ReligiousLeftLaw.com

Reading Lists and Sundry Material

Several times a year I post an updated list of the bibliographies available on my Academia page (the start of the school year for many being one of those times). I have also included a separate list of my writing on a variety of topics as well as the “study guides” for several religious worldviews I used to give to my students. All of the material is in alphabetical order on the site, save the study guides, which are found at the bottom of the page.

1. Transdisciplinary Perspectives on Addiction
2. Africana & African American Philosophy
3. After Slavery & Reconstruction: The Black Struggle for Civil Rights, Freedom, and Equality in the U.S.
4. Salvador Allende and the Quest for Socialism
5. R. Ambedkar
6. American Indian Law (this list goes considerably beyond ‘law’)
7. Samir Amin (3 September 1931 - 12 August 2018)
8. Analogy & Metaphor
9. Anarchism: Philosophy & Praxis
10. Animal Ethics, Rights, and Law
11. The Arab World: Modern & Post-Modern
12. Attica Prison Uprising (September 9, 1971 – September 13, 1971): Notes, Timeline, and Essential Reading
13. The Bedouin
14. Beyond Capitalist Agribusiness: Toward Agroecology & Food Justice
15. Beyond Capitalist-Attenuated Time: Freedom, Leisure, and Self-Realization
16. Beyond Inequality: Toward the Globalization of Welfare, Well-Being and Human Flourishing
17. Beyond Punitive Capitalist and Liberal Society
18. Bioethics
19. Biological Psychiatry, Sullied Psychology and Pharmaceutical Reason
20. The Black Athlete and Sports
21. Blacks and Food Justice: A Guide to Resources
22. Blacks on the (Radical) Left
23. The Black Panther Party
24. On Boxing — Sweet Science & Brutal Agon
25. Buddhism
26. Buddhism & Psychoanalysis
27. Capital Punishment
28. Capitalist and Other Distortions of Democratic Education — From Etiological Diagnosis to Therapeutic Regimen
29. César Chávez & the United Farm Workers
30. Christianity
31. Classical Chinese Worldviews
32. Communism in India
33. Comparative Law
34. Conflict Resolution and Nonviolence
35. Constitutionalism
36. Constitutionalism in India
37. Contract Theory & Promises
38. Criminal Law: Municipal (Domestic) and International
39. Death & Dying
40. Democratic Theory
41. Detroit: Labor & Industrialization, Race & Politics, Rebellion & Resurgence
42. Dreams and Dreaming
43. Ecological & Environmental Politics, Philosophies, and Worldviews
44. Emotions
45. Ethical Perspectives on Science & Technology
46. Famine: History, Causes, and Consequences
47. Frantz Fanon
48. Freudian and Post-Freudian Psychology
49. The Life, Work, & Legacy of Mohandas K. Gandhi
50. Genocide
51. Global Distributive Justice
52. The Great Depression & The New Deal
53. The Haitian Revolution
54. Health: Law, Ethics & Social Justice
55. Hinduism
56. The History, Theory & Praxis of the Left in the 1960s
57. Human Nature and Personal Identity
58. Human Rights
59. Ethics, Law, and Politics of Immigration & Refugees
60. Indic (or Indian) Philosophy
61. Individual & Shared Responsibility
62. International Criminal Law
63. International Law
64. Modern Iran
65. Islam, the Arts, and Aesthetic Experience
66. Islam and Jurisprudence
67. Islam & Muslims in the United States
68. Islamic Studies
69. Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
70. The Jain Tradition
71. L.R. James: Marxist Humanist & Afro-Trinidadian Socialist
72. Judaism
73. Law and Literature
74. Toward an Understanding of Liberalism
75. Malcolm X (May 19, 1925 – February 21, 1965)
76. Marxism
77. Marxism (or ‘the Left’), Art & Aesthetics
78. Marxism and Freudian Psychology
79. Toward a Marxist Theory of International Law
80. Mass Media
81. Nonviolent Resistance in the Middle East (with an emphasis on the Palestinian struggle)
82. Nuclear Weapons
83. Pan-Africanism, Black Internationalism, & Black Cosmopolitanism
84. Philosophy of Law and Legal Theory
85. Philosophy, Psychology, & Methodology for the Social Sciences
86. Philosophy & Racism
87. The Prophet Muhammad
88. Toward a “Realist” Social and Political Psychology
89. The Puerto Rican Struggle for Independence & Self-Determination
90. Punishment and Prison
91. The Qur’ān (Translations, Commentaries, Studies)
92. Radical Catholicism (The Catholic Worker Movement, Liberation Theology…)
93. Science and Religion
94. Science and Technology
95. Slavery
96. Social Security & the Welfare State
97. South African Liberation Struggles
98. Sufism
99. Sullied (Natural & Social) Sciences
100. Terrorism
101. Theology and Philosophy in Islamic Traditions
102. Torture: moral, legal, and political dimensions
103. Transitional Justice
104. Utopian Imagination, Thought & Praxis
105. The Varna & Caste System in India
106. Vietnam War
107. Violent Conflict & the Laws of War
108. Women as Intellectuals in the European Enlightenment
109. Workers, the World of Work, and Labor Law
110. Zionist Ideologies

