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Carceral Capitalism
Essays on the contemporary continuum of incarceration: the biopolitics of juvenile delinquency, predatory policing, the political economy of fees and fines, and algorithmic policing.
What we see happening in Ferguson and other cities around the country is not the creation of livable spaces, but the creation of living hells. When people are trapped in a cycle of debt it also can affect their subjectivity and how they temporally inhabit the world by making it difficult for them to imagine and plan for the future. What psychic toll does this have on residents? How does it feel to be routinely dehumanized and exploited by the police?—from Carceral Capitalism
In this collection of essays in Semiotext(e)'s Intervention series, Jackie Wang examines the contemporary incarceration techniques that have emerged since the 1990s. The essays illustrate various aspects of the carceral continuum, including the biopolitics of juvenile delinquency, predatory policing, the political economy of fees and fines, cybernetic governance, and algorithmic policing. Included in this volume is Wang's influential critique of liberal anti-racist politics, “Against Innocence,” as well as essays on RoboCop, techno-policing, and the aesthetic problem of making invisible forms of power legible.
Wang shows that the new racial capitalism begins with parasitic governance and predatory lending that extends credit only to dispossess later. Predatory lending has a decidedly spatial character and exists in many forms, including subprime mortgage loans, student loans for sham for-profit colleges, car loans, rent-to-own scams, payday loans, and bail bond loans. Parasitic governance, Wang argues, operates through five primary techniques: financial states of exception, automation, extraction and looting, confinement, and gratuitous violence. While these techniques of governance often involve physical confinement and the state-sanctioned execution of black Americans, new carceral modes have blurred the distinction between the inside and outside of prison. As technologies of control are perfected, carcerality tends to bleed into society.
What we see happening in Ferguson and other cities around the country is not the creation of livable spaces, but the creation of living hells. When people are trapped in a cycle of debt it also can affect their subjectivity and how they temporally inhabit the world by making it difficult for them to imagine and plan for the future. What psychic toll does this have on residents? How does it feel to be routinely dehumanized and exploited by the police?—from Carceral Capitalism
In this collection of essays in Semiotext(e)'s Intervention series, Jackie Wang examines the contemporary incarceration techniques that have emerged since the 1990s. The essays illustrate various aspects of the carceral continuum, including the biopolitics of juvenile delinquency, predatory policing, the political economy of fees and fines, cybernetic governance, and algorithmic policing. Included in this volume is Wang's influential critique of liberal anti-racist politics, “Against Innocence,” as well as essays on RoboCop, techno-policing, and the aesthetic problem of making invisible forms of power legible.
Wang shows that the new racial capitalism begins with parasitic governance and predatory lending that extends credit only to dispossess later. Predatory lending has a decidedly spatial character and exists in many forms, including subprime mortgage loans, student loans for sham for-profit colleges, car loans, rent-to-own scams, payday loans, and bail bond loans. Parasitic governance, Wang argues, operates through five primary techniques: financial states of exception, automation, extraction and looting, confinement, and gratuitous violence. While these techniques of governance often involve physical confinement and the state-sanctioned execution of black Americans, new carceral modes have blurred the distinction between the inside and outside of prison. As technologies of control are perfected, carcerality tends to bleed into society.
359 pages, Paperback
First published February 23, 2018
309 people are currently reading
8460 people want to read
About the author
Jackie Wang
15 books291 followersJackie Wang is a student of the dream state, black studies scholar, prison abolitionist, poet, performer, library rat, trauma monster and PhD student at Harvard University. She is the author of a number of punk zines including On Being Hard Femme, as well as a collection of dream poems titled Tiny Spelunker of the Oneiro-Womb.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 173 reviews
January 1, 2022
A powerful set of essays about how capitalism intersects with mass incarceration and anti-Blackness. Jackie Wang brings a strong economic analysis into examining the pitfalls of technological “advancements” such as algorithmic policing and cybernetic governance and how these forces still contribute to the unjust imprisonment of Black and Latinx people. Though the essays to me felt a bit abstract or intellectualizing at times, Wang incorporates a poignant and powerful emotional component to this book by sharing about the incarceration of her brother and how that affected her and her family. In addition to that essay, her essay “Against Innocence” stood out too in its intelligent takedown of the notion that we should only advocate for victims of the carceral state who we perceive as innocent. Recommended as a companion to books such as The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander.
