Darkness on the Edge of Town: Prisons, CAFOs, and Rural Landscapes of State Power

• In Event: Visualizing State Power

Abstract

To date “black” remains a visual form and category inadequately considered by those taking up crime and violence as central sites of research. As a conceptual heuristic and organizing device, “black” is often used to denote particular spatial and conceptual geographies that conceal information and confound knowing. Employed by the state and capital, from the CIA and police departments to corporations, the “black site” is a geography which conceals knowledge of all but its own existence and boundaries. Similarly, “rurality” is primarily a spatial concept frequently characterized by the unknown and the blurred edges of its own material existence. Taking the increasingly common rural American prison and Contained Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs)—spaces which consistently elude visibility and visual knowing through legislation, visual boundaries, and rurality itself—as examples of rural domestic American “black sites”, we contend that efforts to render them visible can be enhanced by the lessons of paranormal/spirit photography. Following this, we argue that these spaces and attendant efforts of photographers, artists, academics, and the public to confront and interrogate them can be usefully understood as the interfacing of two worlds—the known and knowable, and the unknown and unknowable.

Authors

• Bill McClanahan, University of Essex

• Travis Linnemann, Eastern Kentucky University