COURSE DESCRIPTION
Modern democratic states often rely on practices of detention and incarceration in order to demonstrate (and increasingly, to circumvent) the power of the rule of law. As a result, international and domestic detention spaces like refugee camps, jails and for-profit prisons, war prisons, black sites, migrant detention islands, border checkpoints, and protest camps are utilized in an ever-expanding number of spatial, legal, and political contexts. Through close reading, focused class discussion, writing, and interacting with assorted primary sources, we will explore these spaces and engage in a detailed historical and theoretical investigation of the complex and often-contradictory processes that produce them.
COURSE OUTLINE
The course is divided into two sections. The first—lasting the first seven weeks—is designed to introduce the class to the central themes and questions surrounding the history and development of the prison apparatus in the United States. We will trace a course through readings that deal with the origins incarceration and its rapid expansion, with the issues of race, property, and economy, and with the role of the state. Part two—the second half of the semester—will cover a range of issues pertaining to the uses of detainment and sequestration in a global context. We will wrestle with the issues of mobility and migration, with political asylum and refugee camps, with torture, and with the contradiction of detainment for punishment and detainment for security.
COURSE SCHEDULE
PART I: QUESTIONS
Week 1
Intros / Why study detainment?
Is prison necessary?
Week 2
What is a wall and what is it for?
Where is the prison and who is it for?
PART II: THE RACIAL AND SPATIAL HISTORY OF MASS INCARCERATION IN THE UNITED STATES
Week 3
Indigenous Enclosure, Slave Patrols, and Plantation Geographies in the Antebellum U.S.
Worse than Slavery? Convict Leasing, Chain Gangs, and Jim Crow
Week 4
Modes of Control: Terror
Modes of Control: Statistics
Week 5
The Prison Industrial Complex and the Prison Fix
Organized Abandonment and the Rhetoric of War
PART III: CARCERAL LIVES AND THE IMPRISONED BODY
Week 6
Beyond the Wire: Policing and a Culture of Mass Incarceration
Technologies of Control: Everyday Carceral Architecture and Confinement in a Digital Age
Week 7
Prison Organizing, Solitary Confinement, and State-sanctioned Death
Apprehending Gender
PART IV: EMPIRE, BORDERS, AND GLOBAL CRISES
Week 8
Caging the World: The Imperial Roots of/and Global Carcerality
Internment and Colonial Afterlives
Week 9
Pacification and Emergency
The Camp and the Myth of the Total Institution
Week 10
War Prisons & Military Detention
Care and Custody: Borders, Human Rights, and the Refugee
Week 11
Globalization, Mobility, and Borders
Disorder is the Order
Week 12
Migrant Detention: Globalization, Mobility, and Border Work
On Kids and Cages
PART V: ABOLITION AND ALTERNATIVES
Week 13
What is Abolition?
Reformist Reforms and Non-Reformist Reforms
Week 14
Harm, Transformation, Mutuality
Next Steps