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Podcast: New Books in African American Studies
Episode: Cristina Mejia Visperas, "Skin Theory: Visual Culture and the Postwar Prison Laboratory" (NYU, 2022)
Description: An abolitionist approach to STS and the history of the life sciences: this is the model that Cristina Mejia Visperas offers in her book, Skin Theory: Visual Culture and the Postwar Prison Laboratory (NYU 2022). By now, scientistsâ experiments on captive men at Philadelphiaâs Holmesburg Prison are well known, thanks to the brave and important testimony of former captive-subjects in books like Allen Hornblumâs Acres of Skin. Building on this documentary work, Visperas turns attention to the prison experimentsâ âoptical rationality,â the way of seeing images that came out of a space that was simultaneously prison and laboratory. For Visperas, ski...