s narratives about incarcerated people, even those who committed terrible acts in their past. Having grappled in my research with the process and consequences of our mass disappearance of people in prison, I see our classroom as a site of writing new narratives and refusing the boundaries that produce “disposable” people. Our coming together is a way to resuscitate prisoners from social death and rehabilitate our own preconceptions and complicity.

What can activists working on prison abolition learn from the history you detail in your book?

Abolitionist-oriented scholars and activists have warned that making prison kinder only legitimates it and have demonstrated that past reforms only led to a strengthening of the carceral state. Yet this hindsight has underestimated the contingencies and possibilities of the past. Given the growth of the carceral state, it is tempting to regard those advocating for reforms such as furloughs and conjugal visits as disingenuous, cynical, or hopelessly naive.

But the assumptions that undergirded these practices reveal a moment when the permeability of the prison was interpreted as a stage in its dissolution. These assumptions — the belief that incarceration was almost always temporary, the idea that most people who were incarcerated should have ways to sustain their relationships with loved ones as well as the public, the trust that even those convicted of violent crimes could and should move about unescorted outside prison, and the faith that people who broke the law need not be perpetually ostracized for their crime and instead should be shown mercy — were as normative then as they are anathema now.

If challenging hegemonic institutions such as the prison requires a fundamental change in consciousness, we must time-travel to those moments when today’s assumptions were not common sense. I think it’s useful for anyone trying to change the criminal justice system to regularly confront the fact that its current state is not inevitable. Even during Jim Crow, public officials were more merciful than they are today and more open to the idea that prisoners and the broader community could and should interact. Reimagining justice means rethinking what safety, risk, and redemption are and how these are malleable concepts that change over time.

Read the introduction to A Wall Is Just a Wall for free and save 30% on the paperback with coupon E24HLYER.

Q&A with Lucas Hilderbrand

Lucas Hilderbrand is Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Irvine, and author of Inherent Vice: Bootleg Histories of Videotape and Copyright and Paris Is Burning: A Queer Film Classic. In his new book The Bars Are Ours: Histories and Cultures of Gay Bars in America,1960 and After, he offers a panoramic history of gay bars, showing how they served as the medium for queer communities, politics, and cultures.

Your previous scholarship is situated solidly in the realm of film studies. Why did you decide to research the history of gay bars, and how do you see your previous work informing your approach here?

Although my research trajectory may not seem self-evident to anyone else, it always made intuitive sense to me! Like everyone else, I’m a multifaceted person, and I’m as shaped by nightlife as I am by watching films and television or listening to music. My training in cinema and media studies helps me to understand the importance of popular forms that shape our culture, that become pervasive, that define the zeitgeist, and that may be ephemeral or fashionably cyclical—but that may not be taken seriously enough for other scholars to research. My interest often starts with realizing no one else has written about something that seems, to me, innate and central to our culture. Or it starts from discovering something fascinating in the archive that has been overlooked or that overturns my understanding of history.

I am also interested in challenging myself to learn new fields with each project. I’m not a traditionally trained historian, nor am I a social scientist. I try to be self-aware of what I don’t know and of how the questions I might ask offer new ways to make sense of bars’ cultural significance. To focus on zoning or liquor laws without also listening for what songs are playing, to my mind, would be to misunderstand how and why bars work for their patrons.

The Bars are Ours argues that gay bars were at the center of gay political and cultural formations in the second half of the 20th century. Has this changed today?

What has changed in the past 50 years is that the range of outlets to explore one’s queer identity and find community has expanded beyond bars or nightclubs, which were once the only public options. But I contend that nothing has truly replaced what bars provide.

LGBTQ+ community centers, for instance, started emerging in the 1970s to provide services; these developed after bar scenes were established and as an alternative to them. In the 21st century, online forums, social media, and dating/hook-up apps provide ways for people to connect. But the internet cannot replicate the experience of being in a shared public space. Community centers usually do not, and the internet cannot replace the experience of being on a crowded dancefloor as a part of a social body—or of making out with another person.

It is important to have alternatives that are not predicated on consuming alcohol or feeling pressured to consent to strangers’ gazes and touch. But for those who want to experience these things or who feel them as a rite of passage, bars are still the primary way to access them.

