"Stranger Inside: Prisons, Imagination, and the Gendering of Social Theory"

Gina Dent is Assistant Professor of Women's Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz; editor of Black Popular Culture (Seattle: Bay Press, 1992); and author of articles on race, feminism, popular culture, and visual art. Her forthcoming book Anchored to the Real: Black Literature in the Wake of Anthropology (Duke University Press) is a study of the consequences-both disabling and productive-of social science's role in translating black writers into American literature. Recently a member of "Critical Resistance: Beyond the Prison Industrial Complex," an interdisciplinary residential research group at the University of California's Humanities Research Institute, she is currently at work on a manuscript on prisons and popular culture entitled Prison as a Border.