Kristian Williams

In the latest issue of Make/Shift I have a review of Darius Rejali’s book Torture and Democracy. In it, I take issue with his definition of “torture.” In particular, I argue against his dismissal of the notion of “mental torture.”

This is actually the second review I’ve written on Rejali’s book. A much longer piece appeared in the International Socialist Review back in the fall. In that essay I scrutinized Rejali’s definition of “democracy.”

Only the ISR piece is online:
“Hidden Torture, False Democracy.” International Socialist Review. September-October 2008. http://www.isreview.org/issues/61/feat-torturedem.shtml

March 31 (Tuesday) at 6:30 pm
The Continental Club
1658 12th Street, West Oakland

I’ll be giving a talk on police and violence, trying to put some recent events in context. Q&A to follow.

The March/April issue of Against the Current includes an article I wrote on the Critical Resisistance prison abolition conference, back in September. The article is not online, but you can learn about Critical Resistance here: http://www.criticalresistance.org/

Social Anarchism, meanwhile, has just reprinted a speech I gave at last year’s Anarchist Book Fair in San Francisco. Titled, “What Anarchism Contributes to Our Understanding of Torture,” it is exactly what it sounds like. It’s not online either. But you can read about the Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair: http://sfbookfair.wordpress.com/

Tying these two strands together, the Institute for Anarchist Studies just gave me a grant to write an essay on Oscar Wilde’s experience in prison, his writing about prison, and his anarchism. This essay, “A Prisoner with a Noble Face,” will serve as one chapter in my book on Wilde and anarchism.

The IAS website doesn’t have anything about the project yet. But here’s a link anyway: http://www.anarchist-studies.org/

The current Comics Journal has two of my reviews. One is a longish piece on After 9/11: America’s War on Terror (2001- ). The other is a short review of the first six issues of Terry Moore’s Echo. Neither are online.

I’ve also had two articles re-printed recently.

Back in October, Counterpunch ran an excerpt from my book American Methods: Torture and the Logic of Domination. Under the title “Torture at Area 2,” the article provides background on the long-running Chicago torture scandal, which recently resulted in the arrest of retired police commander Jon Burge.

My piece isn’t online. But for information on the Burge case, see the Chicago Reader’s archive of John Conroy’s coverage:
http://www.chicagoreader.com/policetorture/

More recently, an excerpt from my 2005 Columbia Journalism Review article appeared in the anthology Language, Literacy, and Inquiry: World Literature. (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 2009.)

The original CJR piece is on the web: http://cjrarchives.org/issues/2005/2/ideas-essay-williams.asp