It’s also possible to be openly LGBTQ+ and even, in some cases, to feel safe holding hands with one’s partner in spaces that are not differentiated or defined as LGBTQ+ spaces; that did not used to be the case. But it’s still experientially and affectively different to be surrounded by straight people—even if they’re liberal allies—than it is to feel like one is in community.

Gay bars often are stereotyped as being a primarily white space, but you also write about bars that specifically cater to Black and Latinx patrons. How does race play into the history your book covers?

In LGBTQ+ culture and spaces, just as in straight ones, whiteness often goes unacknowledged as a default or norm—and this has the effect of reproducing white supremacist conditions. By the 1970s, activists recognized and fought back against conspicuously exclusionary door policies—both sexist and racist—and these efforts continued and needs to continue. Bars became the site to make visible and respond to bias in the queer community at large.

In part in reaction to discrimination at white venues and in part through self-determination, bars catering to Black or Latinx patrons have also opened and sustained these communities. These bars may feature more or less the same elements as white gay bars, but they also often foster community-specific cultures, ranging from favored musical genres to social norms. In some cities there’s a sufficient population to have multiple Black or Latinx queer venues, but in many places, there might just be one or none at all. I don’t know of any city where ethnically defined gay bars have reached parity with white bars, relative to local population demographics; even majority-minority cities typically have more white bars than non-white bars.

For my book, it was essential to me that my survey history be inclusive—that I understand Black and Latinx gay bars as gay bars. But I also recognized that they often had community-specific histories and cultures, which I worked to document as best I could without claiming to speak for or exoticizing them. The Atlanta and Los Angeles chapters, which center Black and Latinx venues, effectively decenter the white venues that may be the most famous locally and that have dominated understandings of their respective local scenes—for instance, Backstreet in Atlanta and The Abbey in West Hollywood. Similarly, I don’t focus on my local LA bar where I’m a regular: Akbar.

I also look to key parties where the goal was to produce integrated venues, or where clubs sought to serve multiple segments of the LGBTQ+ community by creating targeted parties on different nights of the week.

Are there any distinct differences between gay bars of the past and gay bars of today, and do you view these differences as being for better or for worse?

Before and into the early days of gay liberation, bars were often viewed as exploitative of gay people. They were often owned by the mafia or homophobic straight people, and they treated clientele poorly. Venues and owners were also vulnerable to shakedowns and raids from local vice cops. Queer people endured these indignities for as long as they did because they had so few alternative public spaces to congregate. In these venues, the management often pushed patrons to keep buying drinks in exchange for the right to occupy space. This had a correlative effect of exacerbating alcoholism at a time when many people were already prone to self-medicating their shame about their sexuality. Although these were gay venues, many venues also policed patron’s behavior so that people couldn’t dance together or touch casually.

We’ve moved beyond these conditions, obviously. But I also believe to only see past venues as bleak sites of oppression is reductive and inaccurate. If people hadn’t had fun and found kindred spirits, gay bars would not have endured and evolved. And people continue to experience a full range of tensions and release in bars of the present.

One of the challenges I faced for this book was trying to convey not only the facts of the past but also how it was experienced. One strategy I devised for this was to infuse the book with music; another was to draw parallels or contrasts from my more recent lived experiences.

How does the history of gay bars you relate in your book speak to our present moment of homophobic and transphobic fearmongering exemplified by drag bans and “Don’t Say Gay” bills?

Until recently, it was easy to slip into complacency about gay bars, to take them for granted or dismiss them as passé. Likewise, gay bars may not seem relevant to younger generations who came out before drinking age and who grew up with alternatives to bars—or who may reject binary understandings of gender and sexual identities. (Gay bars operate on a binary logic, in distinction to straight bars.)

What the resurgent culture war reveals is that our lives, our rights, and our venues remain precarious—and possibly subject to erasure. My book looks back on worlds and cultures we built, political battles we fought, and the ways we self-invented through bars.

Read the introduction to The Bars are Ours for free and save 30% on the paperback with coupon E23BARS.

Q&A with Matthew Guariglia

Matthew Guariglia is an Affiliated Scholar at the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco, Senior Policy Analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and coeditor of The Essential Kerner Commission Report. In his new book Police and the Empire City, Guariglia tells the history of the New York Police Department and demonstrates how it was built on and inseparably entwined with the history of race, ethnicity, and whiteness in the United States.

