Prison, Home, Garden: Carceral Idylls and (Re)Thinking Detention in Robert Glas’ Justice Beyond Revenge. Recalling Louk Hulsman (2024)
Hanneke Stuit, University of Amsterdam
In this talk I will analyse how the exhibition Justice Beyond Revenge. Recalling Louk Hulsman (2024) by Robert Glas undermines the relative invisibility and alleged benevolence of prison and detention practices in the Dutch context. Through this analysis, I offer the concept of the carceral idyll to critique how penal systems are maintained positively in the public sphere. The carceral idyll refers to the belief that confining people in the right way, in the right place and for the right amount of time benefits those incarcerated and keeps society safe. It is applicable to the design and experience of prison spaces themselves, but also to rehabilitation and, perhaps, even abolitionist discourses. Building on the seminal work by Monika Fludernik on Anglophone prison literature (2019), the analysis focuses on the prison as home and garden tropes in order to explore how these two deep-seated idylls produce specific configurations of time that, on the one hand, can make prison life tolerable, but, on the other, exacerbate temporal trajectories that further imprison and confine. Carceral Idylls thus not only serve to understand prison space better, but also shed light on the fact that ‘power in our society is above all power over our time’ (Hardt 1997).
In preparation for this talk, please feel free to read the draft of the article I am preparing on this topic for a social sciences journal, but please do not circulate this paper further. It is far from complete and I am still working on the red thread of the argument. For an earlier, more historically oriented iteration of the carceral idyll concept, please see this short paper (article c) on the role of idylls in domestic colonization in the Netherlands in the 19th Century: http://collateral-journal.com/index.php?cluster=23
Hanneke Stuit is Associate Professor Literary and Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam. Recent publications include the edited volumes Carceral Worlds: Legacies, Textures and Futures (Bloomsbury 2024) and Planetary Hinterlands: Extraction, Abandonment and Care (Palgrave 2024). Besides the carceral idyll project, she is working on a monograph on pastoral entrapment and strategies of disenclosure in South African literature and film.