Essays, Papers, and “Study Guides,” (some published, although most of what little I’ve published—largely encyclopedia entries—is not available on my Academia page):

• “Act Naturally!” “Say What?”
• Advaita Vedānta Philosophy: a short introduction
• Analogy and Metaphor: An Idiosyncratic Introduction
• Bombing French Indochina during the U.S. War in Vietnam: a précis
• Book Review: Oliver Leaman’s Islamic Aesthetics: An Introduction (2004) Philosophy East and West, Vol. 57, No. 2, (2007), 271-275.
• Book Review: Martin D. Yaffe, ed., Judaism and Environmental Ethics (2001), Philosophy East and West, Vol. 57, No. 3 (2007), 400-405.
• Christianity: study guide
• Confucianism: study guide
• Daoism: study guide
• Democracy and Islam
• Free Association in Psychoanalysis and “Willing What Cannot Be Willed”
• A summary introduction to the Freudian psychoanalytic model of therapeutic philosophy and psychology
• The Golden Rule
• Hinduism: study guide
• Iran’s Nuclear Power Program and the Question of Nuclear Weapons: Articles and Blog Posts (this material is not written by yours truly)
• Islam: study guide
• Judaism: study guide
• Natural Law “externalism” v. Natural Law as “moral aspiration”
• The pathology of normalcy ... and the quest for a sane society
• Poetry and Islam: An Introduction
• Prosoche in the Daily Life of a Salonnière in the French Enlightenment
• Toward a Philosophically Sensitive Definition of Public Health Law
• Social Norms and Legal Theory
• Toward Socialism
• The Legal Doctrine of Stare Decisis and Rationality
• Therapies of Desire: Introspection in Buddhist and Psychoanalytic Psychologies
• Donald Trump and Narcissistic Personality Disorder
  

Linda A.W. Brakel on the epistemic and ontological priority of (conscious and unconscious) knowledge over beliefs (‘neurotic’ and otherwise)

“That there can be unconscious knowledge at all and the recognition of the great importance of unconscious knowing in mental life, together constitute one of the most basic assumptions of psychoanalytic theory. However, from the philosophical viewpoint most modern epistemologists [and most contemporary work in philosophy of mind] have contended that belief, rather than knowledge, is the most fundamental mental attitude.” In Unconscious Knowing and Other Essays in Psycho-Philosophical Analysis (Oxford University Press, 2010), Linda A.W. Brakel discusses and analyzes the epistemic and ontological priority given to notions of true belief, in particular “justified true belief,” hence the dominant philosophical view in which knowledge is explained in terms of belief, belief being “maintained as the foundational attitude, conceptually prior to knowledge.”