Your book focuses on New York City police in the years between the Civil War and World War II. Why this time and this place in particular?

To me, this is the era that sets the stage for many of the political and societal issues we’re still grappling with. A moment when, for good or for ill, everything seemed in flux and people were genuinely unsure of what the United States would look like 20 years in the future. Or, as the musical Ragtime put it: “an era exploding.” In terms of policing, this seems to be the moment when modern police departments forged their legal, technological, and methodological tools that continue to serve as its primary operating procedure. And while there were many things police were eager to deploy, things like colonial tactics, surveillance techniques, deportations and other legal mechanisms of exclusion and control, for people on the ground things remained relatively unchanged. Especially for Black urbanites, immigrants, activists, people with same-sex sexual desires, and people who did not conform to the era’s strict gender roles, any “new” tools of policing just became ways of re-legitimizing or making more efficient the harassment and violence of the previous decades. As for New York, it really was the portal between the United States and the rest of the world, with people from every corner of the globe arriving in New York City and navigating a landscape blanketed in various levels of exclusion. With New York also being the United States’ connection to Europe, and both attempting to manage and subordinate overseas colonies, the city became an important hub in sharing information on these colonial tactics. 

What is unique about your approach to examining the history of policing?

I hope that my telling of policing history is one that will bring together many different branches of a rapidly growing and very strong field. As a few other have, I hope to bridge histories of policing and incarceration of Black Americans with the policing and deportation of immigrants in hopes of showing that these two processes happen simultaneously and in the context of one another. Policing played an incredibly central role in making European immigrants white by allowing them to join the force and participate in racial management in the city, and because police themselves understood the violence they enacted in Italian or Jewish communities as “inclusive” — i.e. training them with force to be assimilated Americans — while the violence they enacted in Black and sometimes Chinese communities was understood as more strictly exclusionary.

The time period your book details is full of individuals who shaped policing as we know it today you call “police intellectuals.” Could you describe a few of them and their interventions in policing at the time? 

The period between the 1890s and 1920s specifically was full of people who were in and out of police departments, universities, civil society, the press, government, and the military. These were people who were obsessed with understanding and “solving” the “problem” of how to police a multi-racial, multi-ethnic, and multi-lingual society. Men like Raymond Fosdick, Richard Sylvester, Arthur Woods, William McAdoo, and eventually August Vollmer were all deeply committed to learning from the military, private industry, and other countries and their overseas colonies in order to bring back tools and tactics they thought would be useful in the United States. While serving as police chief of Washington, D.C. and president of the International Chiefs of Police, Sylvester proposed putting together a World Police Congress for the purpose of discussing Italian organized crime. Fosdick traveled through Europe and brought back with him plans for an incredibly detailed system of centralized police file management. Arthur Woods earned the ire of his uniformed officers by insisting they wear wristwatches so their reports were more accurate. These were all small pieces of a larger, collaboratively built police apparatus looking for more effective and efficient ways to uphold racial and gendered hierarchies in cities like New York.

One of the surprising things about the history your book covers is how similar it is to the debates around policing happening today. Do you see a continuity between policing in the 19th and 20th centuries and the state of policing today? 

I often say that debates being had today on issues of policing don’t just resemble the debates people had in the early 20^th century — they are the same debates that have never ended. One movement I’m fascinated is the prolonged legal and legislative battle to prevent police from taking and storing biometric information like fingerprints and mugshots until after conviction. Lawyers and legislators across the country voiced real concern about what would happen to a person’s reputation or future presumption of innocence if police retained a photograph of their face after they’d been found innocent. To me, this is part of the same debate we’re having now about whether Google should be able to crawl a person’s mugshot, the use of DMV photos to make face recognition prints for law enforcement, or some newspapers’ programs to let people erase old articles concerning crimes so it doesn’t serve as a perpetual obstacle to their future success.

Calls to abolish the police have become increasingly common after the uprisings we saw in 2020. Is there anything about the history of policing you chronicle that you think activists should pay attention to?

