Carceral imaginaries in science fiction: Toward a palimpsestic understanding of penality

Abstract

This chapter offers a new framework for theorizing processes of penal change: palimpsestic penality. Borrowing from the mechanisms of ancient printmaking, this metaphor draws attention to the ways in which logics of punishment may mutate outside the strictures of linear temporality, continually being superimposed, eroded, and re-imagined, as new ideas integrate with those being effaced. The authors mobilize the science fiction anthology series Black Mirror to illustrate this concept in action, arguing that the final episode “Black Museum” performs a palimpsest of the entire series. This chapter traces how vigilante justice is constructed, transfigured, and effaced within and between episodes, positioning penal change as an interpretive process that reaches toward the past and future simultaneously.