Section I
1. Introduction: Why Prison Yoga and Meditation?
2. Who Was I?: Scholarship, Personal Narrative, and the Testimony
of the Unprotected
3. Yoga and Meditation: Historical and Contemporary Debates
Section II
4. The Total Institution: The World of Mass Incarceration, Prisons,
and Population-Control
5. "Rescued by Prison" or "Drinking the Kool-Aid?": Practicing Yoga
and Meditation While Incarcerated
6. Mindfulness Meditation in a Men's Detention Facility
Section III
7. The World of Prison Volunteers
8. "Making them Better Human Beings" or "Stirring the Pot"?:
Interviews with Volunteers
9. Yogic Philosophy, Nonviolence, and Resistance in a Women's
Prison, co-authored with Reighlen Jordan and Maitra
10. Conclusion
Farah Godrej is Associate Professor of Political Science at the
University of California, Riverside. Her areas of research and
teaching include Indian political thought, Gandhi's political
thought, cosmopolitanism, globalization and comparative political
theory. She also studies contemporary issues such as environmental
justice, food politics, and mass incarceration. She is the author
of Cosmopolitan Political Thought: Method, Practice,
Discipline, and her research has appeared in many journals,
including Political Theory, Political Research Quarterly, Theory &
Event, The Review of Politics, and Polity.
Freedom Inside? is far more than a book about yogic and meditative
practices in prison. It is a reflection on the neoliberal
seductions of self-help and what self-improvement means in the
context of an oppressive total institution. Farah Godrej questions
everything, including her role as a researcher, a volunteer, a
critic of the carceral state. The result is a deeply meditative,
careful, and caring book. By resisting the false dichotomies of
self-help versus systemic critique, as well as the
"violent/non-violent" distinction, Godrej pushes us past the deadly
classifications so endemic to the prison industrial complex.
*Naomi Murakawa, Princeton University, and author of The First
Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America*
In this ambitious book, Farah Godrej asks after the tensions,
ambivalences, and potentially transformative political work
performed by yoga and meditation in the gut of the racialized
carceral state. Combining decades of first-person experience as a
practitioner of yoga, direct research inside the California prison
system, and the sensibilities of an accomplished political
theorist, Freedom Inside? is an original, boundary-crossing work
that contributes to critically important questions about the
relationship between individual practices of the mind, heart, and
body and quiescence to—or revolt against—broader collective
structures of domination and suffering.
*Timothy Pachirat, author of Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized
Slaughter and the Politics of Sight and Among Wolves: Ethnography
and the Immersive Study of Power*
Through the lens of a four-year ethnography as a yoga and
meditation instructor in prison, Godrej explores the insidious
culture of individual responsibility, the widespread acceptance of
responsibilization assumptions by people who volunteer in prison
rehabilitation programs, and the limited but real possibilities for
institutional reform and individual redemption. These are complex,
abstract, and often demoralizing arguments, but Godrej brings them
to life with real people, described vividly, engaged
compassionately.
*Keramet Reiter, University of California, Irvine, author of 23/7:
Pelican Bay Prison and the Rise of Long-Term Solitary Confinement*
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