Regents' Professor Joan Dayan Wins Princeton Fellowship To Focus on Prison and Law Project
Contact: Paula Randall, 621-5372; [email protected]
University of Arizona College of Humanities, Office of External Affairs
Princeton University's Program in Law and Public Affairs has named University of Arizona Regents' Professor Joan Dayan as a fellow for 2000-2001. Dayan, a Professor of English, will join five professors of law from several countries in the program's first group of fellows.
Princeton's Program in Law and Public Affairs sponsors teaching, research, public discussions and scholarly collaborations concerned with how legal systems, legal practices and legal concepts contribute to and detract from justice, order, individual well-being and the common good. It also promotes the interdisciplinary study of law. For her fellowship, Dayan will complete Held in the Body of the State, her book on prisons and the law, and teach a graduate seminar: "From the Plantation to the Penitentiary: Interpretation, Literature, and the Law."
Dayan is the author of Fables of Mind: An Inquiry into Poe's Fiction (Oxford University Press, 1987) and Haiti, History, and the Gods (University of California Press, 1995). In Haiti, History and the Gods, she shows how "the Code Noir or Black Code, instituted in 1685 to convey Louis XIV's edicts concerning the discipline and control of slaves in the French colonies," served as a mandate and vocabulary "of containment and dispossession, in which slaves became things and were divested of selfhood."
In 1995, the sight of men in fetters on Interstate 10 near Douglas, Arizona changed the course of Dayan's work. She started a short essay on the return to chain gangs in Arizona. Her anthropological field work gradually turned into a study of the history and workings of prisons in Arizona. Visits to various Arizona prisons took her to special management units that have extended solitary confinement to large numbers of prisoners and "normalized" its use, prison law libraries (now abolished), and the death house. "The Blue Room in Florence" (Yale Review), her essay/memoir of two visits to the death chamber at Arizona State Prison in Florence, was selected as a Notable Essay of 1997 in The Best American Essays.
Dayan saw a variety of practices that have increasingly and systematically denied incarcerated individuals rights and activities that define, sustain and rehabilitate their humanity. "What is happening to convicts right now in the United States in terms of personhood and property is the most extreme redefinition of personhood and slavery in the Americas," she asserts, adding, "We are creating a large, ever larger group of people who are being expelled from civil society and turned into something like waste materials."
Along the way Dayan realized that to deal with what was happening, "I needed to do more with the actual case law that was determining new practices of incarceration." The backbone of Held in the Body of the State, the book she will finish at Princeton, is "the changes that have occurred in the language of the courts over the last 20 years which have changed our ability to think about the civil rights of prisoners." One such change is the redefinition of solitary confinement as "administrative segregation" rather than "disciplinary segregation," a redefinition that circumvents the right of prisoners to due process before being confined in solitary. Dayan believes one key to the current trend lies in the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which "abolished involuntary servitude, except in the case of criminals who have been convicted." Dayan emphasizes, "You could in effect be a slave of the state." In Held in the Body of the State she hopes to demonstrate that "what had only existed as precepts in 19th-century Saint-Dominique are now being literalized in contemporary practices of incarceration that remain unique in the so-called 'civilized' world."
Dayan examines these trends through the language of the law, including case findings and the administrative procedures correctional facilities use to interpret the law. She notes in her essay "Held in the Body of the State: Prisons and the Law" (Sarat and Kearns' History, Memory, and the Law,Univ. Michigan Press, 1999), Terminology and changing definitions matter a great deal, since the assessment of criminality and control of the confined is in large part a rhetorical endeavor. Discursive obfuscation spares one the need to confront the extreme practices subsumed under the name of "corrections": when "solitary confinement" is retermed "special management" or when those carrying out executions are known as the "special operations team."
Other areas of Dayan's scholarship include American Studies, comparative Caribbean cultural history, and Religion. She holds a B.A. from Smith College and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the City University Graduate Center.
The Program in Law and Public Affairs is a joint venture of Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School, University Center for Human Values, and Politics Department.
Photo is available upon request.
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