Invoking in part the philosopher Timothy Williamson’s Knowledge and Its Limits (Oxford University Press, 2000), Brakel argues for a “radical epistemic view,” namely, that knowledge “comes first, conceptually and ontologically, with belief dependent on knowledge.” She draws upon data from psychoanalysis (e.g., ‘negative hallucinations,’ the role of ‘neurotic beliefs’ interfering with patients’ evidential use of knowledge, and ‘dream drawing’) as well as experimental research in cognitive neuropsychology to support her strictly philosophical arguments which serve to bolster or re-affirm the psychoanalytic theory or model of mind and which, in turn, is critical to therapeutic methods and processes of psychoanalysis.

I won’t attempt here to summarize her arguments for this radical epistemic view, which constitute only one—the second—chapter of her brilliant book. The other chapters treat, with equal analytic sophistication and keen insight, “a-rationality and vagueness;” “agency” and philosophy of action; the placebo effect; and explanations in the philosophy of science as these bear upon psychoanalysis in particular. Rather, I first want to share a clinical vignette on “neurotic beliefs” and phantasy, followed by a substantive and extremely helpful footnote from the same chapter on unconscious knowing, for it provides a succinct conceptual backdrop for the larger argument and thus directly bears upon the psychoanalytic evidence she gathers together on behalf of the endeavor to displace (justified true) belief with knowledge as the foundational epistemic attitude (and thus conceptually prior to belief, that is, the converse of the prevailing view in philosophy).

“The phenomenon of neurotic-belief demonstrates [yet] another way in which one can know without believing what one knows. Most neurotic persons (and patients) have central phantasies, which are treated as beliefs, and have some of beliefs’ causal and functional roles—this despite the important fact that unlike beliefs, neurotic beliefs do not aim at the truth and are not regulated by evidence. Take, for instance, Mr. R who was brutally beaten many times by his father as a child. Now a very successful business man, middle aged and homosexual, he behaves in ways seemingly designed to never attract any man, even as he longs for sex, marriage, and male companionship. Through work in analysis, Mr. R first came to see that his characteristic overly dramatic style alternating with cool indifference was not likely to attract any of the men he was interested in attracting. We then began to understand the purpose of these behaviors. Over the decades, he had developed a complex phantasy (partly unconscious, and partly conscious but irrational) that worked to explain his past problems and prevent future ones. The phantasy as we constructed it looked like this: Mr. R neurotically-believed that his father’s damaging acts had been largely caused by his own lively (and very normal) little boy activities directed toward his father. So he neurotically-believed that as long as he was the opposite of normal—either too histrionic or too cold—not only would this sort of thing never happen again, it would also undo the past. Now Mr. R was not a psychotic person; he was competent and sophisticated and functioned well in the world. Clearly he knew that his father’s sadistic physically damaging behavior owed mostly to his father’s serious psychopathology and moral turpitude. He knew that behaving either with outrageous flamboyance or with cold self-containment could not guarantee future safety. Further, of course, he knew that the present cannot effect the past. Despite this, his neurotic-belief interfered with his rational capacities to believe what he knew. Mr. R had knowledge without believing what he knew.”

*    *    *

As Brakel explains, the purpose of the unusually long footnote below is to illustrate the following epistemic phenomena: “(a) justified true beliefs that seem to constitute knowledge, (b) justified true beliefs that do not constitute knowledge (Gettier-like cases [if you are not familiar with this, see here or here]), (c) unjustified true beliefs, and (d) justified false beliefs. To begin with, take the following five facts as true: (1) It is Friday evening at 5 pm. (2) Our front doorbell is broken. (3) Vic, a punctual visitor at 5 pm each day, arrives on this particular Friday at 5 pm and presses the broken doorbell, but does not knock on the door. 4) Meanwhile, at 5 pm I hear what sounds to be a knock on the door. 5) Also, there has been a strong wind blowing intermittently for hours, and at 5 pm a medium-sized tree branch hits our front door just as Vic is ‘ringing’ the broken doorbell.

