Search

The homeplace, the margin and the classroom could be conceived as the hallmarks of bell hooks’ theoretical reflection on the historical link between space and political resistance. Designed as locations of racial and gender oppression, those spaces have been turned into radical sites of antiracist pedagogy and African American resistance. Hence, mapping these locations of struggle means connecting the historical production of space to the process of radical political subjectification within the African American context. The ultimate intent of the essay is in fact to connect bell hooks’ writings on the locations of domination/liberation with the Black Radical Tradition.

This paper aims to trace the founding elements of the carceral institution in the United States by highlighting the effects of settler culture and slavery on its rise and development. The first section will show how the evolution of the prison system in the US has been highly informed by racializing rationalities and practices connected to the global history of colonial incarceration. The second section, in contrast, will be dedicated to a close reading of a selected collection of narrative fragments written by African American political prisoners between the 1960s and 1980s, focusing on the concept of neoslavery. The ultimate objective of this paper is to demonstrate that prison has been a site of critical production of knowledge and that incarcerated activists’ contributions played a pivotal role in critiquing the interrelation of colonial incarceration, racism, and political repression.