Comparative Approaches to Prison Abolition: Reading & Representing Against Carcerality

In his essay “To Be Baptized” (1972), James Baldwin questions how the law serves to reinforce racial inequality: “if one really wishes to know how justice is administered in a country, one does not question the policemen, the lawyers, the judges, or the protected members of the middle class. One goes to the unprotected—those, precisely, who need the law's protection most!” This exhortation is certainly backed up by the literature—from political philosophers like Franz Fanon to organizers like Mariame Kaba, the common consensus is that unquestioned respect for the law is fundamentally incompatible with substantive democracy. By its nature, as Jacques Derrida, Colin Dayan, Stokley Carmichael, and many others have argued, the law is constituted only through the state’s modes of violent enforcement: the carceral systems of policing and prisons.

Drawing from the Black radical tradition and the afterlives of slavery, scholars of critical carceral studies underscore the centrality of legitimized arbitrary violence to the modern project of the state. The ongoing struggles against capitalist imperialism and for Black liberation in the U.S. and across the diaspora—in addition to the material, immaterial, and fragmented archives of transatlantic slavery and anticolonial movements—offer conceptual tools to analyze carceral continuums: from historical iterations of slavery to contemporary regimes of hyperincarceration. However, the carceral turn has been relatively slow to reach the disciplines of art history, cultural studies, and comparative literature. This panel aims to address that gap, asking specifically how artistic and narrative forms help those who endure these violent carceral systems think through cultural representation, as well as personal and collective responsibility, in order to envision a path that places prison abolition on the political horizon.