Caroline Liebel. “Unique incarceration events’: Margaret Atwood’s Call for Prison Reform in Hag-Seed”
It seems that Margaret Atwood has always been concerned with ideas of personal freedom. Atwood’s Hag-Seed, her contribution to the Hogarth Press’s effort to retell Shakespeare’s plays for a more modern audience, takes the notion of freedom a step further; her adaptation of The Tempest is staged inside a Canadian prison. Atwood’s situating of the plot inside a prison marks its participation in a wider literary and political movement. Hag-Seed reads strikingly like memoirs written by real-life persons who participated in and ran the kinds of prison literacy programs that Atwood recreates.
The debate between retributive and restorative justice has become a vital issue in society today. This paper explores how Atwood humanizes prisoners and demonstrates the benefits of programs such as her fictional Literacy Through Literature. Readers connect to the inmates and realize the benefits of similar programs in actual prisons. I demonstrate how Hag-Seed’s layered adaptation of The Tempest and prison literature memoirs makes Shakespearean themes accessible for a modern audience and places Atwood in a position of social activist. Hag-Seed can and should be read as Atwood supplanting Shakespearean themes into a 21st century setting and engaging with today’s concern with prison reform; she promotes the benefits of a rehabilitative and restorative justice system with an emphasis on the importance of literature and literacy based programming.
Cole Depuy. “The Dehumanization of Elon’s Three Little Pigs”
Elon Musk’s company Neuralink is developing brain-computer chip interfaces to splice the human brain with the rise of artificial intelligence, something Musk deems necessary for human intelligence to avoid irrelevance in the face of computer self-learning. Behind the apparent drama of this transhumanist and existential threat is an act of dehumanization more pressing—Neuralink experiments on live pigs as a way to test their hardware and techniques. While exploitative and detrimental to the pigs, this treatment is also dangerous for the human condition. Neuralink’s Animal Care Team boasts about their supererogatory treatment of the pigs’ “welfare” without questioning the paradigm that accepts vivisection and captivity, for solely human purposes, as appropriate. This Los Angeles, CA company’s framing efforts are emblematic of a last-ditch effort for progressives to justify animal experimentation. As progressivism strives to expand human rights to all groups of people, it cannot ignore the overlapping characteristics between humans and animals. Humans are animals, and they share the same nervous systems, organs, and primary process emotions. In effect, when people treat animals as objects, they deny their capacity to relate to their own sense of play, rage, or will to live. To “other” animals as undeserving of fundamental rights is to admit that the same qualities in people are not worthy of intrinsic value nor protection. To bypass shame, disassociate, and reject compassion for a fictional sense of uniqueness increasingly alienates us from other life, including each other. Like racism and sexism, speciesism is a product of hierarchical prejudice that positions the moral value of one group above another. Practicing any discrimination deadens those to the outside world. We must widen the circle of who deserves human rights to our animal family if we expect to treat ourselves and others with dignity.
Lisa LeBlond. “Gender and [Re-]Casting in Steve McQueen’s Hunger: Selectively Culling Bobby Sands’ Writings from Prison”
This presentation concerns the film Hunger (2008) which focalizes the carceral experience of Bobby Sands, the leader of the 1981 hunger strike at Maze prison, Northern Ireland. While I will underscore the filmmakers’ formal choices that reflect the inhumane conditions of the prison experience and the cause of such conditions—the political division between the British government and the IRA—I also focus on what I claim to be the filmmakers’ alterations to history that omit and conceal lived experience. As the CFP for Gradcon 2021 suggests, “we are in the process of confronting new normals” in “a transformed world” and so it is important to challenge visual texts that deny transformation to promote myopic, outworn representations. My paper argues that while Hunger includes powerful performances by Michael Fassbender as Sands and Helen Madden as Rosaleen Sands, Bobby’s mother—and suggests female agency elsewhere— director Steve McQueen and writer Enda Walsh ignore germane information that they likely had access to regarding the Sands’ family and Sands’ interiority to promote hyper masculine and feminine cultural and religious stereotypes in their film. Evidence for a more complex rendering of these historical figures, as well as Sands’ appreciation of women Irish nationalists, can be found in Sands’ diary, Writings from Prison, and Brendan J. Byrne’s documentary film Bobby Sands: 66 Days. This paper is in conversation with feminist scholarship of Ireland’s Troubles era post-conflict films, film theory, masculinity studies, and Anderson’s theory of the nation.
The separation of Northern Ireland (NI) from the Republic of Ireland recently passed the 100-year mark; years of violent struggles followed the partitioning—especially during the Troubles (1968-98)—and the deaths of thousands linger in the minds of many due to the threat of what a new hard Brexit border might do to the NI psyche. The recent Brexit deal will avoid border checkpoints and chaos by allowing NI to apply certain E.U. customs rules while not being a part of the EU; but these rules in turn will likely foster diminished links with the rest of the United Kingdom and may lead to an eventual battle over the reunification of Ireland. Thus, Irish nationalism and reunification remain relevant to discourse today.
