Browsing by Subject "capitalism"
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Item Open Access Imagined communities of fandom: sport, spectatorship, meaning and alienation in late capitalism(Sport in Society, 2020-01-01) Kalman-Lamb, N© 2020, © 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This article accounts for the allure of sports spectatorship in late capitalism by theorizing spectatorial communities as imagined communities. Building on the work of Benedict Anderson and others, and drawing on discourse around fandom in popular culture and the media, it argues that imagined communities of fandom function as sites of meaning and community within the alienating and individualist context of late capitalism. These communities are invented and continuously rehearsed through fetish spectacle and ritualistic practice and produce Manichean understandings of social relations that can lead to marginalization and violence.Item Open Access Prison of the Womb: Gender, Incarceration, and Capitalism on the Gold Coast of West Africa, c. 1500–1957(Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2023) Balakrishnan, SAbstract To date, studies of imprisonment and incarceration have focused on the growth of male-gendered penal institutions. This essay offers a provocative addition to the global study of the prison by tracing the emergence of a carceral system in West Africa in the nineteenth century that was organized around the female body. By examining archival testimonies of female prisoners held in what were called “native prisons” in colonial Gold Coast (southern Ghana), this essay shows how birthing, impregnation, and menstruation shaped West Africa penal practices, including the selection of the captives, the duration of their time in prison, and how the prison factored into the legal infrastructure around tort settlements for debts and crimes. The term “prison of the womb” is used here to describe how the West African prison held bloodlines captive, threatening the impregnation of a female kin member as a ticking clock for tort settlement. Furthermore, it will be shown that this institution was imperative to the spread of mercantile capitalism in nineteenth-century Gold Coast.Item Open Access The jailhouse divergence: Why debtors’ prisons disappeared in 19th century Europe and flourished in West Africa(Punishment and Society, 2022-01-01) Balakrishnan, SIt has been argued that the debtors’ prison was abolished in 19th century Europe and North America because the institution contradicted the principles of modern capitalism; by confining debtors for unpaid loans, it punished the poor while hampering the creditor, who could not be repaid by a debtor rotting in jail. This essay revises these assumptions through a study of debtors’ prisons in 19th century Ghana. It argues that, in both Europe and West Africa, the debtors’ prison historically emerged as a hostage-taking institution. Families paid their members’ loans to free them. In 19th century Ghana, this system proved crucial to the spread of mercantile capitalism; debt inmates were released within a week and creditors were repaid in full. However, in Euro-America, a new belief in homo economicus as the ‘self-made man’ portrayed insolvency as an individual failure. The European nuclear family also reduced the financial base supporting the debtor. The result was that debtors faced months, if not years, behind bars. This essay suggests that debtors’ prisons disappeared in Europe, while flourishing in West Africa, not due to the emergence of capitalism, but because of the social fabric of credit relations—the financial obligations of Africa kin networks versus European families.