Abstract
This book reads as an energetic postmodernist romp through its topic and therefore offers a relatively unusual approach compared to most academic criminal justice or journalistic/popular texts. Not surprising given that Chasin is a professor of literary studies, writing both fiction and nonfiction. This has been recognized and appreciated on the sleeve notes by none less than Jonathan Safran Foer and Robin Hemley. However, for this review, I ask whether the book’s kaleidoscopic’ approach effectively transmits the author’s intent to the criminal justice reader. From a social science perspective, Assassins feels like an extended polemic with sparse referencing and little attempt to provide a balanced argument. However, the author is clear that this is not her intent, and it may be that I am not able to move far enough out of my discipline’s curmudgeonly groove. I suppose the question is then who is it written for?: those who are already familiar with existing work on the topic; or those seeking a postmodern literary polemic against the war on drugs with little need of follow up materials.
For the first group, there is little systematic debate about the (anti)epistemological approach taken, while the latter group is likely to be put off by the constant allusions to sources and concepts they are expected to know about already (see, e.g., the willfully vague use of the seemingly minor term le cafard, p. 117). These are recognizably standard criticisms of most postmodernist accounts, which rely on unexplained allusions and on the verbal and symbolic, rather than evidence, as a form of subversion and resistance. Chasin clearly expects the work to be read on these terms, however esoteric.
Assassins is written largely in subjective, first-person style and, unsurprisingly, draws on many assumed (but mostly not cited) cultural and disciplinary references, for example, Homer’s Odysseus and Lotus Eaters (both Greek classical and James Joyce nonlinear varieties), and “standard” narrative approaches, including juxtaposition, speculation, metonymic associations, and so on (p. 10). Chasin’s mission is clearest in her heading-rich prologue (p. 10) where she sees the role of “multiple Marthas” as mounting a “defense of speculative history…veering perilously close to fiction.” Indeed, she admits that her “prose” or “prolix” “is squirrelly, spirally, circular…as a pushback against the requirements of linear argumentation” (p. 11). This is offered in Foucauldian terms of leaking across discipline boundaries and against the rhetoric of “discipline and punish” (p. 11). The issue for the less specialist reader is whether they wish to move beyond the issues raised by yet another Martha (Nussbaum, 1999) to engage with Chasin’s approach. Many of the criticisms leveled at postmodern feminist writers by Nussbaum (p. 2) might also be leveled at Chasin or her genre of writing. Her style can be ponderous and obscure, and “it is dense with allusions to other theorists, drawn from a wide range of different theoretical traditions…with so many contradictory concepts and doctrines, usually without any account of how the apparent contradictions will be resolved.”
Seen in this way, the prologue itself seems to be a type of metaphor for the approach used, that is, symbolic or implicit, rather than explicit. This attempt at disrupting narrative flow between headings can be effective in forcing new linkages, with Anslinger as a processor for seemingly disparate elements. At other times, it feels a simplistic “mash-up” (p. 12). The “Creative Nonfiction” (p. 12) approach is also inconsistent within the parameters the author sets herself, where “facts have no material reality” (p. 12), that is, does this square with her use of statistics (facts?) to argue that the U.S. incarceration rate is an embarrassment and that U.S. sentencing is overwhelmingly racist for drug-related incarcerations? Similarly, there is no questioning of the nonscientific drug harm classifications (p. 3) which might be linked to Anslinger’s previously relaxed attitude to “Indian Hemp” until prohibition of alcohol “dried up” as a career option. But perhaps the book has done its job in making me twist the kaleidoscope again!
Overall, the book’s value is to establish new perspectives or questions, rather than providing a coherent account, very much in tune with the Derridian/deconstructionist plot line that is at the heart of the book. But if a linear narrative is eschewed, surely it is not appropriate to present a text designed to be read cover to cover. The chapters are not always sequential, but the value of the approach could have been maximized by use of a detailed index from where the reader could fashion their own kaleidoscopic, or linear, journeys. The style overall puts me in mind of a “mash up” between the type of popular historical approach that Richard Collier (1980) adopted in his book 1940: The World in Flames (e.g., Chasin’s extended case studies of Wally Reid, Chapter 23) and the deeply layered stream of consciousness and subliminal sensitization of James Joyce’s Ulysses.
Overlapping with Chasin’s theme is Johann Hari’s (2015) Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs. He also uses personal narrative, intertwined case studies, personas, and so on. Naomi Klein admired its “thrilling storytelling” and its “superb journalism,” but these work against Chasin’s underlying postmodernism. The result is that Hari provides a less fractured picture for the less informed reader and provides ample referencing for them to follow. In comparison, I felt Assassins would appeal only to criminal justice connoisseurs of the study area or to those for whom the literary style is the main focus. Others need to start with more linear sources, and I didn’t feel that readers “who have most likely never heard of Harry J. Anslinger” or “the War on Drugs” would find it as accessible as the sleeve notes suggest. But I might just be stuck in my discipline. Or genre!