The subversive pencil: writing, prison and political status

Abstract

The article offers a personal recollection of Barbara Harlow and her impact on the author’s intellectual development. Harlow’s book Barred: women, writing, and political detention (1992) and her later writings on the US military prison at Guantánamo Bay are revisited for their contemporary significance. The author situates Harlow as a unique literary critic whose sustained work was conjunctural reading, translating and writing across geopolitical and disciplinary borders; her interventions being made in commitment to her honed liberatory agendas and visions.