un armario para libros

pengpenguins:

• Black Sisters Speak Out by Awa Thiem
• Longing to Tell: Black Women Talk About Sexuality and Intimacy by by Tricia Rose
• In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose by Alice Walker
• Theorizing Empowerment: Canadian Perspectives on Black Feminist Thought by by Notisha Massaquoi 
• Black British Feminism: A Reader by Heidi Safia Mirza
• Black Feminist Anthropology: Theory, Politics, Praxis, and Poetics
• Wounds of the Spirit: Black Women, Violence, and Resistance Ethics by by Traci West
• Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism by Erik S. McDuffie
• Dark Continent of Our Bodies: Black Feminism and the Politics of Respectability by E. Frances White
• Living for the Revolution: Black Feminist Organizations, 1968-1980 by Kimberly Springer
• Home Girls Make Some Noise!: Hip-Hop Feminism Anthology by Gwendolyn Pough, Elaine Richardson, Aisha Durham. 
• Not Just Race, Not Just Gender: Black Feminist Readings by Valerie Smith
• Theorizing Black Feminisms: The Visionary Pragmatism of Black Women by Stanlie James
• The Black Woman: An Anthology by Eleanor W Traylor and Toni Cade Bambara.
• Mutha Is Half a Word: Intersections of Folklore, Vernacular, Myth, and Queerness in Black Female Culture by by L. H. Stallings
• Still Lifting, Still Climbing: Contemporary African American Women’s Activism by Kimberly Springer
• But Some Of Us Are Brave: All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men: Black Women’s Studies by Gloria T. Hull, Barbara Smith, Patricia Bell Scott
• Shadowboxing: Representations of Black Feminist Politics by Joy James
• A Taste of Power: A Black Woman’s Story
• by Elaine Brown
• Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches
• by Audre Lorde
• Where We Stand: Class Matters by bell hooks
• Women, Race, & Class by Angela Y. Davis
• We Specialize in the Wholly Impossible: A Reader in Black Women’s History by Darlene Clark Hine 
• The Goddess Blackwoman: Mother of Civilization by Akil
• I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings  by Maya Angelou
• Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment by Patricia Hill Collins

loneberry:

I upload some articles and linked to some books I’ve read recently (or somewhat recently) on prisons. Feel free to download and share the links with friends. We should have a conversation about this material sometime. Read it and let me know what you think.

Articles

• Asian American Studies in the Age of the Prison Industrial Complex — Dylan Rodríguez
  I think all Asian Americans, especially those that have never really thought about the prison-industrial complex, should read this article. It discusses how the production of model minority discourse makes possible the expansion of the PIC while also strengthening anti-blackness. Asian Americans who discuss model minorityism as a dehumanizing, white supremacist stereotype while ignoring model minorityism as a precondition of anti-black incarceration/state violence are often complicit in fortifying anti-blackness. The Asian model minority gives coherence to the notion of black criminality. Furthermore, Asians themselves often seek political solidarity with whites, especially on the issue of crime. Dylan discusses the example of the Korean-American community (especially small business and property owners) after the 1992 LA insurrection. Instances of “strategic and laboriously ritualized solidarities with the state” can be seen in the reactionary Korean American-LAPD coalition that generates such events as the 2002 “March Against Crime.” Campaigns against black and brown people have been led by the Korean Youth and Community Center, which is evidenced in the rhetoric used in a flyer they circulated that said, “10 YEARS AFTER THE L.A. RIOTS Our City comes together to CLEAN our Streets.” The article also challenges the way that conceptualizing of POC in terms of “shared oppression” creates and insidious multiculturalism that obscures power relations between POC. (That’s why I prefer Andrea Smith’s re-vision of WOC organizing as a type of organizing based on self-criticism rather than shared oppression. I was excited to see Dylan and Andie speak together on a panel about race in the 21st century.)
  
  Here is a quote from Dylan’s article:
  “The cultural production and statecraft of the Asian-American model minority, reproduced and institutionally inscribed by the administrative culture of dominant schooling institutions (and accentuated in higher education), is wedged in a peculiar symbiosis with this militarization and penal pedagogical shift in the war on poor urban Black and Brown youth. The Asian-American model minority, as a cultural fabrication situated within a particular historical conjuncture, is something even more than (as Prashad correctly asserts) a ‘weapon in the war against black America’: it is both the condition of possibility and embodied site of reproduction of this domestic war, a seminal move in the production of a national(ist) ‘multiculturalism’ that fortifies and extrapolates historical white supremacist social formations—including and especially the burgeoning U.S. prison regime. As such, the Asian-Americanist contestation of the ‘model minority myth’ as inaccurate, deceptive, (anti-Asian) racist, and/or an erasure of the material subordination of poor and disenfranchised Asian populations tends to elide critical confrontation with the militarized and hegemonic discursive and social structure through which the myth itself has been articulated.”

• It’s Like Living in a Black Hole: Women of Color and Solitary Confinement in the Prison Industrial Complex — Cassandra Shaylor
  This article discusses the racist, classist, and misogynistic dynamics of the use of solitary confinement in women’s prisons. 61.4 percent of the women at the prison Cassandra surveyed were women of color, 40 percent of whom were black. About 60 percent of women in prison are also survivors of sexual abuse, and solitary confinement can make them particularly vulnerable to assault by prison guards. The article explores the deep psychic trauma caused by being forced to live in a “black hole”—a hidden zone characterized by racist and patriarchal humiliation, social isolation, and sensory deprivation.

• Fear and Loathing: Public Feelings in Antiprison Work — Jessi Lee Jackson and Erica R. Meiners
  How is the the “safety” of women affectively deployed to support the prison-industrial complex? How are public “feelings” subtly manipulated to create a racist profile of “the criminal”? How can we use affect differently, by trying to envision affect-based antiprison work? How do groups like the Audre Lorde Project’s Safe Outside the System Collective use affective strategies to address violence against queer people of color without involving the police and criminal justice system?
  