There is a lot we can learn about our collective future by studying the history of policing — namely that after nearly 200 years we can say pretty definitively that reforms to make the system better and more equitable do not work. Politicians and departments have been working together to try to reform away corruption and brutality since police have existed. These reforms either don’t trickle down to a resistant rank and file, they run out of steam, or worse — they end up creating new problems that different reforms will be called upon to fix later on. Departments stopped deploying officers to their own neighborhoods to decrease risk of corruption or preferential treatment. Now, decades later, we’ve found that deploying police into far away communities encourages stereotyping. History has also shown that no amount of policing or surveillance can eradicate crime and create safety for all people. In that way, the history of policing is a history of experimentation and failure and invites us to ask: how much failure is too much before we try something new? If medical procedures or medicine failed to produce results, how long would it be allowed to be the primary mode of treatment until the medical community found a new model?

There is an assumption that because police look similar all over the world that this institution emerged naturally from the organization of an industrialized society. I hope this history shows that this is not true. There is nothing natural, per se, about the very formalized and calcified version of policing we see today. It had to be built very meticulously and with a great deal of international effort.

Read the introduction to Police and the Empire City for free and save 30% on the paperback with coupon E23PATEC.

Q&A with Rob Goldberg

Rob Goldberg is an historian of American childhood, toys, and play. He received his Ph.D. in History from the University of Pennsylvania. He is currently Head of the History Department at Germantown Friends School in Philadelphia. In his new book Radical Play, he recovers a little-known history of American children’s culture in the 1960s and 1970s by showing how dolls, guns, action figures, and other toys galvanized and symbolized new visions of social, racial, and gender justice.

What prompted you to consider the cultural and political dimensions to toy-making and write this book?

I originally aimed to write a history of Free to Be…You and Me, the gender-equality-themed children’s album released in 1972, produced by Marlo Thomas & Friends. I loved it as a kid, and I always felt there was something special about it. Here was a commercially popular LP that openly celebrated the era’s feminist politics, that ripped into traditional gender stereotypes, that featured some of the most amazing left-wing entertainers of the time—Harry Belafonte, Carol Channing, Mel Brooks. I’ve always been fascinated by the ways the American left looked to children’s culture to spread their message of building a better world. As a kid growing up in the 1980s, the Free to Be…You and Me album was my exposure to that radical tradition. But there wasn’t a proper history of it.

So I began doing some research and came upon a 1975 newspapers article about a citizens’ group called the Public Action Coalition on Toys. The group had begun handing out awards to companies that made socially conscious products for kids, and the Free to Be…You and Me album was one of the first recipients. I loved toys as a kid, and I wondered what this group was trying to do. Did their activism shape my own toy world?! As I began to investigate, I came to see that Free to Be was just one part of something much bigger: a child-centered cultural movement that emerged in the mid-1960s with the goal of bringing the commercialized world of children’s popular culture in line with left-liberal values. And transforming toys was at the center of it. The more research I did into the toy activism and the industry’s response, the more I realized it deserved a book.

What made toy culture in the 1960s and 1970s distinct from past periods of toy-making?

What really distinguished it was not only the unprecedented level of consumer activism around toys, from the national campaigns against war toys to the feminist critique of gendered toys, but also the extent to which the mainstream toy industry listened to and addressed their concerns. Activists got the biggest companies in the business to talk about the ethics of selling toy machine guns when the US was escalating the war in Vietnam, or the importance of manufacturing uniquely designed Black dolls that weren’t just white dolls tinted brown. Not every toy company was moved to change its current practices, but many were.

How did movement activists effectively advocate for their desired changes in toy-making?

The toy reform initiatives that had the most success targeted all the adult groups involved in the toy business—consumers, retailers, and manufacturers. The campaigns against war toys were great at publicity. They picketed outside the Toy Fair in New York City. They made buttons and bumper stickers. They handed out certificates to toy shops that refused to sell toy guns and tanks. The group No War Toys even partnered with the toy company Creative Playthings to run a toy exchange: kids could surrender their war toy at the store and receive a free non-war toy. An antiracist toy campaign run by the United Presbyterian Church lobbied toy stores in predominantly white neighborhoods to display Black dolls in their windows, with the goal of getting white children to play with Black dolls. Feminist activist Letty Cottin Pogrebin began publishing an annual toy review column in Ms. Magazine that brought the critique of sexist toys to tens of thousands of homes. That column went a long way toward making the purchase of nonsexist toys a cornerstone of progressive parenting.

Was there pushback to the toy activism of the 1960s and 1970s?

