Book review: Michaela Soyer, A Dream Denied: Incarceration, Recidivism, and Young Minority Men in America
| Published date | 01 February 2018 |
| Date | 01 February 2018 |
| Author | Jamie J Fader |
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480617703252 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
Book reviews 141
surprising that this chapter—given its title ‘Violence, resistance, survival’—does not
reflect on this more. Despite immense adversity and her declining mental and physical
health, Hawwi manages to persevere through her circumstances and eventually obtains
leave to remain; a feat not to be underestimated particularly given the aforementioned
strategies through which the Home Office seeks to prevent such an occurrence.
Chapters 6 and 7 further explore the themes of everyday violence through considering
how its impact is exacerbated when seeking asylum, and Canning turns to Mathiesen’s (2004)
concept of silencing and Cohen’s (2001) notions of denial to examine how harm is inflicted
and concealed through encounters with gendered violence. A major strength of this chapter is
Canning’s attention to how the Home Office deals with negative reports and criticism—par-
ticularly around the conditions of immigration detention. The Home Office responds by con-
sistently deferring to individualize problems, whereby serious incidents become framed as
one-offs and dealt with by removing one or two staff members. This manner of individualiz-
ing problems she argues, ‘deflects from the exploration of a true alternative and provides
superficial endorsement’ (p. 146), a fact that has largely gone undocumented.
Taken as a whole, this book is well written, extremely thorough and provides an
uncomfortable but much-needed stark critique of Britain’s asylum policy and its gender-
specific impact on women. Many scholars have sought to highlight and make sense of
the various institutional harms caused by the asylum process and by theorizing these
experiences through a concept of structural violence. In this way, Canning offers a rigor-
ous framework which draws attention to the implicit yet intentional ways in which indi-
viduals are excluded and harmed through the asylum process. Its limitations are that in
not expounding structural violence as a theoretical tool, there is the sense of a missed
opportunity. This results in much of the book’s extensive insight lacking theoretical
enrichment such an inclusion might have afforded.
References
Cohen S (2001) States of Denial; Knowing About Atrocities and Suffering. London: Polity Press.
Confortini C (2006) Galtung, violence and gender: The case for a peace studies/feminism alliance.
Peace and Change 31(3): 333–367.
Galtung J (1969) Violence, peace and peace research. Journal of Peace Research 6(3): 167–191.
Graeber D (2012) Dead zones of the imagination: On violence, bureaucracy and interpretive labor.
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2(2): 105–128.
Mathiesen T (2004) Silently Silenced: Essays on the Creation of Acqiuence in Modern Society.
Winchester: Waterside Press.
Pain R and Smith S (eds) (2008) Fear: Critical Geopolitics and Everyday Life. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Michaela Soyer, A Dream Denied: Incarceration, Recidivism, and Young Minority Men in America,
University of California Press: Berkeley, CA, 2016; 184 pp.: 9780520290457, $34.95
Reviewed by: Jamie J Fader, Temple University, USA
The United States has reached an unprecedented level of social inequality as decades of
neoliberal policies have eroded the social safety net and its citizens struggle to recover
from the economic shock of the recent recession. Thus, there is perhaps no more apt time
to critically examine the American Dream as a cultural theme that shapes the lives and
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