  
• The Prison Slave as Hegemony’s (Silent) Scandal — Frank Wilderson
  I think this is one of Frank’s best articles, and a good distillation of the dominant themes in his work overall: his critique of Marxism, his exposure of the assumptive logic of civil society, his centering of anti-blackness as the primary global antagonism, his theorization of slavery as the necessary foundation for human subjectivity, his critique of multiculturalism, and his insistence on understanding slavery in terms of social death rather than labor. The paradigm of slavery never ended—it has just taken on new forms. The black prisoner, like the slave, is positioned as socially dead. What I find particularly interesting in his description of the way the US paradigm of policing structures subjectivity itself and permeates our beings at the level of ontology. He asks, what is the difference between bodies that magnetize bullets and bodies that don’t? How are white people deputized in the face of black people, consciously or not? He comes to the conclusion that “white people are not simply ‘protected’ by the police, they are — in their very corporeality — the police.”
  
  
• Compliance is Gendered — Dean Spade
  This article discusses the way the State—via the criminal justice system/carceral apparatus and welfare system—disciplines gender. Dean draws our attention to how poor people are more vulnerable to gender policing because they are more likely to be entangled in high gendered institutions (jails, homeless shelters, welfare offices, etc).
  
  
• Indefinite Detention — Judith Butler
  JB discusses Guantanamo Bay and the discourse of the US war on terror and its role in supporting indefinite detention. She re-thinks Foucault’s governmentalist theorization of the contemporary prison by describing the dual operations of sovereign and governmental/diffuse forms of power.
  
  
• From Slavery to Mass Incarceration — Loïc Wacquant
  I posted a brief discussion here.
  
  

Books

• The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness — Michelle Alexander
  We can have a long discussion about this book. I have some problems with it, but I think it’s moving the discourse on prisons in a better direction. I like that Michelle emphasizes that the criminal justice system is not just infected with racism, but that the institutions themselves are constituted by racist violence (in other words, institutional racism is not an aberration of the prison/legal system’s more noble protective role; its  function is racialized violence and social control). She also thoroughly debunks the idea that we live in a post-race society, and unpacks the hidden mechanisms of liberal, colorblind racism. I saw Michelle speak at Morgan State University soon after reading her book and asked her if she considered herself a prison abolitionist. She said she’s against prisons as they exist now, but not necessarily against removing people who are actually dangerous from society (????). It’s curious that she is trying to draw attention to the problematic nature of legalist attempts to address the racism of mass incarceration (because this form of racism is legalized), but fails to mention the work of grassroots organizations like Critical Resistance. The good thing about this book is that it’s armed me with all kinds of statistics to challenge those who defend prisons and police. I gave this book to my mom.
  
  
• Discipline and Punish — Michel Foucault
  We can talk about it sometime….
  
  
• Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex — Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith
  This anthology addresses the intersection between antiprison struggles and queer and trans* struggles. It offers an extended critique of the gaystream’s collusion with the carceral apparatus, as well as the rhetoric of accommodation (the way the liberal feminist and mainstream queer campaigns to create prisons/jails to accommodate queers, women, trans people, and youth actually just strengthen and expand the prison-industrial complex). The book includes essays on the history of police brutality against queers, the criminalization of queerness, and queer resistance to the police state (such as the Stonewall Riots). There are also essays by incarcerated queer and trans folk about their experiences inside prison. Other topics include the politics of AIDS and the isolation of prisoners with AIDS, access to hormones and medical treatment in prison, immigration, the criminalization of sex work, poverty, queer/trans vulnerability to being sexually assaulted by prison guards and other prisoners, the disciplining of masculine women and transmen inside prisons (denial of access to masculine clothing such as briefs and retaliation against lesbians/dykes), etc.
  
  
• Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles Of Incarcerated Women — Vikki Law
  The perception of women as passive and obedient has effectively obscured the the struggles of women against the prison-industrial complex. This book also discusses the conditions that have led to the massive growth of incarcerated women in recent year (conditions such as the feminization of poverty, racialized campaigns against the “welfare queen” and the reordering of the welfare state, the increase of punitive laws on nonviolent crimes, etc). Vikki Law is awesome—I wish Dylan would have talked about her in his article on Asian Americans and the prison-industrial complex.
  
  
• Marshall Law: The Life and Times of a Baltimore Black Panther — Eddie Conway
  Panther autobiographies always inspire me. This book is mostly about prison life and the work Eddie has done inside prisons. I’m thankful to have had the chance to teleconference with Eddie.

Film

• Bush Mama — Haile Gerima (1975)
  This film is kind of hard to find—maybe I can mail you a DVD if you really want to see it. Haile was part of the LA Rebellion School of Black Filmmakers (primarily active from 1967-1989). Here is a good resource on the LA Rebellion film movement. Plot synopsis: “Bush Mama is the story of Dorothy and her husband T.C., a discharged Vietnam veteran who thought he would return home to a ‘hero’s welcome.’ Instead he is falsely arrested and imprisoned for a crime he didn’t commit. Theirs is a world of welfare, perennial unemployment, and despair. To some, the film may appear bleak and nihilistic with its stark black-and-white photography, but its message is moving and distinct.”
  Here are some film stills:
  

• Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap (Culture America) by Jeffrey Ogbonna Green Ogbar (Mar 2009)
• Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore (Nov 27, 2006)

My parents moved a lot of my books out of one of my storage suitcases into boxes so that they could put wedding photos in my suitcase. After looking in boxes for 2 hours I’ve found that I’m missing about half of them from… but these were the 2 I wanted to use tonight. Wahhh.