From a selected text literature, I need a literature review based article for my comprehensive exam with uniques argument (s) with APA Citations (Author Last Name, Year and Page Number) and referencing from the following approved proposals:
Literature-Based Comprehensive Exam Proposal and Reading List
I have read and reviewed at least 35-45% of the articles, chapters, and books listed in my original Course Development pathway comprehensive exam proposal, “Carceral Resistance: From Decolonization Perspectives.” Through this process, I was able to develop an understanding of the issues that has informed my development of an amended proposal. I now intend to follow the Literature Review pathway.
In my literature review, I will examine prisoner resistance as a struggle against carceral coloniality and racial capitalism. I argue how decolonial criminology extends political economic perspectives by centering the lived experiences of colonized and racialized people, both in the global north and global south. Based on these primary objectives, I have three central research questions: (1) How does prisoner resistance challenge carceral coloniality and racial capitalism? (2) How do different decolonial criminological perspectives extend political-economic critiques of incarceration? (3) How does centring the lived experiences of colonized and racialized prisoners expand our understanding of penal governance?
From Karl Marx to neo-Marxists/critical Marxists in criminology and penology, political economy has long provided a critical framework for analyzing incarceration as a mechanism of capitalist exploitation, surplus labour control (Rusche & Kirchheimer, 2017), and neoliberal governance (Gilmore, 2007; Wacquant, 2009). Yet, political-economic analyses alone are insufficient to account for the colonial and racialized dimensions of mass incarceration and its associated prisoners’ resistance in contemporary Western countries and the neo-colonial global south. Using decolonial criminological perspectives, I will examine how incarceration functions as an extension of colonial governance, structurally linked to slavery, Indigenous dispossession, and racialized punishment (Agozino, 2003; Cunneen, 2001; Rodríguez, 2006). Through this examination, I will develop a framework for understanding prisoner resistance that combines the political economy of punishment and prisoners’ resistance with decolonial criminology-based carceral resistance movement.
My approach is grounded in my family experiences of my elder brother’s arrest during my college life, involvement in leftist organizations and knowledge and understanding of prison-based anticolonial movement in South Asia, as well as Bangladesh during the British period, Pakistan and the post-liberation period. Throughout my teaching life, I have actively participated in Indigenous activist movements, anti-fascists and authoritarian rules in academic institutions and democratic transition for the societies. Based on my academic, theoretical and activist positionality as a scholar who is fascinated with Marxist egalitarian philosophy, a commitment to decolonizing knowledge in sociology, socio-legal studies, criminology and criminal justice, I am engaging myself to do researching carceral resistance through integrating political economic and decolonial perspectives. Through this research, I have a vision to decolonize the prisoner resistance movement as well as existing knowledge by integrating political, economic and decolonial perspectives.
To address my aforementioned research questions, I have developed a reading list focused on three main themes: (1) carceral and prisoner resistance; (2) the political economy of prisoners’ resistance; and (3) decolonial criminology. Within each of these themes, I tried to include classical and contemporary readings from both the global north and global south, including books, book chapters, articles and historical cases to understand the depth and breadth of the prisoner’s resistance from the perspectives. In my paper, I will employ a qualitative methodological approach based on historical analysis, case studies, and critical analysis of these three broad themes. As my objective is to prepare for a study of released Indigenous Women Political Prisoner resistance movements in Canada and Bangladesh, the literature review will equip me with the depth and breadth of two perspectives for understanding empirical cases in Bangladesh and Canada.
Based on the readings I have already completed, I expect to find that prisoner resistance—whether through labor strikes, legal mobilization, or Indigenous decolonial activism—disrupts both economic exploitation and settler-colonial dominance. Political economic perspectives identify prisons as sites of forced labor and surplus population management. In contrast, decolonial criminology expands this critique by showing how carceral systems reproduce colonial violence, racial subjugation, and Indigenous erasure in the age of racial capitalism in the global south and global north. I will also highlight the historical continuities between slavery, colonial imprisonment, and contemporary mass incarceration, demonstrating how penal institutions have long functioned as racial and colonial apparatuses of control in the global north and global south.