December 1, 2018
"Our bodies are not closed loops. We hold each other and keep each other in time by marching, singing, embracing, breathing. We synchronize our tempos so we can find a rhythm through which the urge to live can be expressed, collectively. And in this way, we set the world into motion. In this way, poets become the timekeepers of the revolution."
It took me a while to finish this book, because it's pretty dense honestly. When I first started I was like am I smart enough to read this? But I kept coming back when I needed guidance, when I was ready to expand, when I was ready to heal and learn in ways my program could never provide me. This book combines abolition with poetry, afro pessimism with optimism and radical imagination. Only read if you're ready for a complete restructuring of the world as you knew it. Only read if you're ready to dream and think critically of a world without prisons. Actually, read it anyways, because by the end you'll be ready to learn more.
It took me a while to finish this book, because it's pretty dense honestly. When I first started I was like am I smart enough to read this? But I kept coming back when I needed guidance, when I was ready to expand, when I was ready to heal and learn in ways my program could never provide me. This book combines abolition with poetry, afro pessimism with optimism and radical imagination. Only read if you're ready for a complete restructuring of the world as you knew it. Only read if you're ready to dream and think critically of a world without prisons. Actually, read it anyways, because by the end you'll be ready to learn more.
July 25, 2019
Right up there with Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow. Jackie Wang dropped bomb after bomb in this detailed look into the way that America has been using mass incarceration, fucked-up policing and judicial practices, taxes, and fines to control and destroy black and brown communities to make a profit.
I can't recommend this book any higher. Jackie Wang isn't just a scholar - even though she's a super dope scholar, she has that lived experience element of having family members incarcerated.. she's speaking from a place of passion and pain and examines the many ways that the justice system has been set up to disenfranchise black, brown, low-income communities. The justice system in addition to various systems such as the credit & payday loans institutional structure that has been built off the backs of people who were set behind the line from day one.
This book hit me hard. Equal parts The New Jim Crow, and Evicted by Matthew Desmond; Wang shares so many detailed, well-researched and documented instances of discriminatory and predatory behaviour that has lead to the disenfranchisement of so many. You have to read this.
I can't recommend this book any higher. Jackie Wang isn't just a scholar - even though she's a super dope scholar, she has that lived experience element of having family members incarcerated.. she's speaking from a place of passion and pain and examines the many ways that the justice system has been set up to disenfranchise black, brown, low-income communities. The justice system in addition to various systems such as the credit & payday loans institutional structure that has been built off the backs of people who were set behind the line from day one.
This book hit me hard. Equal parts The New Jim Crow, and Evicted by Matthew Desmond; Wang shares so many detailed, well-researched and documented instances of discriminatory and predatory behaviour that has lead to the disenfranchisement of so many. You have to read this.
April 23, 2018
i learned a lot from these essays about incarceration, financialization and debt, policing and automation, and the pitfalls of innocence vs. guilt discourse. while there are a lot of smart books on contemporary capitalism, i appreciate that jackie wang doesn't lose sight of the human impact of her arguments. my favorite parts of the book were where she talked about her brother's incarceration and its toll on her and her family. i appreciated the scope of her arguments that used political economy and afropessimist critiques to explain the workings of the prison industrial complex. at times i wondered why she didn't engage more heavily with stuart hall's "policing the crisis" or ruth wilson gilmore's "the golden gulag," because both those books felt very relevant to the arguments wang makes. at a theoretical level, i'm still contemplating the distinction between expropriation and exploitation as two overlapping accumulative logics of capitalism.
January 10, 2025
This is a smart and ingeniously written work of hybrid scholarship: beginning as a work firmly rooted in an analysis of racial capitalism and neoliberal carcerality -- which was explained brilliantly for the non-economist (such as myself) -- Wang departs from the mold by incorporating performance, memoir, and poetics toward a magnificent and stubbornly hopeful conclusion. Very excited to see this formal experimentation, especially inasmuch as it is a lived gesture toward the world without borders and walls Wang pursues, and the lyrical interventions her militant interlocutors –– from the Panthers to Tiqqun –– make themselves.