The Toy Manufacturers of America, the industry’s trade association, was a vocal defender of the status quo at every phase. Toy sales had more than doubled between the early 1950s and early 1960s. No one wanted that trend to change. Protest groups were leveling some serious charges against an industry that painted itself as wholesome and child-centered: glorifying war and violence, demeaning women, excluding girls from equal play opportunities, failing to represent the diversity of Americans in terms of race and family structure. Not surprisingly, the TMA, as the association was known, didn’t sit back idly, but launched counteroffensive measures to fend off the industry’s critics, downplay their concerns, and protect the public image of the toy business. Those measures included hiring prominent psychologists to speak to the media, holding press conferences to address the campaigns, and critiquing the activists in the industry’s leading trade magazines. When activists from different constituencies joined hands to form the Public Action Coalition on Toys in 1973, the TMA took it to the next level, hiring a leading PR firm to run a multi-year national public relations campaign on the industry’s behalf. For a little over a decade, from the mid-sixties to the late seventies, the activists really kept the toymakers on their toes.

Was the relationship between activists and toymakers always antagonistic?

No, it wasn’t, and that’s one of the incredible things I learned in my research. Sure, the industry’s trade organization, the Toy Manufacturers of America, did not appreciate people publicly questioning their industry’s moral compass. And some individual companies also fought back. Daisy Manufacturing Company, for instance, was hardly a fan of the anti-war toy campaigns, given that its entire line consisted of firearms! But one of the most remarkable things that activists did during this era was to take radical toy production into their own hands, and in the most significant cases, they did so in collaboration with toymakers. In 1968, leaders of the Black Power movement in Los Angeles, with the technical and financial support of Mattel, started a toy company to design and manufacture non-stereotyped Black dolls that celebrated Black identity and culture as never before. That company, Shindana Toys, grew to be the largest manufacturer specializing in Black dolls, selling its products at Sears, Macy’s, and other chains. In the early 1970s, a feminist educator from the Women’s Action Alliance convinced the Milton Bradley Company to produce an unprecedented series of non-sexist toys based on her handmade toy prototypes. The toys were sold to nursery schools nationwide throughout the 1970s. In this sense, activists protested and partnered with the toy industry in their efforts to create toys that reflected and advanced their visions of a more inclusive America.

Were there any unexpected or particularly surprising influences on toy culture you discovered while writing this book?

I didn’t expect the people involved in toy activism to have such deep connections to the other social movements of the time. Lou Smith, cofounder of Shindana Toys and its first president, was a leader in the Congress of Racial Equality in Philadelphia, Harlem, and Los Angeles. In 1964, he participated in the Mississippi Freedom Summer campaign. Letty Cottin Pogrebin, who helped popularize the feminist critique of sexist toys, including the Barbie doll, was intimately involved in the women’s rights organizations of the era. And Victoria Reiss, the chief organizer of anti-war toy activism in New York, the epicenter of the industry, was also active in the anti-nuclear and anti-Vietnam War movements. These people turned to toy reform not as a break from their more traditional political activism but as an extension of it.

I also was amazed at how many toy companies engaged explicitly with the protest movements of the time, in some cases outwardly supporting them. Lionel and LEGO spoke out against war and gun violence. Ideal Toys described its Derry Daring doll, which rode a stunt cycle, as a direct response to sexism in the toy culture. Remco Industries appealed to the ideals of the civil rights movement to promote its ethnically correct Black dolls in the late 1960s.

Read the introduction to Radical Play for free and save 30% on the paperback with coupon E23GLDBR.

Disability Pride Month Reads

Happy Disability Pride Month! As we celebrate the 1990 passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, we’re proud to share some of our recent titles that focus on disability studies and histories.

Black Disability Politics by Sami Schalk explores how issues of disability have been and continue to be central to Black activism from the 1970s to the present by drawing on rich archives from the Black Panther Party and the National Black Women’s Health Project. 

For people who are living with disability, daily tasks like lifting a glass of water or taking off clothes can be difficult if not impossible. In Activist Affordances, Arseli Dokumacı draws on ethnographic work with differently disabled people whose ingenuity, labor, and artfulness allow them to achieve these seemingly simple tasks.

In On Learning to Heal, Ed Cohen explores living with chronic disease, arguing that although medicine can now offer many seemingly miraculous therapies, medicine is not and has never been the only way to enhance healing.

