The Life of Paper Letters and a Poetics of Living Beyond Captivity [Hardcover]

The Life of Paperoffers a wholly original and inspiring analysis of how people facing systematic social dismantling have engaged letter correspondence to remake themselves—from bodily integrity to subjectivity and collective and spiritual being. Exploring the evolution of racism and confinement in California history, this ambitious investigation disrupts common understandings of the early detention of Chinese migrants (1880s–1920s), the internment of Japanese Americans (1930s–1940s), and the mass incarceration of African Americans (1960s–present) in its meditation on modern development and imprisonment as a way of life. Situating letters within global capitalist movements, racial logics, and overlapping modes of social control, Sharon Luk demonstrates how correspondence becomes a poetic act of reinvention and a way to live for those who are incarcerated. 
 

Sharon Lukis Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at University of Oregon. 

List of Illustrations
Introduction: The Life of Paper

Part One: Detained
1 • The Inventions of China
2 • Imagined Genealogies (for All Who Cannot Arrive)

Part Two: Interned
3 • “Detained Alien Enemy Mail: EXAMINED”
4 • Censorship and the / Work of Art, Where They Barbed the / Fourth Corner Open

Part Three: Imprisoned
5 • Ephemeral Value and Disused Commodities
6 • Uses of the Profane

Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index

"The Life of Paperis imbued through and through, at once, with both a scholastically won and rendered understanding of the whole of our contemporary world—both worldwide and world-making—and a yet resolute and tenaciously held sense of the theoretical work that arises within the personal and intimate, in the apparently ephemeral fragments of a hope long belÓÒ