Imagining the American Death Penalty

The Cultural Work of Popular Visual Representations

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by Birte Christ

Type: Studies
Subject: Countries > United States
Keywords: United States, sociology, justice
Publishing date: 2025 (May 31, 2025)
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Collection: Law and Literature
Language: English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Hardcover • 336 pages
6 x 9 ¼ inches (15.5 x 23.5 cm)

ISBN

978-0-19-893508-7

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Book Presentation:
Law and Literature • Contextualizes popular visual representations of the death penalty after 1890 not only in scholarship, but in its medial pre-history from the antebellum period onwards
• Displays a timeline and cluster overview for each of the three parts of the book
• Focuses on both political and legal discourse, and on genre and other cultural and material contexts, such as technology and economic issues

Imagining the American Death Penalty traces the US American cultural imaginary of capital punishment through popular visual representations from the 1890s to the twenty-first century. The book focuses on three generic and historical clusters of representations: early film from the 1890s through Intolerance (1916), crime film noir of the 1950s and1960s, and legal TV series from the 1990s through the early 2000s. The book makes two central arguments. First, it demonstrates that an increased concern with the death penalty in popular media does not mean that these texts promote an abolitionist agenda: their cultural work is ambiguous at best. This ambiguity is always contingent upon both the affordances of the particular genre and medium in question and on political-legal discursive context. The book explores both in detail. Early film is enchanted with its own representational possibilities due to the progress of technology and, in analogy, with the progress in execution technique, specifically the electric chair. In film noir, genre conventions and the legal back-and-forth before and after Furman predicate ambiguity. In legal TV series, the genre's ensemble casts and its focus on conversational exchange invite open debate. The second argument is that popular visual representations consistently whitewash the death penalty. The book demonstrates that this is the case because the most common narrative around executions in film and TV is to cast the condemned man as a hero who defies the violence of the state, gains dignity by accepting his fate and faults, and in some ways triumphs over death. The American imaginary, until very recently, did or could not imagine Black men to possess that measure of agency that it attributed to its white heroes.

About the Author:
Birte Christ, Giessen University Birte Christ has been teaching American Literature, Culture, and Media at Giessen University since 2009. Her work has focused on gender studies, book studies, the modernist and post-modernist novel, contemporary American politics and its media, but most importantly on Law and Literature and on the American death penalty. She has published on related issues such as the death penalty in Germany, and she has co-edited a volume on literary representations of the death penalty (Death Sentences, 2019). Her research has been supported, among others, by the American Antiquarian Society, the Karl Loewenstein Fellowship at Amherst College, and the Humboldt Foundation.

See the publisher website: Oxford University Press

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