Punishment in Popular Culture. Eds. Charles J. Ogletree, Jr. and Austin Sarat. New York: New York University Press, 2015. 320 pp. $27 paperback.

Abstract

Punishment in Popular Culture. Eds. Charles J. Ogletree, Jr. and Austin Sarat. New York: New York University Press, 2015. 320 pp. $27 paperback.The editors of Punishment in Popular Culture remind us that practices of punishment ... cultural boundaries are drawn, that solidarity is created through acts of marking difference between self and other, that these processes proceed through disidentification as much as imagined connection. (p. 2) This is doubt true about the organization, justification and reception of various forms of punishment in society. It is less true about the creation and cultivation of popular cultural forms of entertainment such as television and film. To be sure, punishment acts directly on bodies. And cultural forms-visual or texual stories about punishment or justice-act on bodies less directly. But both act on us, constituting individuals and communities as subjects, shaping our expectations and desires, implicating us in the moral points made. Narratives do not stand outside social authority - they are part of it. (Binder and Weisberg 2000: 23)Punishment in Popular Culture is a collection of essays about the representation and circulation of stories about punishment and justice. The essays take as given the constitutive force of popular culture and combine it with the deeply rooted discourses about punishment to demonstrate their interdependence. Contributors to the volume are legal scholars, cultural critics, and social justice advocates, attending to the appropriation and reconfiguration that law and popular culture accomplish as part of their mutually dependent reasoning. Alert to both historical truths about punishment and justice as well as to that circulate through culture like ... contagion, (Binder and Weisberg 2000: 27), stories that contain both truth and stereotypes organiz[e] and speak[] the world. (Binder and Weisberg 2000: 14). This is the power of popular cultural narratives. In critiquing cultural forms about prisons, the death penalty, and police corruption, the contributors ask whether our justice system is succeeding or failing by asking how popular culture enables audiences' critiques of the ultimate power law has: to degrade human bodies through its purposive use of violence.The parallels between the socio-political mechanisms of punishment and the constitutive forces of cultural narratives are ever present in this volume. Punishment requires subjective-objective relations of guilt and responsibility as well as shame and retribution to function as a disciplining force in and outside the law. Cultural narratives too, to stick and regenerate stories that further ground and reproduce shared moral values, combine individualization, and identification with broad discursive practices that bind communities around shared meanings to shape realities. As Richard Sherwin has written, popular cultural narratives (especially the visual forms) are no idle diversion.... It is where people look these days for reality. (Sherwin 1996: 894, 896). But cultural forms-like forms of punishment-also provoke imagination, the might-have-beens and might-bes as the editors describe them. (p. 5) We cannot help project ourselves into scenes of punishment. Likewise, narrative form (visual narratives especially) calls upon audiences to identify with subjects to stitch together the story through a combination of empathic dread and relief. Between the moments of decision and action, we consider our options and possible reactions. We thus participate in the story unfolding contemplating alternatives to the social order depicted and judging the outcome as well as its inhabitants.The book is divided into three parts, roughly corresponding to forms of critique. The first part containing chapters by Lary May and Aurora Wallace reads film and television texts, respectively, to explain the appeal of a particular American form of punishment. May reads a set of crime from the 1970s to the 1990s that he calls backlash films as a response to the counterculture movement of the 1960s. …