So with these in mind, here is (a) an example of a simple justified true belief that seems consistent with knowledge: I have the justified true belief/knowledge that since the doorbell does not work, some other sound (like a knock) will be needed to signal a visitor’s presence. Now, for (b) a Gettier-like case, where justified true beliefs do not constitute knowledge: On the basis of the ‘knock’ sound at 5 pm, I believed that someone is at the door, especially as I am expecting Vic. Although this was a justified and true belief—justified as it is rational to think that when doorbells are broken people will knock to signal their arrival, and that knocking makes the type of knock-sound I heard; and true in that Vic truly was at the door at 5 pm—still, I cannot be said to have had knowledge of Vic being at the door at 5 pm, because the appropriate causal chain did not figure into my justified true belief. I believed Vic was at the door due to what turns out to have been the false belief that Vic had knocked on the door when really the ‘knock’ was the sound of the branch banging against the door. (c) An unjustified true belief is as follows: My husband, Art, was daydreaming at 5 pm that someone was at the door. On this a-rational basis he believed that someone was at the door. Since there was a visitor at 5 pm—this turned out to be a true belief. However, this belief was true only by accident; Art arrived at it without sufficiently justifiable reasons. Finally, to illustrate (d) a justified false belief, let us change one of the facts above. It is still Friday at 5 pm, but Vic does not arrive until 5:30 pm. At 5 pm when I heard the knocking sound, expecting Vic at 5 pm, I had the justified belief that it was Vic. As in the Gettier-like case above (example b), the knocking sound was really the branch hitting the door; but this time Vic was not yet present. My belief that it was someone at the door was equally justified, but under these circumstances it was false.”

Desires, Wishes ... and Weakness of Will

Linda A.W. Brakel, who by training and profession is both a psychoanalyst and a philosopher, demonstrates how this particular combination can yield important insights that uniquely benefit psychoanalytic theory and therapy as well as philosophy. Philosophically her work is on par with such stellar exemplars in the philosophical examination of psychoanalysis as Marcia Cavell, Ilham Dilman, Sebastian Gardner, Jonathan Lear, A.O. Rorty, Richard Wollheim, Jon Mills, Tomas Pataki, and John Wisdom, among others. In what follows I highlight some aspects of one of several incisive and compelling arguments in her book, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and the A-Rational Mind (Oxford University Press, 2009). This has to do with her conceptual distinction between “desires” and “wishes” (a distinction Freud himself failed to make), one result of which is her contribution to making sense of, if not solving, the akratic or “weakness of will” problem (i.e., acting against one’s better judgment) in philosophy.

As Brakel explains, “[p]sychological attitudes are standardly divided into two types—cognitive attitudes, in which the content of the attitude is regarded as having come about; and conative attitudes, in which the context is to be brought about. Beliefs are the foremost example of the former, and can be further distinguished from other cognitive attitudes: phantasizing, imagining, pretending, supposing, and hypothesizing, for example. Beliefs stand apart from these other cognitive attitudes in that

“[i]ntrinsic to being a belief is the distinctive functional and constitutive aim in attempting to represent the world truly and correctly. If evidence to the contrary of a belief’s content a is gained—if I am shown that what appeared to be a water fountain is really a birdbath—the belief that a can no long be held as a belief. The same negative evidence, however, in no way prevents me from continuing to phantasize a, imagine a true, pretend a true, or suppose a true. The content a can no longer be believed-true owing to the fact that belief functions to represent the world as it is—‘belief constitutively aims at the truth’ [David Velleman]—and that this constitutive regulation of belief constrains what contents can be believed (as opposed to imagined, supposed, etc.).”

We’ll leave aside further analysis and discussion of cognitive attitudes to focus on an exemplary conative attitude, desire. Brakel argues that desire has a constitutive function,

“namely, that in order to be a desire, a conative attitude must contribute to action production in the real world toward the fulfillment of its own content—a readiness-to-act. Wishes … have a much different constitutive function. Wishes contribute to the fulfillment of their content, not through readiness-to-act in the real world, but via the formation of the sort of phantasies that can provide fulfillment.”

