Carceral Marronage and Mutations in Colonialism

Abstract

While recent scholarship has addressed the question of what colonialism meant in terms of the experience of people who lived at the peripheries of empires, little consideration has been given to the question of what anticolonialism meant for the experience of people who lived in the ultimate peripheral zone: namely, prisons. Carceral Marronage and Mutations in Colonialism explores the intellectual history and poetics of carcerally-inflected anticolonialism, focusing on significant counter-cultural formations that emerged in Irish and American prisons in the 1960s and 70s. In focusing on oral histories and narratives of confinement by George Jackson, Huey Newton, and Bobby Sands, it tracks trajectories of intellectual self-fashioning in the context of what I identify as a global culture of carceral marronage. Overall, I argue that this culture is embodied by a paradox of escape in confinement, and that this paradox presents itself as both a mode of psychic discipline and of self-determined social organization.