Sweetness and Urban Infrastructure: Sugar’s Function as a Carceral Technology

• In Event: Carceral Violence, the Land, and the Expansion of Abolition Ecologies

Abstract

Sugar production has shaped the entire world—geographically, socially, and culturally; and for a single commodity to have that kind of influence means that those who control its production exercise a great amount of power. This paper explores sugar not as a commodity we consume but as something that captures: bodies, land, and our very imaginations. Using the 2018 discovery of 95 prisoners’ graves in Sugar Land, Texas, I examine sugar’s production and distribution as a technology—a man-made solution to an insatiable appetite for sweetness—that takes on a carceral function in relation to Black lives through established partnerships between 19th and 20th century sugar companies and the Texas penitentiary system. Through examinations of media reports, archaeological evidence, and archival records related to Texas’s early sugar industry alongside the history of Texas prisons, this paper interrogates how public-private partnerships in Texas created infrastructures of violence that continue to inform and imperil Black lives in “the city that sugar built.”

Author

• Ashanté M Reese, The University of Texas at Austin