Fugitive Thought: Prison Movements, Race, and the Meaning of Justice by Michael Hames-García

a book discussion led by Ulka Anjaria and Jennifer Harford-Vargas

Thursday, February 24, 2005
Board Room, Stanford Humanities Center, 4:00-6:00 PM

Reading: Chapter 4, "Resistant Freedom: Piri Thomas and Miguel Piñero" from Fugitive Thought.

Abstract: In Fugitive Thought, Hames-García takes a fresh approach to philosophies of justice and freedom and shows how the critiques and moral visions of dissidents and participants in prison movements can contribute to the shaping and realization of workable ethical conceptions. Unlike other authors who have studied prisons or legal theory, Hames-García views prisoners as political and social thinkers whose ideas are as valuable as those of lawyers and philosophers. Fugitive Thought focuses on writings by black and Latina/o lawyers and prisoners to flesh out the philosophical underpinnings of ethical claims within legal theory and prison activism.

Michael Hames-García is Associate Professor in the English Department at Binghamton University (State University of New York). He is the author of Fugitive Thought: Prison Movements, Race, and the Meaning of Justice (Minnesota 2004) and the co-editor, with Paula Moya, of Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism (California 2000). He has published articles on social identity, ethnic studies, gay and lesbian studies, prison intellectuals, law and literature, and literary theory and he teaches courses in Chicana/o and Latina/o literatures and critical theory. In 2002-2003, he was a visiting fellow at Stanford University's Research Institute for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity (RICSRE).

Ulka Anjaria is a third-year doctoral student in the Program for Modern Thought and Literature at Stanford University. Jennifer Harford-Vargas is a first-year doctoral student in the Department of English at Stanford University.