"Captive and Free" is the first study to deal extensively and comparatively with capture, imprisonment and punishment in colonial and post-colonial cultures. Offering textual as well as historical analysis, each chapter focuses on a specific national or regional arena. Each also provides insight into the social, economic and cultural conditions prevalent in colonial societies. There are contributions on: prison narratives; slave trading; property and power; gender and imprisonment; national identity; war and terror; modes of survival; religion and incarceration; the relationships between master and slave; disease and urban imprisonment; and on the condition and destruction of detention camps. Chapters, written by a wide range of international specialists, include coverage of the early modern to the contemporary period as well as coverage of cultural arenas from Europe to Asia, Australia, northern and southern Africa and North America. The book is useful reading for those interested in such questions as "what are the differences between one instance of colonial incarceration and another?"; "how are Western and non-Western approaches to punishment different?" ; "in what ways are such broad categories as "gender", "race" and "ownership" formulated in the discourses of torture, imprisonment and survival?"; and "how do practices of detention and punishment reflect the tensions as well as the agreements between cultures?"

Author Biography

Graeme Harper is Professor of Creative Writing and Director of the National Institute for Excellence in the Creative Industries at Bangor University, UK. He is Editor of New Writing: the International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing. His most recent novels are Moon Dance (Parlor, 2008) and Small Maps of the World (Parlor, 2006). His previous book for Continuum was Teaching Creative Writing (Continuum, 2006).