Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review“
Slaves of the State cannot receive enough superlatives: eye-opening, deeply disturbing, intellectually stimulating, terrible, brilliant. Dennis Childs has written a moving and intricately researched book, which weaves novels and memory, the past and the present, ancient artifacts and modern tools of repression to reveal an unwelcome truth about modern day America and the biggest prison system on earth."—Mumia Abu-Jamal, author of
Writing on the Wall: Selected Prison Writings of Mumia Abu-Jamal"Dennis Childs ‘digs a ditch’ in Slaves of the State, laboring to present the tortured captives of chain gangs and penitentiaries in ways that bring the captors to shame. With incisive scholarship, Childs analyzes the terrors of black incarceration and trauma. This daring book simplifies a democracy corrupted by penal enslavement. Its haunting critique of the racial-sexual production of misery and ghosts, through the ‘terrorizing structure of US penal law,’ needs to be read and remembered."—Joy James, author of Seeking the Beloved Community
Table of ContentsContents
Introduction. “Inhuman Punishment”: The (Un)dead Book of Chattel Carcerality
1. “You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet”: Beloved and the Middle Passage Carceral Model
2. “Except as Punishment for a Crime”: The Thirteenth Amendment and the Rebirth of Chattel Imprisonment
3. Angola Penitentiary: The Once and Future Slave Plantation
4. The Warfare of Northern Neoslavery in Chester Himes’s Yesterday Will Make You Cry
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