We cannot fill in all the steps in the argument or provide the details of her treatment of possible objections, all of which make for enjoyable reading. Here we will simply share the bulk of her novel and ingenious approach to the problem akrasia, or weakness of will:

“Donald Davidson gives the modern standard version of the dilemma of the akratic person. A man has a desire for a and is able to do a. He also has a desire for b and could do b. He is free to do a or do b, and they are mutually exclusive. After taking everything possible into account, he judges that b is the better action. On this basis he desires to do b more and therefore decides to do b. Yet he performs a and does not perform b. Davidson asks, ‘what is the agent’s reason for doing a when he believes it would be better, all things considered, to do another thing[?].’ He continues ‘the answer must be: for this agent has no reason.’ In other words, although ‘[o]f course he has a reason for doing a; what he lacks is a reason for not letting his better reason for not doing a prevail.’ To the extent that the akrate performs akratic actions, he is for Davidson not rational. Further, according to Davidson, the akrate ‘cannot understand himself; he recognizes in his own internal behavior, something essentially surd.

Let us investigate this with an example that is both specific and commonplace. H drinks sugary soft drinks, and colas are his favorite. He knows, all things considered, that it is better not to drink them. Thus with each can or bottle of cola, he both desires to drink it—let us say he desires a; and desires not to drink it—let us call this his desire for b. Not drinking colas would be better, and b is the better act. Therefore, according to Davidson, H should desire b more. Yet H continues to imbibe cola soft drinks—he does a, he does not do b.

Davidson’s problem can be addressed fairly readily if one considers readiness-to-act as desire’s constitutive function and the psychological calculus alluded to earlier…. An agent’s judgment that an action b is better than some action a, even all things considered, is no assurance, Davidson’s claim to the contrary notwithstanding, that this agent will desire b more than a. This type of example makes it clear that desire and evaluative judgment are not intrinsically linked. To desire something does not mean, as Davidson claims, that one has an attitude toward it as worthy of that desire. Rather, on my view, desire’s constitutive function of readiness-to-act links it to intentional action such that if an agent performs desired action a intentionally and does not perform desired action b, no matter what other actions are considered, in some sense he can be said to desire a more. H judges that b, stopping cola drinking, is better. But H does a, he drinks colas. Hence, H desires a more. Note that this analysis does not preclude H having a strong wish for b, to stop imbibing colas, even as he does a, and drinks them. Moreover, H might well have a strong wish that he could desire b more than he desires a. In fact, just these sorts of conflict between wish and desire is likely present in every case of akrasia. And yet, as long as he continues to do a, his cola drinking is reflective of his stronger desire and its constitutive aim of readiness-to-act in the real world toward fulfillment of its content.”

Further Reading (In addition to the basic literature on akrasia and ‘weakness of will’ found in the bibliography to the SEP entry by Sarah Stroud below, this short, idiosyncratic list represents material that has influenced my perspective on topics broached by Brakel as well as related matters, such as addiction and ‘precommitment’ or ‘self-binding.’):

• Elster, Jon. Strong Feelings: Emotion, Addiction, and Human Behavior (MIT Press, 1999).
• Elster, Jon. Ulysses Unbound: Studies in Rationality, Precommitment and Constraints (Cambridge University Press, 2000): 1-87, but especially, 63-87.
• Fingarette, Herbert. Heavy Drinking: The Myth of Alcoholism as a Disease (University of California Press, 1988).
• Heyman, Gene M. Addiction: A Disorder of Choice (Harvard University Press, 2009).
• Hill, Thomas E., Jr. “Kant on Weakness of Will,” from his book, Virtue, Rules and Justice: Kantian Aspirations (Oxford University Press, 2012): 107-128.
• Radoilska, Lubomira. Addiction and Weakness of Will (Oxford University Press, 2013).
• Rorty, Amélie Oksenberg, 12. “Where Does the Akratic Break Take Place?” and 13. “Akrasia and Conflict,” from her book, Mind in Action: Essays in the Philosophy of Mind (Beacon Press, 1988): 229-265.
• Stroud, Sarah. “Weakness of Will,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2014 Edition), Edward N. Zalta, ed. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2014/entries/weakness-will/

Relevant Bibliographies

• Transdisciplinary Perspectives on Addiction
• Biological Psychiatry, Sullied Psychology and Pharmaceutical Reason
• The Emotions
• Health: Law, Ethics and Social Justice
• Human Nature and Personal Identity
• Psychoanalytic Psychology and Therapy

