Colonial and Post-Colonial Incarceration

Graeme Harper is Professor of Creative Writing and Dean of The Honors College at Oakland University, Michigan, USA. He is Editor of the Approaches to Writing Series at Bloomsbury, Editor of the New Writing journal and is Chair of the Creative Writing Studies Organization (CWSO) in the USA. He was also inaugural Chair of HE at the UK’s National Association of Writers in Education (NAWE) and is an award-winning fiction writer, Professor and Honorary Professor.

• The history and culture of imprisonment - Western traditions and the colonial world, Graeme Harper; servants on the high seas -unfree labour in early modern captivity narratives, Daniel J. Vitkus; European women and the aboriginal folklore in Australian captivity narratives, Susan K. Martin; sermons of race -puritanism and the gallows in colonial North America, J. Kameron Carter; trading places - slave traders enslaved, Kerry Sinnanan; urban captivity - imprisonment and disease in the 18th century, Cynthia Ragland; cross-cultural comparisons - captivity narratives from North America to Australia, D'Arcy Randall and Kay Schaffer; the imprisoned body - power, property and ownership in Mali, Emily Haddad; empires of dark and light - Japanese prisons and narratives of survival, James A. Whitlark; gendering imprisonment - Muslim women in French colonial Algeria, James D. Le Seur; captivity in Kenya - detention camps and independence, Mary Ross; Chinese women and the prisons of exile, Di Gan; the construction of national identity in South Africa - apartheid prison narratives, Shane Graham; war and terror - imperialism and imprisonment in Irish literature, John Brannigan; colonial incarceration - rewriting the culture and history of the prison, Graeme Harper.