Politics in Captivity: Plantations, Prisons, and World-Building

Black Americans have resisted racial regimes in extraordinary and everyday ways, from the 1811 German Coast Slave Rebellion to the 1971 Attica Prison Uprising. Politics in Captivity offers an indispensable framework for articulating a theory of resistance to chattel and carceral captivity, taking seriously the ways in which slavery and incarceration share important commonalities. The insights of these thinkers and activists figure into Zuckerwise's analyses of large-scale uprisings and quotidian practices of resistance, which she conceives as acts of world-building, against conditions of forced worldlessness.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 288 pages
Publication date: 02 July 2024
Publisher: Fordham University Press

Black Americans have a long history of resisting racial regimes in extraordinary and everyday ways, from the 1811 German Coast Slave Rebellion to the 1971 Attica Prison Uprising. This book explores the ways in which slavery and incarceration share important commonalities, including historical continuity, and how these connections can be used to articulate a theory of resistance to chattel and carceral captivity. The book begins by taking seriously the ways in which slavery and incarceration share important commonalities, including historical continuity. In Zuckerwise's account of this commonality, the point of connection between enslaved and incarcerated people is not exploited labor, but rather resistance. The relations between the rebellions of both groups appear in the writings of Muhammed Ahmad, Angela Davis, George Jackson, Ruchell Magee, and Assata Shakur, a genre Zuckerwise calls Black carceral political thought. The insights of these thinkers and activists figure into Zuckerwise's analyses of large-scale uprisings and quotidian practices of resistance, which she conceives as acts of world-building, against conditions of forced worldlessness. In a moment when a collective racial reckoning is underway, when Critical Race Theory is a target of the Right, and when prison abolition has become a mainstream political issue, this book offers a timely and important contribution to the study of Black politics.

Weight: 474g
Dimension: 152 x 229 x 20 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781531507039