God wants you to be rich (in material wealth)

Jesus’ teaching on poverty and wealth was anchored in the Scriptures, in particular, it shared with Psalms and the Prophets the key idea that God was somehow on the side of the poor. At the same time, however, Jesus’ message about the dangers of wealth was radical and provocative at the time (and of course remains so two millennia later). — Ann Wierzbicka, What Did Jesus Mean? (Oxford University Press, 2001): 385

From Meagan Day’s article, “A Grift From God,” Jacobin (10 August 2019):  

“The prosperity gospel is a movement within American Christianity, also known as the Word of Faith, that says God wants you to be rich, but you have to will his financial blessing into being. Forty percent of Evangelicals are taught the prosperity gospel, according to which the root cause of poverty is faithlessness. [….]

Prosperity gospel ministers don’t usually stop at urging positive thinking. To manifest financial success, believers can’t simply have faith. They must demonstrate that faith — preferably in the form of a tithe to the person doing the preaching. As rapper Ice-T put it, ‘The preacher says, “I know God a little bit better than you. If you pay me, I’ll hook you up.”’ Like payday lenders, prosperity gospel ministers see the broke and struggling as a consumer market. Their target demographic is those who suffer from lack, and their product is the promise of abundance, or at least relief. Financially, the prosperity gospel is nothing but a swindle, prying money from people who by definition have very little and desperately wish they had more.

Ideologically, the prosperity gospel dovetails perfectly with right-wing ideology, which views poverty as a consequence of individual failure rather than rigged economic and political structures. As [Barbara] Ehrenreich writes [in Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermining America (2009)], ‘Always, in a hissed undertone, there is the darker message that if you don’t have all that you want, if you feel sick, discouraged, or defeated, you have only yourself to blame.’ When times are hard, it’s because you didn’t think positively enough, pray hard enough, or tithe enough. It’s a spiritual spin on meritocracy, the ideological handmaiden to neoliberal capitalism. The prosperity gospel is one of America’s greatest grifts. Little wonder, then, that it’s made its way to the White House, currently occupied by a master con artist himself.”

The full article is here.

Image: Fritz Eichenberg, The Christ of the Breadlines (wood engraving, 1955)

The Prisoner as Person: Education and the Arts behind Bars

Prison offers, curiously, a time to make art, with men on life sentences sometimes being the most serious about developing their craft. Boredom also assures the motivation of Tobola’s poets: ‘Unlike my college students, who were required to take composition, my inmate students came to class because they wanted to learn.’ But the book also raises questions about creative work, its potential and its limits. A prison classroom or theater is a crucible, a lab for working out what art can do when separated from economies of grants, sales, and prestige.

Art is a form of resistance. It is an attempt to maintain one’s humanity and individuality even while wearing a uniform and tagged with a number. Art builds community. As any reader of prison or internment camp memoirs knows, the creation of art in captivity does not require an official program. In moments of crisis, people instinctively draw on their own creative resources.  – From Irina Dumitrescu’s review, “Door Open for Beauty: On Deborah Tobola’s Hummingbird in Underworld: Teaching in a Men’s Prison—a Memoir (Berkeley, CA: She Writes Press, 2019), in the Los Angeles Review of Books, 2 August 2019.

 

Dumitrescu’s review moved me to put this list together, culled from my larger compilation on “punishment and prison.”

