Dan Berger

Constructing crime, framing disaster Routines of criminalization and crisis in Hurricane Katrina

This article argues that the media frames utilized in the first month after Hurricane Katrina legitimated punishment as disaster policy through lurid reports of individual crime. The application of prevailing state policies led to a quick embrace of punitive policing and incarceration, and journalistic routines ended up supporting this process. Although journalists openly expressed their disgust with state neglect, news conventions nonetheless criminalized much of the New Orleans population and suggested militarized policing and imprisonment as fundamental to restore order. Lacking credible sources, reporters relied on rumors and helped create a racialized ‘looter class’ that aided state efforts to regain control through existing policies of mass incarceration rather than mutual aid or state welfare. Even though various media outlets recanted the more extreme elements of this coverage, the tropes they employed created a lasting effect. Building off Stuart Hall et al.’s (1978) analysis of a moral panic over mugging in 1970s England, this article examines both the conventions and consequences of this crisis coverage. The result, I argue, bolstered the existing crisis of incarceration.

Social Movements and Mass Incarceration

This article reads social movements into the story of the American carceral state in two ways. First, rather than see mass incarceration as emanating only from the war on drugs, I locate it within a broader framework of political repression of radical movements. Second, I argue that there is a new social movement against imprisonment on the rise. This burgeoning movement pursues what I call a strategy of decarceration that combines radical critique, direct action, and tangible goals for reducing the reach of the carceral state.

Rescuing Civil Rights from Black Power: Collective Memory and Saving the State in Twenty-First-Century Prosecutions of 1960s-Era Cases

Recent historical studies have shown that the movement for black power significantly predated its 1966 emergence as a slogan during a protest march in Mississippi. Scholarly texts and memoirs have excavated numerous projects to show that radical perspectives of black power— politically, culturally, strategically—defined the post-World War II war period in multiple ways. This revisionist literature has already helped rewrite the standard narrative of the postwar period in at least two crucial ways: these monographs discuss the movement as always being a national phenomenon, rather than one distinctly Southern and then discretely Northern. The explicit articulation of “black power” in the late 1960s and early 1970s is thus presented as a more explicitly militant iteration of the black freedom struggle rather than as a deviation from the civil rights movement. Such a presentation further challenges the dichotomous view of civil rights as noble and nonviolent, black power as vicious and violent. These contributions trace a constantly evolving movement targeting deeply entrenched structures of white supremacy in the politics, culture, economics, and values of the United States writ large. The manifestations of the black freedom struggle—its goals and strategies—shifted over time, and several of these studies have documented the nuances of these ebbs and flows. But this more fluid view of the black freedom struggle eschews rigid periodization in favor of an approach emphasizing change along a continuum of repression, imagination, and resistance.

Challenging U.S. Apartheid: Atlanta and Black Struggles For Human Rights, 1960–1977 Winston A. Grady-Willis

women somehow desire the erotic more than men do. But even if this were historically true, that men can come to understand the value of erotic life—as W.E.B. Du Bois confessed about his own sexuality in his last autobiography Soliloquy on My Life Near the End of Its First Century (International Publishers, 1968 )—makes the claim a contingent feature of male (and female) life. In similar kind, one could argue that the dialectic between the one-party state leader and church civil institutions lack the mediating force of a group linked to infrastructural development in a way that constitutes the ownership of production-generating capital. A problem with religious civil institutions is that, like many other institutions that relate to Black communities, they are service-oriented instead of productionbased. As a consequence, the material things needed along with the political institutions in Africa require more. Bongmba has, however, marked out the ethical, existential, and political terrain in remarkable detail. The Dialectics of Social Transformation in Africa needn’t have all the answers. What is crucial is that it places the right set of questions on the table.

Book Review: Our Unfree Press: 100 Years of Radical Media Criticism

ing vital media issues. Entman’s analysis is sharp. Presidents do enjoy enormous power in setting the terms of public debate. Most journalists disseminate the perspectives of political elites. It is harder for reporters to bring messages from ordinary citizens to the corridors of power, harder still for them to contest the dominant ideas of their time. Through this book, we understand more clearly why the work of independent journalism is so hard – and why, in wartime, it matters so much.