June 3, 2025
Perhaps the right words will soon arrive to describe what this book did to me, but for now I’ll simply say that my conception of the world has shifted irreparably after reading this book. By this, I mean that Jackie Wang has astutely and unsparingly shed light on the deep injustices structuring our world in such a way that to look away from the truths she’s illuminated would constitute a violence unto itself. And, also, she’s reminded us that she is foremost a poet, and her vocation is therefore to ask what new worlds might be conjured through dreaming and imagining in collectivity. These lessons will guide me forever and they should guide you too!!!
July 26, 2020
Thoroughly researched, thoughtfully crafted, achingly personal, and sometimes eclectic writing on the theory of incarceration under modern capitalism, examined through political economy, biopolitics, poetry, and more. A cohesive extension of the author's popular essay "Against Innocence," which is republished as a chapter in this book.
Some assorted reflections:
Jackie Wang's voice in this book is pretty distinctive. She interlaces scholarly essays with unforgettable first-person storytelling, and manages to reconcile the voice of the Harvard PhD with that of the activist-artist-revolutionary. Academic verbiage is sometimes interrupted by short gusts of the author's visceral thoughts and occasional profanity, as if in rebellion against the desensitizing effect of typical academic writing. I dig it.
For a book written in a pretty academic register, I think the content is relatively accessible thanks to two features. First, the inclusion of generous dollops of relevant background information, both in the 90-page introduction and in the beginnings of several of the main chapters. Second, the lack of political posturing — the perspective is unquestionably communist, but the analyses are given without finger-wagging at liberals (etc.). It feels like everyone from Tiqqunists to left-liberals can potentially identify with this text, and yet this is done without compromising the political content. That in itself is impressive.
I have two modest criticisms.
The first is that the book draws from automation discourse in an uncritical way. In the introduction for example, Wang writes, "Mass automation is on the horizon… What will happen when…humans are no longer needed for production and consumption?" By now, many economists, technologists, and Marxist theorists have debunked the baseless hype that automation is coming for all our jobs in the totalizing manner suggested by statements like these. Fortunately none of the main arguments hinge on this.
My second vague dissatisfaction with the book is that it's much more concerned with articulating the logics of incarceration (which it does with extreme clarity) than with explaining how these conditions and systems arose in a causal way. But that's alright; it doesn't stop this from emerging as an outstanding collection of essays (and moving interludes that take other forms) with a lot of information and a unique character.
Some assorted reflections:
Jackie Wang's voice in this book is pretty distinctive. She interlaces scholarly essays with unforgettable first-person storytelling, and manages to reconcile the voice of the Harvard PhD with that of the activist-artist-revolutionary. Academic verbiage is sometimes interrupted by short gusts of the author's visceral thoughts and occasional profanity, as if in rebellion against the desensitizing effect of typical academic writing. I dig it.
For a book written in a pretty academic register, I think the content is relatively accessible thanks to two features. First, the inclusion of generous dollops of relevant background information, both in the 90-page introduction and in the beginnings of several of the main chapters. Second, the lack of political posturing — the perspective is unquestionably communist, but the analyses are given without finger-wagging at liberals (etc.). It feels like everyone from Tiqqunists to left-liberals can potentially identify with this text, and yet this is done without compromising the political content. That in itself is impressive.
I have two modest criticisms.
The first is that the book draws from automation discourse in an uncritical way. In the introduction for example, Wang writes, "Mass automation is on the horizon… What will happen when…humans are no longer needed for production and consumption?" By now, many economists, technologists, and Marxist theorists have debunked the baseless hype that automation is coming for all our jobs in the totalizing manner suggested by statements like these. Fortunately none of the main arguments hinge on this.
My second vague dissatisfaction with the book is that it's much more concerned with articulating the logics of incarceration (which it does with extreme clarity) than with explaining how these conditions and systems arose in a causal way. But that's alright; it doesn't stop this from emerging as an outstanding collection of essays (and moving interludes that take other forms) with a lot of information and a unique character.
