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"Carceral liberalism emerges from the confluence of neoliberalism, carcerality, and patriarchy to construct a powerful ruse disguised as freedom. It waves the feminist flag while keeping most women still at the margins. It speaks of a post-race society while one in three Black men remain incarcerated. It sings the praises of capital while the dispossessed remain mired in debt. Shreerekha Pillai edits essays on carceral liberalism that continue the trajectory of the Combahee River Collective and the many people inspired by its vision of feminist solidarity and radical liberation. Academics, activists, writers, poets, and a formerly incarcerated social worker look at feminist resurgence and resistance within, at the threshold of, and outside state violence; observe and record direct and indirect forms of carcerality sponsored by the state and shaped by state structures, traditions, and actors; and critique carcerality. Cutting-edge yet historically grounded, Carceral Liberalism examines an American ideological creation that advances imperialism, anti-blackness, capitalism, and patriarchy"--
List of contents
Foreword Demita Frazier Acknowledgments
Introduction Shreerekha Pillai
Part One: Carceral Narratives and Fictions
Poems: Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, “Pantoum for a Black Man on a Greyhound Bus” and “Lost Letter #27: John Peters, Boston-Gaol to Phillis Wheatley Peters, Boston, December 3, 1784″
1. Carceral Trauma at the Intersections of Race, Class, Gender, Sexuality, and Maternity
Cassandra D. Little
2. Prisons and Politics: Conceptualizing Prison Memoirs
Shailza Sharma
3. Seeing Orange: Mediatizing the Prison Empire
Shreerekha Pillai
4. Emptied Chairs and Faceless Inmates: A Critical Analysis of the Texas Prison Museum
Beth Matusoff Merfish
Poems: Ravi Shankar, “Against Innocence” and “Sunday School” The Stories that will not be Confined
Poems: Solmaz Sharif, “Reaching Guantánamo”
Part Two: Carceral Bodies and Systems
Poem: Jeremy Eugene, “Space”
5. These Stories Will Not Be Confined
Joanna Eleftheriou
6. Cornered: Day Laborers, Criminalization and Rituals of Democracy in Texas
Francisco Argüelles Paz y Puente, aka Pancho
7. Resisting Criminalization: Principles, Practicalities, and Possibilities of Alternative Justices Beyond the State
Autumn Elizabeth, Zarinah Agnew, D Coulombe
8. Going Carceral? Analyzing Written and Visual Representations of Prison Yoga Programs
Tria Blu Wakpa and Jennifer Musial
9. Vacant Refuge, Unfinished Resettlement: Gendered Nativism and the Experience of Ambivalence among Displaced Syrian Iraqi and Women and Children in Houston, Texas
Maria F. Curtis
10. Gendered Punishment and Social Control: Silenced Memories of Women in Wartime Peru
Marta Romero-Delgado
11. Bad Girls of Pindra Tod
Alka Kurian
Poem: Javier Zamora, “Citizenship”
Contributors
Index
About the author
Edited by Shreerekha Pillai. Foreword by Demita Frazier
