Like a Phoenix, We Rise: Relations of Resistance in the Prison Capital of the World

• In Event: Freedom’s Movements, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Rock the Prison Empire

Abstract

Incarceration has become an epidemic in Louisiana. With one in eighty-six adults currently on lockdown, this state of 4.6 million is the world’s prison capital. What does freedom mean in a slave society turned prison society? What does movement mean when so many others are confined?

While much ink has been spilled describing the mechanisms that drive this system of racial expulsion, we would do well to remember Katherine McKittrick’s (2006) cautionary tale of how descriptive rehearsals of violence can naturalize our present order of human life (us/them, with/without, white/black, life/death), thereby entrenching the very brutalities they purport to oppose. Perhaps the black box of the “carceral state” does not need another social science treatise (with its requisite mind-numbing stories of victimization). Perhaps it is time to embark on a new kind of adventure with New Orleans’ so-called convicts and fallen women, where their spaces of creativity and political organization (not the prisons that would hold them captive) take center stage. Perhaps here we can learn to speak of “freedom” and “movement” without reference to captivity.

In this paper, I narrate one such adventure, where things “can take place and have a place,” with my colleagues at Women With A Vision (WWAV), a twenty-three year running New Orleans’ black women’s health collective. The story is prefigured by two events in 2012: (1) March 29th – WWAV overturns a 207-year-old crime against nature statute being used to criminalize sex work in Louisiana, and (2) May 24th – WWAV’s midcity offices are destroyed in an aggravated arson attack. To be sure, there is a certain seduction in the terror of the arson; this event fits neatly within our old narrative of white survival and black death. But what if we begin the story not with black death but with black life? By turning to the everyday texture of WWAV’s work after the fire, I open one such frontier of possibility.

With the fine-grain of ethnographic fieldwork and the temporal expansiveness of life history interviews, this paper traces the relational geographies and histories that have enabled WWAV to hold their community together since they became place-less. By centering questions of continuity (not rupture), I bring into focus the two-decade-long program of mutual aid and social transformation that gave shape to WWAV’s practices of resistance. In so doing, I argue that WWAV’s work has always been about the discovery and affirmation of community bonds – the relations of resistance. When the people are the catalysts for change and their relationships carry the movement, that everyday resistance is vitally elastic. WWAV can “hunker down” in times of crisis and gather loved ones close without foreclosing the option to stretch out again to re-form the severed threads of community and unravel those of the prison empire. Within this relational latticework, against the specter of carcerality, “freedom” is the ability to have the connections that make human life possible, and “movement” is, as Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2007) once called it, “a material context of spiritual hope realized through human action.”

Author

• Laura McTighe, Columbia University (NY)