Motivated by a conviction that mass incarceration and state execution are among the most important ethical and political problems of our time, the contributors to this volume come together from a diverse range of backgrounds to analyze, critique, and envision alternatives to the injustices of the U.S. prison system, with recourse to deconstruction, phenomenology, critical race theory, feminism, queer theory, and disability studies. They engage with the hyper-incarceration of people of color, the…
Read moreMotivated by a conviction that mass incarceration and state execution are among the most important ethical and political problems of our time, the contributors to this volume come together from a diverse range of backgrounds to analyze, critique, and envision alternatives to the injustices of the U.S. prison system, with recourse to deconstruction, phenomenology, critical race theory, feminism, queer theory, and disability studies. They engage with the hyper-incarceration of people of color, the incomplete abolition of slavery, the exploitation of prisoners as workers and as "raw material" for the prison industrial complex, the intensive confinement of prisoners in supermax units, and the complexities of capital punishment in an age of abolition. -/- Contents -/- Introduction: Death and Other Penalties
Geoffrey Adelsberg, Lisa Guenther, and Scott Zeman -/- Part I. Legacies of Slavery -/- Excavating the Sedimentations of Slavery: The Unfinished Project of American Abolition
Brady Heiner -/- From Commodity Fetishism to Prison Fetishism: Slavery, Convict-leasing, and the Ideological Productions of Incarceration
James Manos -/- Maroon Philosophy: An Interview with Russell Maroon Shoatz
Russell Maroon Shoatz -/- Part II. Death Penalties -/- In Reality-from the Row
Derrick Quintero -/- Inheritances of the Death Penalty: American Racism and Derrida's Theologico-Political Sovereignty
Geoffrey Adelsberg -/- Making Death a Penalty: Or, Making "Good" Death a "Good" Penalty
Kelly Oliver -/- Death Penalty Abolition in Neoliberal Times: The SAFE California Act and the Nexus of Savings and Security
Andrew Dilts -/- On the Inviolability of Human Life
Julia Kristeva (translated by Lisa Walsh) -/- Part III. Rethinking Power and Responsibility -/- Punishment, Desert, and Equality: A Levinasian Analysis
Benjamin S. Yost -/- Prisons and Palliative Politics
Ami Harbin -/- Sovereignty, Community, and the Incarceration of Immigrants
Matt S. Whitt -/- Without the Right to Exist: Mass Incarceration and National Security
Andrea Smith -/- Prison Abolition and a Culture of Sexual Difference
Sarah Tyson -/- Part IV. Isolation and Resistance -/- Statement on Solitary Confinement
Abu Ali Abdur'Rahman -/- The Violence of the Supermax: Toward a Phenomenological Aesthetics of Prison Space
Adrian Switzer -/- Prison and the Subject of Resistance: A Levinasian Inquiry
Shokoufeh Sakhi -/- Critical Theory, Queer Resistance, and the Ends of Capture
Liat Ben-Moshe, Che Gossett, Nick Mitchell, and Eric A. Stanley.