The cultural lives of capital punishment : comparative perspectives / edited by Austin Sarat and Christian Boulanger.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Sarat, Austin.

Boulanger, Christian.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Capital punishment--Cross-cultural studies.

Capital punishment.

Genre:

Cross-cultural studies.

Physical Description:

xiv, 342 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press, 2005.

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Putting culture into the picture : toward a comparative analysis of state killing / Christian Boulanger and Austin Sarat

Nineteenth-century executions as performances of law, death, and civilization / Jürgen Martschukat

Seed of abolition : experience and culture in the desire to end capital punishment in Mexico, 1841-1857 / Patrick Timmons

The cultural lives of capital punishment in the United States / Judith Randle

European identity and the mission against the death penalty in the United States / Evi Girling

Crime and punishment, self versus other : the cultural life of capital punishment in European and American film / Louise Tyler

Capital punishment in Poland : an aspect of the "cultural life" of death penalty discourse / Agata Fijalkowski

Capital punishment in Kyrgyzstan : between the past, "other" state killings and social demands / Botagoz Kassymbekova

Death and the nation : state killing in India / Julia Eckert

Imagining the death penalty in Israel : punishment, violence, vengeance, and revenge / Shai J. Lavi

The Palestinian culture of death : Shariah and Siyasah : justice, political power, and capital punishment in the Palestinian National Authority / Judith Mendelsohn Rood

The death penalty in Japan : secrecy, silence, and salience / David T. Johnson

What is wrong with capital punishment? : official and unofficial attitudes toward capital punishment in modern and contemporary China / Virgil K. Y. Ho

Capital punishment and the culture of developmentalism in Singapore / Alfred Oehlers and Nicole Tarulevicz

Ending state killing in South Korea : challenging the Asian capital punishment status quo / Sangmin Bae.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

0804752338

0804752346

OCLC:

57652253