The Prisoner as Person: Education and the Arts behind Bars

• Bernstein, Lee (2010) America is the Prison: Arts and Politics in Prison in the 1970s. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.
• Brottman, Mikita (2016) The Maximum Security Book Club: Reading Literature in a Men’s Prison. New York: HarperCollins.
• Chevigeny, Bell Gale, ed. (1999) Doing Time: Twenty-Five Years of Prison Writing. New York: Aracade.
• Coyle, William J. (1987) Libraries in Prisons: A Blending of Institutions. New York: Greenwood Press.
• Davies, Ioan (1990) Writers in Prison. Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell.
• Desai, Ashwin (2014/Unisa Press, 2012) Reading Revolution: Shakespeare on Robben Island. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books.
• Franklin, H. Bruce (1978) The Victim as Criminal and Artist: Literature from the American Prison. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Franklin, H. Bruce (1998) Prison Writing in Twentieth Century America. New York: Penguin Books.
• Fyfe, Janet (1992) Books Behind Bars: The Role of Books, Reading, and Libraries in British Reform, 1701-1911. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
• Harlow, Barbara (1992) Barred: Women, Writing and Political Detention. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press.
• James, Joy, ed. (2003) Imprisoned Intellectuals: America’s Political Prisoners Write on Life, Liberation, and Rebellion. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
• James, Joy, ed. (2005) The New Abolitionists: (neo)Slave Narratives and Contemporary Prison Writings. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
• Johnson, Paula C. (2003) Inner Lives: Voices of African American Women in Prison. New York: New York University Press.
• Karpowitz, Daniel (2017) College in Prison: Reading in an Age of Mass Incarceration. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
• Kornfeld, Phyllis (1997) Cellblock Visions: Prison Art in America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Lagemann, Ellen Condliffe (2016) Liberating Minds: The Case for College in Prison. New York: New Press.
• Melville, Samuel (1972) Letters from Attica. New York: William Morrow and Co.
• Miller, D. Quentin, ed. (2005) Prose and Cons: Essays on Prison Literature in the United States. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
• Monroe, Gary (2009) The Highway Men Murals: Al Black’s Concrete Dreams. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida.
• Peltier, Leonard (Harvey Arden, ed.) (1999) Prison Writings: My Life is My Sun Dance. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin.
• Sachs, Albie (1990) The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs. London: Paladin/Grafton Books.
• Salinas, Raúl (Louis G. Mendoza, ed.) (2006) raúlsalinas and the Jail Machine: My Weapon is My Pen. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
• Scheffler, Judith A., ed. (2002) Wall Tappings: An International Anthology of Women’s Prison Writings, 200 [CE] to the Present. New York: Feminist Press.
• Schorb, Jodi. (2014) Reading Prisoners: Literature, Literacy, and the Transformation of American Punishment, 1700-1845. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
• Schreiner, Barbara, ed. (1992) A Snake with Ice Water: Prison Writings by South African Women. Johannesburg: Congress of South African Writers.
• Suttner, Raymond (2001) Inside Apartheid’s Prisons: Notes and Letters of Struggle. Melbourne: Ocean Press/Pietermaritzburg, SA: University of Natal Press.
• Sweeney, Megan (2010) Reading Is My Window: Books and the Art of Reading in Women’s Prisons. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.
• Waldman, Ayelet and Robin Levi, eds. (2011) Inside This Place, Not of It: Narratives from Women’s Prisons. San Francisco, CA: McSweeney’s Books and Voice of Witness.

white supremacist, xenophobic nationalism and fascism

Now Dayton, Ohio: it makes one think these mass shootings are somehow planned, but I am not sure (sans compelling evidence) they are coordinated, perhaps arising out of acts of conspiracy, except, as it were, social psychologically (one act, inspiring another, and so forth), but it is clearly white supremacist, xenophobic nationalism (a variety of fascism) that is ideologically behind the wheel. And it is indeed, homegrown terrorism. Let’s be emphatic about this, the President of the U.S. is at least indirectly—thus not legally but morally because politically—culpable owing to his xenophobic and racist rhetoric at campaign speeches, in interviews, and on Twitter. He is using the “bully pulpit” (in part and by implication, in Theodore Roosevelt’s sense to ‘exhort, instruct, or inspire,’ but the adjective no longer means ‘excellent’ or ‘first-rate’ but rather is in the degrading and ugly spirit of its contemporary meaning as both a noun and verb), to inspire these mentally fragile if not sick individuals to act out their violent (‘primary process’ in the Freudian sense) phantasies that are intimately connected to their (‘secondary process’) political beliefs and desires. It is no exaggeration to say that these are conspicuous symptoms of our current variation on the theme of the “pathology of normalcy.”