With 2.1 million incarcerated people, the United States has the largest prison population in the world. But America’s prison system is part of a larger social apparatus that predominantly targets, criminalizes, and polices poor people and people of color. As the monstrous reach of our carceral system extends further into our daily lives, so too have forms of resistance grown in communities around the country and beyond. At this moment in history, what creative possibilities exist for revolting against these institutionalized forms of capture, policing, and criminalization?
In 2021, TRNN Executive Producer and host of Rattling the Bars Eddie Conway joined a blockbuster panel of scholars and activists for the American Studies Association (ASA) to discuss these very questions. In this episode of Rattling the Bars, with permission from the ASA and the panel participants, we are publishing the video recording of this panel, which is entitled “Revolt Against the Carceral World” and is hosted by Professor Dylan Rodríguez.
Panelists:
Dylan Rodríguez (host) is Professor in the Department of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Riverside. He was named to the inaugural class of Freedom Scholars in 2020 and is President of the American Studies Association (2020-2021). Rodríguez is a founding member of the Critical Ethnic Studies Association and Critical Resistance, a national carceral abolitionist organization, and he is the author of three books: White Reconstruction: Domestic Warfare and the Logic of Racial Genocide; Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime; and Suspended Apocalypse: White Supremacy, Genocide, and the Filipino Condition.
Jennifer Marley is Tewa, from the Pueblo of San Ildefonso, and has been a member of The Red Nation since 2015. In 2019 she completed her BA with a double major in Native American Studies and American studies from the University of New Mexico, where she served as Kiva Club president from 2018-2019. Marley is currently a PhD student in the American Studies department at the University of New Mexico.
Rachel Herzing lives and works in Oakland, CA, where she fights the violence of policing and imprisonment. She is a co-founder of Critical Resistance, a national grassroots organization dedicated to abolishing the prison-industrial complex, and the co-director of the StoryTelling & Organizing Project, a community resource sharing stories of interventions to interpersonal harm that do not rely on policing, imprisonment, or traditional social services.
Dean Spade is Associate Professor at Seattle University School of Law and has been working to build queer and trans liberation based in racial and economic justice for the past two decades. Spade is the author of Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics and the Limits of Law, published by South End Press in 2011, as well as Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the next), published by Verso Press in 2020.
Sandy Grande is Professor of Political Science and Native American and Indigenous Studies at the University of Connecticut with affiliations in American Studies, Philosophy, and the Race, Ethnicity and Politics program. Her research and teaching interfaces Native American and Indigenous Studies with critical theory toward the development of more nuanced analyses of the colonial present. She is the author of Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought and a founding member of New York Stands for Standing Rock, a group of scholars and activists that forwards the aims of Native American and Indigenous sovereignty and resurgence.
David Hernández is Faculty Director of Community Engagement and Associate Professor of Latina/o Studies at Mount Holyoke College. His research focuses on immigration enforcement with a particular focus on the US detention regime. He is the co-editor of the anthology Critical Ethnic Studies: A Reader and is completing a book manuscript tentatively titled Alien Incarcerations: Immigrant Detention and Lesser Citizenship.
Dorothy Roberts, an acclaimed scholar of race, gender, and the law, joined the University of Pennsylvania as its 14th Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor with joint appointments in the Departments of Africana Studies and Sociology and the Law School, where she holds the inaugural Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander chair. She is also founding director of the Penn Program on Race, Science & Society in the Center for Africana Studies. She is the author of more than 100 scholarly articles and book chapters, as well as the author of numerous books, including: Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century; Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare; and Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty.
Eddie Conway is an Executive Producer at The Real News Network and host of the TRNN show Rattling the Bars. A former member of the Black Panther Party, Conway is an internationally known political prisoner who was incarcerated for over 43 years, and he’s the author of Marshall Law: The Life & Times of a Baltimore Black Panther and The Greatest Threat: The Black Panther Party and COINTELPRO. He is a longtime prisoners’ rights organizer in Maryland, the co-founder of the Friend of a Friend mentoring program, and the president of Tubman House Inc. of Baltimore.
Pre-Production/Studio/Post-Production: Cameron Granadino
Transcript
The transcript of this video will be made available as soon as possible.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.