Incarceration – Recall This Book

Daring to Be Free: Slave Marronage and Rebellion with Sudhir Hazareesingh (George Boulukos, JP)

Distinguished Oxford historian Sudhir Hazareesingh has written a stunning new study documenting the seemingly inevitable resistance that New World enslavement produced throughout its long terrible history. Joining John to speak with Sudhir is George Boulukos of SIU Carbondale, author of The Grateful Slave.

Daring to Be Free Rebellion and Resistance of the Enslaved in the Atlantic World (a suitable companion ot Hazareesingh’s earlier biography of the Haitian nation builder Toussaint Louverture, Black Spartacus). opens up four crucial topics that reshape the stories we tell about slavery’s “social death”. One is persistent resistance during the Middle Passage, another is the omnipresence of successful marronage (meaning escape to highlands or remote refuges). Third is the strikingly omnipresent hope inspired by slaves’ widespread knowledge the successful Haitian revolution. Finally he emphasizes the striking way a sense of agency and autonomy among enslaved persons persisted in the New World–by way both of culture (frequently marked by durable religious practice) and by way of violent, frequently fatal rebellions, which were systematically underacknowledged or swept under the rug within enslaving societies. He sums it up: “resistance during middle passage, marronage, resistance based on culture, insurrections.”

Sudhir persuasively makes the case that the role of benevolent actors within enslaving societies (the William Wilberforces of the world…) “has been greatly exaggerated, and in fact, their interventions were more often than not…actually prompted by the resistance of the enslaved themselves.”

Mentioned in the episode:

Sylvaine Diouf on hinterland marronage, Slavery’s Exiles: The Story of America’s Maroons.

Aime Cesaire, “The Verb ‘Marooner’” (1950, English version 1972)

Francois Mackandal: Haitian religious leader who alluded to and educated Haitians a longer pre-Revolutionary tradition there.

Julis C. Scott, The Common Wind. on communicative structures within the African-American slave world.

Vincent Brown, “Social Death and Political Life in the Study of Slavery.” (2009).

Recallable Books

Rebecca Hall, Wake (graphic novel)
Marcelo D’Salete Angola Janga (Graphic novel about Brazilian Marronage)

C. L. R. James, Black Jacobins (1938)

Richard Price, First Time.

Neil Roberts, Freedom as Marronage (2015)

Listen to the episode here and read the transcript here.

166 Imperial Depths: Mark Letteney and Matthew Larsen on the Roman Prison system (JP)

The notion of abolishing prisons strikes some as an impossible dream: could we could reasonably conceive of a society that responded to harm without the possibility of long-term confinement in purpose-built institutions? To others, we already have a template. Didn’t Michel Foucault long ago show us that prisons as they exist now–in all their horror, in all their commitment not just to jail people before trial but also to imprison them afterwards–come about only in the modern episteme, concomitant with capitalism and all sorts of attendant evils?

Actually, nope. Prisons are as old as the Romans and very likely much older than that. In Ancient Mediterranean Incarceration (California, 2025). Mark Letteney (a U Washington historian who wrote The Christianization of Knowledge in Late Antiquity)directs excavations in a legionary amphitheater) and Matthew Larsen (University of Copenhagen, author of Gospels before the Book) document an ancient and durable prison system system with five key features: Centrality, surveillance, separation depth, and punitive variability.

Their RTB conversation explores key aspects of that system and its present-day legacy or parallels. Yet it ends on a note of cautious optimism from Letteney: just because we don’t find a prison-free world in ancient Rome is no reason to give up the struggle. Whatever better solution to societal safety and rehabilitation awaits us in the future, it must be something we ourselves set out to build anew.

Mentioned

Michel Foucault’s foundational Discipline and Punish (1975)

Adam Gopknik reviews Ancient Mediterranean Incarceration in The New Yorker

The Rules of Ulpian (3rd century jurist)

Wengrow and Graeber’s foundational and heavily debated The Dawn of Everything (2021).

G Geltner Medieval Prison

Spencer Weinreich’s work on solitary confinement)

Erving Goffman Stigma (1963) and Asylums (1961)

Livy (eg in his History of Rome on prisons and prisoners

Who Would Believe a Prisoner? Edited by Michelle Daniel Jones and Elizabeth Angeline Nelson.

Libanius (on the abuse of Prisoners)

Fyodor Dostoyevsky. The House of the Dead

Samuel Delany Tales of Neveryon.

Listen and read here

132* Policing and White Power with David Cunningham and Daniel Kryder

This June 2020 episode, part of a Global Policing series, was Recall this Book’s first exploration of police brutality, systemic and personal racism and Black Lives Matter. Elizabeth and John were lucky to be joined by by Daniel Kryder and David Cunningham,two scholars who have worked on these questions for decades.

Many of the mechanisms that create an oppressed and subordinated American community of color can seem subtle and indirect, despite the insidious ways they pervade housing law (The Color of Law), education (Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together, Savage Inequalities) and the carceral state (The Condemnation of Blackness, The New Jim Crow, Locking Up Our Own).

117* Laurence Ralph Reckons With Police Violence (EF, JP)

In the third episode of our Global Policing series, Elizabeth and John spoke back in 2020 with anthropologist Laurence Ralph about The Torture Letters: Reckoning with Police Violence. The book relates the decades-long history in which hundreds of people (mostly Black men) were tortured by the Chicago Police. Fascinatingly, it is framed as a series of open letters that explore the layers of silence and complicity that enabled torture and the activist movements that have helped to uncover this history and implement forms of collective redress and repair. Elizabeth and John ask Laurence about that genre choice, and he unpacks his thinking about responsibility, witnessing, trauma and channels of activism. Arendt’s “banality of evil” briefly surfaces.

“People are always reckoning. People are always trying, no matter how overwhelming the odds may be, people are always trying to fight back.”

44 Adaner Usmani: Racism as idea, Racism as power relation (EF, JP)

racism, mass incarceration, Southern plantation economy,
and W.E.B. Du Bois

Do we understand racism as the primary driving engine of American inequality? Or do we focus instead on the indirect ways that frequently hard-to-discern class inequality and inegalitarian power relations can produce racially differentiated outcomes? Adaner Usmani, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Social Studies at Harvard and on the editorial board at Catalyst joins Elizabeth and John to wrestle with the subtle and complex genealogy of Southern plantation economy and its racist legacy.