Discipline and Punishment on the Settlement-Plantation

• In Event: Struggle and Progress in Black America

Abstract

In the United States, enslavement did not only entail the capture and enslavement of African peoples, but the continual stealing and occupation of Native land. This two-fold process formed the basis of U.S. settler societies’ property relations and racial hierarchies. The contemporary U.S. prison is historically and materially wedded to this foundational violence. A critique of prison abolition frequently made by Native scholars is that any movement that seeks the freeing of bodies, yet overlooks the necessity of repatriating Native land, will result in the reterritorialization of settler society. This paper is a contribution to this growing conversation, focusing on prison abolition—a central pillar of resistance to anti-black state violence—as also a site of myriad decolonial possibilities. This paper traces a genealogy of the U.S. prison regime through the analytic of "middle passage/frontier homicide," illuminating the prison as a site of not only normalized anti-black genocide but settler societies’ reterritorialization. Expanding on Tiffany Jeannette King’s (2013) concept of U.S. society as “the settlement-plantation” and Dylan Rodríguez’s (2006) conceptualization of the U.S. prison as “a site and condition of death that is itself a form of passage” like the middle passage; the prison must also be understood as historically, materially, and culturally linked to the conquest and continual occupation of Native land. Conceptualizing the prison through this spatial analytic allows for a dynamic and multi-scalar abolitionist praxis, revealing a number of possibilities for alliance and understandings of our own complicity within settler colonialism.

Author

• Casey Robert Goonan, UC Riverside