01/06/2012
We are excited to announce our first LEEP speaker of 2012:
John Riofrio from College of William and Mary will be speaking on Thursday, January 26th at 6:00 pm in El Centro, Stanford University
Spectacles of Incarceration: Ideological Violence in Popular Prison Documentaries
Spectacles of Incarceration looks closely at the proliferation of documentary-based programming that purports to take viewers “behind bars” at prisons throughout the United States. I argue that these programs, which can be viewed every night of the week on channels as diverse as MSNBC, Discovery Channel and National Geographic Channel, perform a very specific and insidious form of rhetorical and ideological violence. My essay argues that programs like MSNBC’s Lockdown or Behind Bars function largely to educate the viewing public by reaffirming core neoliberal beliefs that consistently 1) construct criminality as a failing of individual actors and not as a social construct 2) fetishize the technology of surveillance and incarceration and 3) reaffirm the “justified” criminalization of black and latino males. This essay focuses particularly on the insidious nature of these messages as well as their subtle, barely perceptible articulations within the traditional narrative arc of the reality-style documentaries.
John Riofrio, or “Rio” as he is called by just about everyone besides his parents, earned his PhD in English from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The son of Ecuadorian migrants, Rio is the father of two small children and two older step-daughters. When he is not busy playing Mancala, putting together Legos and coaching his kids’ soccer team, he is hard at work teaching courses in Latino studies at the College of William and Mary where he is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures. Rio has published on the confluence of Latin American and Latino studies, and is at work on a book-length manuscript entitled “Continental Shifts: Hemispheric Migrations and the Struggles over Latin@ Identity in the Americas.” He also occasionally finds the emotional energy to publish opinion pieces in Huffington Post on topics ranging from cable television’s obsession with big, white families to a media review of CNN’s Latino in America.
