New from the University of Minnesota Press:
Slaves of the State: Black Incarceration from the Chain Gang to the Penitentiary, by
Dennis Childs (University of California, San Diego). A description from the Press:
The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, passed in
1865, has long been viewed as a definitive break with the nation’s past
by abolishing slavery and ushering in an inexorable march toward black
freedom. Slaves of the State presents a stunning counterhistory to this linear narrative of racial, social, and legal progress in America.
Dennis
Childs argues that the incarceration of black people and other
historically repressed groups in chain gangs, peon camps, prison
plantations, and penitentiaries represents a ghostly perpetuation of
chattel slavery. He exposes how the Thirteenth Amendment’s exception
clause—allowing for enslavement as “punishment for a crime”—has
inaugurated forms of racial capitalist misogynist incarceration that
serve as haunting returns of conditions Africans endured in the
barracoons and slave ship holds of the Middle Passage, on plantations,
and in chattel slavery.
Childs seeks out the historically muted
voices of those entombed within terrorizing spaces such as the chain
gang rolling cage and the modern solitary confinement cell, engaging the
writings of Toni Morrison and Chester Himes as well as a broad range of
archival materials, including landmark court cases, prison songs, and
testimonies, reaching back to the birth of modern slave plantations such
as Louisiana’s “Angola” penitentiary.
More information is available
here.
