Meet the Authors Series: Viviane Saleh-Hanna
Wednesday, April 16, 1:00 - 2:00 pm
Board of Trustees Room, Foster Administration Building
About the Book
Colonial Systems of Control is a groundbreaking book on the under-researched topic of West African penal-systems appearing in the collection Alternative Perspectives on Criminology. The book brings theoretical innovation to the study of penology, colonialism, history, and resistance and proposes new directions and methodological approaches for future studies. Dr. Saleh-Hanna brings together Western and African scholars, former prisoners and human rights activists—a powerful approach which offers the reader a range of perspectives from which to approach the topic. The testimonies by former prisoners in particular provide a humanizing glimpse of the micro-level struggles of survival for criminalized African men and women, while the scholarly articles address the macro-level structural, political and legal contexts.
The books introduces new concepts and understandings of the relationship between colonialism and the penal system (penal coloniality) while at the same time presenting previously unavailable details about Indigenous African justice models. This is the first detailed account that documents the use of penal abolitionist discourse and praxis in an African context. It is a compelling and important book that will challenge the way you think about safety, crime and punishment.
From the foreword by Julia Sudbury.
The inside dust jacket reads as follows:
At the root of Viviane Saleh-Hanna’s scholarly work is the desire and expressed responsibility to bring forth the voices of those rendered voiceless: “For this reason, I work with prisoners and actively pursue avenues through which their experiences and knowledges can be heard on this side of the prison’s wall. In this book, I present a modified ethnographic method. I consciously avoided the use of traditional ‘interview’ methods that systemize, break up (into ‘shortened quotes’) and thematically categorize people’s statements and experiences. Instead, I reserved entire chapters at the heart of the book in which first hand accounts of prisoners’ experiences could be presented as is, from beginning to end, in the first person. I asked them to write about what was important to them and did not provide any specific questions or frameworks that they had to abide by or react to. My own ethnographic work included documenting what I saw and learned in Nigeria. My experiences and my scholarship, in conjunction with a wide array of scholarly voices on the historical, economic and political conditions in Nigeria contextualize (not explain) prisoners’ first-hand accounts of life inside prison. In presenting this modified ethnographic approach, I hope to inspire more scholars to create spaces in their publications in which their ‘subjects’ can be seen and heard as people who are their own experts on their own experiences.”
About the Author
Dr. Saleh-Hanna is an Assistant Professor of Crime and Justice Studies at the UMass Dartmouth. Coptic and Palestinian in origin, Canadian in citizenship and Pan-Africanist in her heart, she identifies as an activist scholar. Prior to moving to the United States, she lived in Nigeria and worked with prisoners in Nigeria, Ghana and the Gambia. Her book Colonial Systems of Control: Criminal Justice in Nigeria is the first publication on prisons in West Africa and the first publication to provide an in-depth look at the life inside African prisons. More recently, her scholarship and activism have focused on the role black music plays in black liberation struggles and the fight against modern slavery through mass incarceration.
