Abstract
This chapter offers a new framework for theorizing processes of penal change: palimpsestic penality. Borrowing from the mechanisms of ancient printmaking, this metaphor draws attention to the ways in which logics of punishment may mutate outside the strictures of linear temporality, continually being superimposed, eroded, and re-imagined, as new ideas integrate with those being effaced. The authors mobilize the science fiction anthology series Black Mirror to illustrate this concept in action, arguing that the final episode “Black Museum” performs a palimpsest of the entire series. This chapter traces how vigilante justice is constructed, transfigured, and effaced within and between episodes, positioning penal change as an interpretive process that reaches toward the past and future simultaneously.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Bender, J. B. 1987. Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture of Mind in Eighteenth Century England. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Blumer, Herbert. 1986 [1969]. Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Brooker, Charlie, Annabel Jones, and Jason Arnopp. 2018. Inside Black Mirror. London: Ebury Press.
Bryant, Joseph M. 1994. “Evidence and Explanation in History and Sociology: Critical Reflections on Goldthorpe’s Critique of Historical Sociology.” The British Journal of Sociology 45, no. 1: 3–19.
Bryant, Joseph M., and John A. Hall. 2005. “Towards Integration and Unity in the Human Sciences: The Project of Historical Sociology.” In Historical Methods in the Social Sciences, edited by John A. Hall and Joseph M. Bryant, xxi–xxxv. London, Thousand Oaks, and New Delhi: Sage.
Duncan, M. G. 1996. Romantic Outlaws, Beloved Prisons: The Unconscious Meanings of Crime and Punishment. New York: New York University Press.
Durkheim, Emile. 1997. The Division of Labor in Society. New York: The Free Press.
Feeley, M., and Jonathan Simon. 1992. “The New Penology: Notes of the Emerging Strategy for Corrections and Its Implications.” Criminology 30, no. 4: 49–74.
Foucault, Michel. 1995. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books.
Garland, David. 2001. The Culture of Control. Vol. 367. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Giddens, Anthony. 1984. The Constitution of Society. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Goldstone, Jack A. 2004. “Response: Reasoning About History, Sociologically….” Sociological Methodology 34: 35–61.
Goodman, Philip, Joshua Page, and Michelle Phelps. 2015. “The Long Struggle: An Agonistic Perspective on Penal Development.” Theoretical Criminology 19, no. 3: 315–335.
Goodman, Philip, Joshua Page, and Michelle Phelps. 2017. Breaking the Pendulum: The Long Struggle Over Criminal Justice. New York: Oxford University Press.
Hutchinson, Steven. 2006. “Countering Catastrophic Criminology: Reform, Punishment and the Modern Liberal Compromise.” Punishment & Society 8, no. 4: 443–467.
Katz, Jack. 1988. Seductions of Crime: Moral and Sensual Attractions in Doing Evil. New York: Basic Books.
Ketterer, David, Eric S. Rabkin, and Raffaella Baccolini. 2005. “Science Fiction and Imagination.” PMLA 120, no. 1: 246–249.
Linnemann, Travis. 2015. “Capote’s Ghosts: Violence, Media and the Spectre of Suspicion.” British Journal of Criminology 55, no. 3: 514–533.
Martin, John Levi. 2003. “What Is Field Theory?” American Journal of Sociology 109: 1–49.
Maurutto, Paula, and Kelly Hannah-Moffat. 2006. “Assembling Risk and the Restructuring of Penal Control.” British Journal of Criminology 46, no. 3: 438–454.
Page, Joshua, and Philip Goodman. 2018. “Creative Disruption: Edward Bunker, Carceral Habitus, and the Criminological Value of Fiction.” Theoretical Criminology: 1362480618769866.
Rafter, Nicole Hahn, and Michelle Brown. 2011. Criminology Goes to the Movies: Crime Theory and Popular Culture. New York: New York University Press.
Rubin, Ashley. 2016. “Penal Change as Penal Layering: A Case Study of Proto-Prison Adoption and Capital Punishment Reduction, 1785–1822.” Punishment & Society 18, no. 4: 420–441.
Rubin, Ashley. 2019. “Punishment’s Legal Templates: A Theory of Formal Penal Change.” Law & Society Review 53, no. 2: 518–553.
Ruggiero, V. 2003. Crime in Literature: Sociology of Deviance and Fiction. New York: Verso.
Rusche, Georg, and Otto Kirchheimer. 2003. Punishment and Social Structure. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers.
Savage, Mike, and Elizabeth B. Silva. 2013. “Field Analysis in Cultural Sociology.” Cultural Sociology 7, no. 2: 111–126.
Schneiderhan, Erik. 2016. “Theorizing Resistance.” The British Journal of Sociology 67, no. 1: 43–49.
Simon, Jonathan. 2007. Governing Through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Smith, C. 2009. The Prison and the American Imagination. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Suvin, Darko. 1972. “On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre.” College English 34, no. 3: 372–382.
Suvin, Darko. 1979. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Swedberg, Richard. 2012. “Theorizing in Sociology and Social Science: Turning to the Context of Discovery.” Theory and Society 41: 1–40.
Wacquant, Loic. 2001. “Deadly Symbiosis: When Ghetto and Prison Meet and Mesh.” Punishment & Society 3, no. 1: 95–133.
Wakeman, S. 2018. “The ‘One Who Knocks’ and the ‘One Who Waits’: Gendered Violence in Breaking Bad.” Crime, Media, Culture 14, no. 2: 213–228.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Quinn, K., Canossini, E., Evans, V. (2020). Carceral Imaginaries in Science Fiction: Toward a Palimpsestic Understanding of Penality. In: Harmes, M., Harmes, M., Harmes, B. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Incarceration in Popular Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36059-7_28
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36059-7_28
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-36058-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-36059-7
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)