Austin Sarat Christian Boulanger
The Cultural Lives of Capital Punishment
Comparative Perspectives
Anteprima del libro
How does the way we think
and feel about the world around us affect the existence and administration of
the death penalty? What role does capital punishment play in defining our
political and cultural identity?
After centuries during
which capital punishment was a normal and self-evident part of criminal
punishment, it has now taken on a life of its own in various arenas far beyond
the limits of the penal sphere. In this volume, the authors argue that in order
to understand the death penalty, we need to know more about the "cultural
lives"—past and present—of the state’s ultimate sanction.
They undertake this
“cultural voyage” comparatively—examining the dynamics of the death penalty in
Mexico, the United States, Poland, Kyrgyzstan, India, Israel, Palestine, Japan,
China, Singapore, and South Korea—arguing that we need to look beyond the
United States to see how capital punishment “lives” or “dies” in the rest of
the world, how images of state killing are produced and consumed elsewhere, and
how they are reflected, back and forth, in the emerging international judicial
and political discourse on the penalty of death and its abolition.