In Crip Colony, Sony Coráñez Bolton examines the racial politics of disability, mestizaje, and sexuality in the Philippines. Drawing on literature, poetry, colonial records, political essays, travel narratives, and visual culture, Coráñez Bolton traces how disability politics colluded with notions of Philippine mestizaje.

The contributors to Crip Genealogies, edited by Mel Y. Chen, Alison Kafer, Eunjung Kim, and Julie Avril Minich, reorient the field of disability studies by centering the work of transnational feminism, queer of color critique, and trans scholarship and activism. By cripping disability studies, the contributors allow for divergent histories, the coexistence of anti-ableist and antiracist theorizing, and a radically just and capacious understanding of disability.

In Diminished Faculties Jonathan Sterne offers a sweeping cultural study and theorization of impairment. Drawing on his personal history with thyroid cancer and a paralyzed vocal cord, Sterne undertakes a political phenomenology of impairment in which experience is understood from the standpoint of a subject that is not fully able to account for itself. 

You can save 30% on any of these disability studies titles with coupon SAVE30.

Legal Personhood of Rivers and the Failure of Imagination: A World Water Day Guest Post by Naveeda Khan

On March 4, I woke up to an urgent message from Avaaz in my email asking me to join the global effort to protect the Earth’s rivers.  An image of a polluted river with denuded sides crowded with people trying to bathe or to pan (it was unclear which) graced their petition.  This could be any water body anywhere.  Yet, I have argued for paying attention to the specificity of types of water bodies in my scholarly work, thinking to militate against the tendency to dissolve all to water within the framework of Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM), the reigning policy paradigm.  It matters whether water comes in a plastic container or from a tube-well.  It matters what type of a river it is, say, braided or meandering.  Entirely different sets of experiences, practices, policies, problems spring to mind with each.

My intuition is served by the recent spate of efforts to give personhood to rivers as distinct from other water bodies.  New Zealand’s Whanganui, United States’ Klamath, Colombia’s Amazon, Canada’s Magpie are all rivers which have had personhood given to them. The western legal concept of a person with rights and responsibilities has been tasked to express varying Indigenous notions of the river, from embodying ancestors to aspects of Mother Earth.  Whereas the notion of personhood has been used to much pernicious effect, such as in the granting of personhood to corporations, invariably the effort to extend personhood to rivers is to protect them, say from mining or damming or to secure them for eco-tourism, the latter bringing with it its own issues and concerns.

Even if such legal claims are yet to be tested and the protective, redemptive measures that unfold from them yet to be borne out in practice, the granting of personhood to rivers seems a positive development.  It helps express in however awkward a fashion a range of relations to rivers beyond thinking of them as “ecological service infrastructures” and provides a conceptual bridge for the imagination to take flight to explore other possible relations to rivers than the ones to which one is accustomed.  It raises the question for me: by means of this legal claim, what experiences and possibilities present themselves to people who have otherwise very instrumentalist relations to rivers?  Can we reimagine our relation to rivers?

As I explore in my recent book on the Jamuna River in Bangladesh, the river expresses itself in myriad ways among those who live alongside it.  While writing my book, I was hard pressed to find elaborate cosmologies with respect to the river.  Inspired by these recent moves to grant personhood to rivers, I turned to newspaper reportage on rivers in Bangladesh to see how these moves had registered within the Bangladeshi imagination.  The English national daily, the Daily Star, known for its consistent focus on the plight of rivers in Bangladesh, records the appalling state of the many rivers of Bangladesh (the Government of Bangladesh portal records 800).  The articles point to visual evidence and studies to show how rivers are being filled in to create roads and build factories and how their waters are becoming toxic due to chemical, industrial and household wastes.  Some are more forthright in saying that Bangladesh rivers are dying; in fact, 29 are considered biologically dead, unable to support life, possibly asphyxiating.

