Against the Carceral Archive: The Art of Black Liberatory Practice

Against the Carceral Archive is a meditation on the carceral archival project, examining carcerality as the dominant mode of state governance over Black populations since the 1960s. It builds upon theories of the archive to explore the destabilization, destruction, and containment of Black life, emphasizing the carceral archive's failure to destroy Black communal logics and radical Black forms of knowledge production. Sojoyner argues that centering Blackness enables a structuring of the mind that refuses the violent exploitative tendencies of Western epistemological traditions.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 128 pages
Publication date: 25 April 2023
Publisher: Fordham University Press

Against the Carceral Archive is a profound meditation on the carceral archival project, drawing upon critical, theoretical, and activist work by prison abolitionists over the past three decades. Drawing from collections at the Southern California Library, including the Black Panthers, LA Chapter, the Coalition Against Police Abuse, the Urban Policy Research Institute, Mothers Reclaiming Our Children, and the collection of geographer Clyde Woods, the book explores carcerality as the dominant mode of state governance over Black populations in the United States since the 1960s. Each chapter delves into a specific aspect of the carceral archive, examining its destabilization, destruction, and containment of Black life. The book challenges the notion of the human and the production of pejorative blackness, highlighting the intimate connection between police and military in the protection of racial capitalism and its fossil fuel–based economy. It also explores the role of technology in counterintelligence and counterinsurgency logics. Importantly, the book emphasizes the carceral archive's fundamental failure to destroy Black communal logics and radical Black forms of knowledge production, which contest the carceral archive and create other forms of life in its midst. Concluding with a statement on the reckoning with the radical traditions of thought and being which liberation requires, Sojoyner offers a compelling argument for how the centering of Blackness enables a structuring of the mind that refuses the violent exploitative tendencies of Western epistemological traditions as viable life-affirming practices.

Dimension: 203 x 127 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781531503772