Angels of Angola: Fascism and Slavery in the Deep South

Abstract

This dissertation examines emergent forms of fascism and slavery in the southern US through the prism of a prison and plantation located on the Mississippi River. The study draws upon eighteen months of observant participation primarily spent alongside families and friends of people incarcerated at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, the largest US prison both by population and acreage. I gathered ethnographic data from sites and spaces in which intimacies, solidarities, and struggles straddle carceral contours, such as bus trips to the prison, parole hearings for elderly captives, and professional meetings of prison administrators. Using a queer of color critique, I analyzed an array of archival sources—including autobiographies, budgets, court filings, financial records, Instagram posts, maps, news articles, poetry, sermons, and songs—to complement the ethnographic data. I marshal these varied data to make three core claims. First, I argue that fascism’s antecedents stem not from early twentieth century Europe but from the antebellum United States where proto-fascist formulations offered enslavers the ability to subjugate not only the Black people to which they laid claim but also the Black people who, before the Civil War, held the dubious status of free. I place primacy on the ‘free Black’ before the end of chattel slavery, revealing it to be an inconceivable ideation amid a fascist regime of rampant labor exploitation and severe social control. Second, I layer an understanding of fascism by illustrating its proclivity for collapsing political, economic, and religious capital into an indeterminate bloc. Third, I contend that anti-Blackness is indispensable to fascism and that the two occupy an umbilical relationship to each other.