Among the causes for this crisis in the rivers of Bangladesh are infrastructural tendencies towards river training and the creation of embankments left over from British colonial times.  Other articles point to unfair water arrangements with India, notably the Farraka and Gajoldoba Barrages that caused the decline of the Padma and Teesta Rivers in Bangladesh.  In a grimly amusing interview with Saber Hossain Chowdhury, head of the parliamentary committee on Environment, Forest and Climate Change, he recounted “they [the industry’s ministry] make the same excuses each time, massive employment and earning of foreign currencies are involved with the tannery industry and a shutdown will have a negative impact,” followed by “We have asked the environment ministry to take measures to sever electricity connection to the respective industrial units upon their failure to act on the directives” (“Slow Death of the Dhaleswari”  Daily Star July 18, 2022).  And in a clear recognition that the forces that spell the death of rivers are the very same forces that seek to capture all resources in Bangladesh, another article specifies that names of encroachers on rivers be put on lists to prevent them from running for office, getting bank loans or even leaving the country (“Protecting Rights of Rivers: Turning Intentions into Action, Nov 20, 2020).

Such, then, is the context within which the Bangladesh High Court conferred legal personhood upon the Turag River in February 2019 and by extension all rivers in Bangladesh.  Writing in October 2021, Suraya Ferdous explains the history of the concept of environmental personhood to Daily Star readers, tracing it back from Dr. Christopher Stone’s 1972 book Should Trees Have Standing?, to the 1972 U.S. Supreme Court Decision on behalf of natural entities, and to Ecuador’s enshrinement of the rights of Pachamamma (Mother Earth) in 2007 and Bolivia’s “Law of the Rights of Mother Earth” (“The Idea of ‘Environmental Personhood’ with Reference to River” Daily Star, Oct 16, 2021).  The author notes that the important shift is in perception, from anthropocentricism that upholds natural entities as mere resources for human use, to considering that entities have their own rights to shield themselves from human exploitation. “Legal personhood entitles a river to sue, to utilise compensation for its own wholesomeness, to have a say in multipurpose projects and to have a right in rem not to be affected adversely” (ibid).  The National River Conservation Commission (NRCC), created in 2014, was granted guardianship of the Turag.  Given the parlous state of law and order in Bangladesh it should not surprise that the NRCC’s efforts to publicize the names of encroachers on rivers are equal parts heroic and pusillanimous for quickly shelving any further actions against them.

What is interesting in the case of Bangladesh extending the rights of personhood to rivers is what transfers from the most capacious understanding of the notion of personhood of rivers.  This is another way of asking: what experiences and possibilities present themselves to people who have otherwise very instrumentalist relations to rivers?  Can we reimagine our relation to rivers?  In the case of say the Whangaui River in New Zealand, it is seen as continuous with the Maori social body—any harm to it is harm to Maoris. Meanwhile, rivers in Bangladesh are granted a more limited set of rights that stops shy of treating them as persons.  Rather, they are in the stated custody of persons whose practical action is to protect the rivers, again not for the rivers’ own sake but for the sake of the general good.  This fits within the normative Muslim perspective, in which nature is given to humans for their use but also to be safeguarded as God’s creation against human excesses (Bangladesh is majority Muslim).  Here too is an unstated reference to Hindu-Muslim relations in these parts through the implicit concern with associating humans with non-humans or rendering non-humans humanlike.  What is worrying for me in this question of what transfers or doesn’t transfer is the continued occlusion of those bodies which may put themselves with rivers along a continuum of personhood.  Indigenous populations or Adivasis in Bangladesh have long maintained relations with sacred groves, mountains and water bodies.  They have also long suffered violence and dispossession of their ancestral lands.  While personhood for rivers may enter the Bangladesh imagination through the route of international legal actions, it is dispiriting to find that it does not spur inquiry into Indigenous peoples in Bangladesh, as if they have nothing to add on the matter or insights, experiences, or even critiques.  In the event marking the launch of the bilingual translation of the above-mentioned High Court judgment in English and Bengali (“Protecting Rights of Rivers: Turning Intentions into Action, Nov 20, 2020), we hear from students of geography and law, various high-ranking officials of the Bangladesh Government, the senior editor of the Daily Star, lawyers, environmental activists associated with Bangladesh Poribesh Andolon (BAPA), and members of the NRCC. The usual faces, the usual voices, join in an undoubtedly noble struggle to keep alive rivers in Bangladesh, but offer no new possibilities for re-imagining our relations to rivers.

Naveeda Khan is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University and author of Muslim Becoming: Aspiration and Skepticism in Pakistan and the new book River Life and the Uprising of Nature. Save 50% on both books, now through April 17, with coupon code SPRING23.

Rooting Justice in Forest Worlds: A Proposal for the International Day of Forests, a Guest Post by Daniel Ruiz-Serna

“Interaction with forests is not a choice. Only how we interact with them is.”