Through this literature-based comprehensive paper, I will contribute to theoretical criminology and punishment and society scholarship by bridging and integrating political economy with decolonial theory in the broader field of sociology, socio-legal studies and criminology as I did not find any direct work on this. My paper will challenge dominant criminological narratives that focus solely on economic exploitation, instead foregrounding how incarceration operates through intersecting logics of racial capitalism and colonial governance. Moreover, my paper will advance abolitionist and transformative justice movements, emphasizing the need to dismantle the prison-industrial complex as part of a broader project of decolonization for the voices and strategies of incarcerated individuals worldwide.
Green Color=Read and Review
Black color=Need to be read and reviewed, but they are from previous lists
Blue colour = Newly included but needs to approve
Theme-1: Carceral resistance and Global carceral resistance movements
1. Aretxaga, B. (1995). Dirty protest: Symbolic overdetermination and gender in Northern Ireland ethnic violence. Ethos, 23(2), 123–148.
2. Arford, T. (2016). Prisons as sites of power/resistance. The SAGE handbook of resistance, 224-243.
3. Feldman, A. (2008). “Introduction”, Formations of violence: The narrative of the body and political terror in Northern Ireland. University of Chicago Press.
4. Lilja, M. (2022). The definition of resistance. Journal of Political Power, 15(2), 202–220. https://doi.org/10.1080/2158379X.2022.2061127.
5. Ross, J. I. (2009). Resisting the carceral state: Prisoner resistance from the bottom up. Social Justice, 36(3 (117), 28–45.
6. Singh, U. K. (1996). Political prisoners in India, 1920-1977 [Ph.D., University of London, School of Oriental and African Studies (United Kingdom)]. https://www.proquest.com/docview/1977907000/abstract/AD59723BC6834F84PQ/1)?sourcetype=Dissertations%20&%20Theses
7. Bandyopadhyay, M. (2010). Everyday Life in a Prison: Confinement, Surveillance, Resistance. New Delhi: Orient Black Swan. P. 3-58.
8. Bracco Bruce, L. (2021). “Decolonising and De-patriarchalising Analyses of the Prison in the Global South.” In Prison in Peru: Ethnographic, Feminist and Decolonial Perspectives (pp. 73-114). Cham: Springer International Publishing.
Theme-2: Political Economy of Carceral Resistance
9. Alexander, M. (2010). The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, New York, NY: New Press.
10. Gilmore, R. W. (2007). Golden gulag: Prisons, surplus, crisis, and opposition in globalizing California (Vol. 21). Univ of California Press.
11. Bhattacharyya, G. (2018). “Introduction” Rethinking Racial Capitalism: Questions of Reproduction and Survival. Rowman & Littlefield.
12. De Giorgi, A. (2017). Punishment and political economy. In Alternative Criminologies (pp. 51-72). Routledge.
13. Garland, D. (1990). “The Political Economy of Punishment: Rusche and Kirchheimer and the Marxist Tradition.” “Punishment as Ideology and Class Control: Variations on Marxist Themes” ders., Punishment and Modern Society, Oxford, p. 101-154.
14. Lacey, N. (2008) The Prisoners’ Dilemma: Political economy and punishment in contemporary democracies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. P. 1-54
15. Massa, E. (2016). Punishment and political economy. In Handbook on Prisons (pp. 309-323). Routledge.
16. Melossi, D., Sozzo, M., & García, J. B. (Eds.). (2017). “Introduction”, The political economy of punishment today: Visions, debates and challenges. Routledge.
17. Rodríguez, D. (2006). “Introduction: American Apocalypse” In Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime. University of Minnesota Press. P.1-39.
18. Wacquant, L. (2009) Punishing the Poor. The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. P.1-75; 195-208.
19. Wang, J. (2018). “Introduction”, “The Prison Abolitionist Imagination: A Conversation” Carceral capitalism (Vol. 21). MIT Press. P. 1-99; 295-325.
Theme-3: Settler Colonialism, Colonial Politics, Decoloniality, Indigeneity and Resistance
20. Agozino, B. (2003). Counter-colonial criminology: A critique of imperialist reason. Pluto Press. https://digital.library.tu.ac.th/tu_dc/frontend/Info/item/dc:23902
21. Arnold, D. (1994). The colonial prison: power, knowledge and penology in nineteenth-century India. Subaltern Studies, 8, 148-87.