Forests have been around way before humankind. They master life and thought. How much do they know about time and the stars? Or about geometry and chemistry? What about grief and joy? We should ask them, just as many forest dwellers, human and otherwise, have been doing for millennia. We, humans, still need to learn to hear and understand the forests’ answers. Today, March 21, is the observance of the International Day of Forests, a date instituted by the United Nations only eleven years ago. The theme for 2023, “Forests and Health,” is a reminder of how our collective well-being, our flourishing, is deeply rooted and entangled with the fate of these sylvan landscapes—a fate increasingly compromised on account of rapacious economic systems, predatory policies, volatile infrastructures, and armed interests.

Although most of us would associate forests with wilderness and rural places, forests contribute a great deal to the health of urban populations and industrialized societies. A recent report from the Food and Agriculture Organization made that link very explicit[1]. And a tiny virus that jumped from wild animals to human hosts in 2019 and that has provoked more than 6.5 million deaths worldwide is a reminder of that entangled relationship. Interaction with forests is not a choice. Only how we interact with them is. In fact, it is only by virtue of that interaction that we cultivate our humanness.

Consider the following word: naku. It belongs to the Sapara language, the mother tongue of a small number of individuals that compose the Indigenous Sapara nation living in the Amazon, on Ecuador’s eastern border with Peru. Naku might roughly be translated as forest, that sylvan world that surrounds, welcomes, and nourishes this and the about 400 Indigenous nations that call the Amazon rainforest their home. But, unlike the source of natural resources and environmental services that the FAO describes in the aforementioned report, naku describes a profusion of sentient beings (some of animal and vegetal form, others made of more intangible but not less real components) with whom people share different degrees of intellectual, bodily, and spiritual connections. The world, hold different Sapara leaders, is naku, is forest;[2] and to know the world, with all its ferocity and kindness, is fundamentally to engage in meaningful relations with the myriad beings that forests harbor. One cultivates one’s own humanness in the company of these sylvan worlds, as a guest of forests, not as a master of them.

What happens when these relations are severely hindered by war? That is the question that drove my ethnographic inquiry in Bajo Atrato, a region located in the forestlands located on the northwestern Colombian Pacific coast. I saw how armed conflict is an experience wherein suffering extends beyond the people, provoking a form of collective harm that is embodied by the other-than-human beings and the sentient places that compose the traditional territories of Indigenous and Afro-Colombian peoples. Trees heavily pocked from gunfire; rivers that became floating cemeteries of trees; spiritual protectors of game that decided to keep animals out of the reach of people; snakes capable of injecting into their victims’ wounds a poison that pollutes the land that warlords had transformed into oil palm plantations; evil beings that, after having been released by powerful shamans in their attempt to protect communities from the raids carried out by armies, are now wreaking havoc, drowning people and devouring their noses and their fingers. These are some of the afterlives of war, and they have triggered a kind of ecological violence that cannot be easily tackled with the language of human rights and environmental degradation.

War, just like everyday human life, is always a multispecies effort. War, at least as it has been waged in the forests of Colombia, challenges assumptions regarding selfhood, bodies, the elements of life, and the distinctiveness of humans. And given that armed conflict compromises the web of relations through which people and different sentient beings weave their lives together, it also compels us to explore what justice means and how it can be achieved in regions where colonialism, state violence, and militarism have entangled human and nonhuman lives and shown their shared vulnerability. On the International Day of Forests, we should recall that when forests are harmed, when they run amok because of our destructive actions, not only is human health at stake, but the fate of the world itself is jeopardized, because without forests, our world will not simply be poorer. Our world will not be a world at all.

Daniel Ruiz-Serna is Lecturer of Anthropology at Dawson College, and author of When Forests Run Amok: War and Its Afterlives in Indigenous and Afro-Colombian Territories, published by Duke University Press. Read the introduction to his book for free and save 50% with coupon code SPRING23 now through April 17.

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[1] See FAO. 2020. Forests for human health and well-being – Strengthening the forest–health–nutrition nexus. Forestry Working Paper No. 18. Rome. Available on https://www.fao.org/3/cb1468en/cb1468en.pdf

[2] See Declaración Kamungishi. Available on https://rebelion.org/hogar-de-la-selva-para-el-continuo-renacer/