22. Coulthard G (2014). Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Chapter 1 & 2.
23. Dei, G. J. S., & Jaimungal, C. (Eds.). (2018). “Introduction” Indigeneity and decolonial resistance: Alternatives to colonial thinking and practice. Myers Education Press. P.1-14.
24. Dimou, E. (2021). Decolonizing Southern Criminology: What Can the “Decolonial Option” Tell Us About Challenging the Modern/Colonial Foundations of Criminology? Critical Criminology, 29(3), 431–450. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10612-021-09579-9
25. Mignolo, W. D., & Walsh, C. E. (2018). “Introduction”, On decoloniality: Concepts, analytics, praxis. Duke University Press.
26. Monchalin, L. (2016). “Introduction”, The colonial problem: An Indigenous perspective on crime and injustice in Canada. University of Toronto Press.
27. Tetrault, J. E. C. (2023). Decolonizing prisons: Indigenized programming and a critique of critical prison studies. Incarceration, 4, 26326663231188203. https://doi.org/10.1177/26326663231188203
28. Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. “Decolonization is not a metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1(1) (2012). Online
29. Cabral, A., Rabaka, R., Cabral, A., & Cabral, A. (2016). Resistance and Decolonization. Rowman & Littlefield International. P.1-69.
30. Cunneen, C., Deckert, A., Porter, A., Tauri, J., & Webb, R. (Eds.). (2023). “Abolition as a decolonizing project”, “Decolonial criminology” “The decolonization paradigm in criminology”. The Routledge International Handbook on Decolonizing Justice. Taylor & Francis. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003176619
31. Davis, A. Y. (2003). “Introduction” “Slavery, Civil Rights, and Abolitionist Perspectives Toward Prison,” Are prisons obsolete? Seven Stories Press.
32. Montford, K. S., & Taylor, C. (2021). Building Abolition: Decarceration and Social Justice. Routledge.
33. Nickel, S. (2023). ” We want action now”: Indigenous Spirituality, Prison Activism, and Social Movement Mobilization. Histoire sociale/Social History, 56(115), 149-175.
34. Palacios, L. (2016). Challenging convictions: Indigenous and black race-radical feminists theorizing the carceral state and abolitionist praxis in the United States and Canada. Meridians, 15(1), 137-165.
35. Piacentini, L., & Slade, G. (2024). East is East? Beyond the Global North and Global South in Criminology. The British Journal of Criminology, 64(3), 521–537. https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azad048
36. Smith, L.T. (1999). “Introduction”, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London: Zed Books Ltd.
37. Aliverti, A., Carvalho, H., Chamberlen, A., & Sozzo, M. (2023). Decolonizing the criminal question: colonial legacies, contemporary problems (p. 416). Oxford University Press.
38. Blagg, H., & Anthony, T. (2019). Decolonising criminology. Imagining Justice in.
39. Cavalcanti, R. P. (2022). The pursuit of the ‘dead bandit’: A decolonial analysis of the persecution of the marginalized in Brazil. Critical Criminology, 30(3), 757-775.
40. Cunneen, C., & Tauri, J. (2016). Indigenous criminology. Policy Press.
41. Fanon, F., Sartre, J. P., & Farrington, C. (1963). ‘Colonial Wars and Mental Disorder’ The wretched of the earth (Vol. 36). New York: Grove press.
42. Fischer-Hoffman, C. (2016). “Introduction” Prisons and power: Carceral coloniality in hybrid post-neoliberal Venezuela.
43. Glynn, M., Breen, D. Towards a Critical Race Criminology: Decolonising Criminological Practice. Crit Crim 32, 441–456 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10612-024-09758-4
44. Kitossa PhD, T. (2020). Criminology as epistemic necropolitics. Social Transformations Journal of the Global South, 8(2), 5.
45. Saleh-Hanna, V., Williams, J. M., & Coyle, M. J. (2023). Abolish criminology. In Abolish criminology (pp. 1-9). Routledge.
46. Stark, H. K. (2016). Criminal empire: The making of the savage in a lawless land. Theory & Event, 19(4).