March 28, 2020
This was fine. It doesn't really contain any new information, and the most compelling parts of it were the collections of quotations from other sources. So why wouldn't I just read those? Wang synthesizes her arguments well in 'Against Innocence,' one of the chapters of the book that's been published elsewhere but unfortunately the book devolves into poetry and imagined conversations of abolitionism with past revolutionaries.
I do think it's worth a read, but maybe buoyed by a larger context: an understanding of the Black Panthers and Marx especially. She also leans heavily on Foucault and Agamben but that part is less easy to understand.
I dunno! worth a read!!
I do think it's worth a read, but maybe buoyed by a larger context: an understanding of the Black Panthers and Marx especially. She also leans heavily on Foucault and Agamben but that part is less easy to understand.
I dunno! worth a read!!
April 27, 2020
this book was an absolute banger from start to finish. a gripping synthesis of racial capitalism that is steeped in both theory and personal understanding. in particular, I was struck by the discussion of how today's moral economy of debt and new financial functions of discipline have reconfigured biopolitical power.
December 27, 2020
"what counter-spell is powerful enough to break the prison's stranglehold on our imagination?
but the spell is never total. the intensification of the desire for life undermines the prison's capacity to structure our mental lives.
imagination is excess, is that which could never be contained by the prison, that which will always exceed it.
what night endeavors must we embrace to enter that hidden frequency — that special vibration, the one Sun Ra believed would set us free."
a call to an abolitionist imagination that beautifully opens up avenues for thought outside common trappings of respectability in the left (as argued in Against Innocence particularly). an abolitionist poetics with explorations on anti-Blackness and carceral logic within the algorithm, data mining, the debt economy that tied together so many different sources in ways that were really useful for me. i found myself reading the final chapter,"the prison abolitionist imagination: a conversation" slowly, out loud, with a renewed appreciation for the work generations immemorial have done to ignite wonder, freedom, and imagination — may we heed those words for an unabating desire for another world.
but the spell is never total. the intensification of the desire for life undermines the prison's capacity to structure our mental lives.
imagination is excess, is that which could never be contained by the prison, that which will always exceed it.
what night endeavors must we embrace to enter that hidden frequency — that special vibration, the one Sun Ra believed would set us free."
a call to an abolitionist imagination that beautifully opens up avenues for thought outside common trappings of respectability in the left (as argued in Against Innocence particularly). an abolitionist poetics with explorations on anti-Blackness and carceral logic within the algorithm, data mining, the debt economy that tied together so many different sources in ways that were really useful for me. i found myself reading the final chapter,"the prison abolitionist imagination: a conversation" slowly, out loud, with a renewed appreciation for the work generations immemorial have done to ignite wonder, freedom, and imagination — may we heed those words for an unabating desire for another world.
July 10, 2025
This will turn you upside down and shake a bunch of rattly normalized toxic nonsense out of your head. It's intense but I'd like for everyone to go through this wringer.
It gets pretty academic at times but I think I maybe only spent ~30 total minutes feeling in over my head. Mostly I felt thankful that smart people like Jackie Wang spend time working through this stuff + infusing the work of other political thinkers so the rest of us don't have to conjure up such challenging ideas from scratch. The least I can do is be a willing baby bird and open my beak to receive God knows what tough information that someone has done most of the work to gather and chew through first. And I'll tell ya what: when you manage to swallow it you wind up seeing exploitation and capitalist extraction everywhere you look haha congrats on your new lease on life get it??
Also, this book finally turned me into someone who reads with a pen in hand. I am now down to make marks in my books, especially to keep track of things that I need to marinate on or revisit. Lots of that here.
It gets pretty academic at times but I think I maybe only spent ~30 total minutes feeling in over my head. Mostly I felt thankful that smart people like Jackie Wang spend time working through this stuff + infusing the work of other political thinkers so the rest of us don't have to conjure up such challenging ideas from scratch. The least I can do is be a willing baby bird and open my beak to receive God knows what tough information that someone has done most of the work to gather and chew through first. And I'll tell ya what: when you manage to swallow it you wind up seeing exploitation and capitalist extraction everywhere you look haha congrats on your new lease on life get it??
Also, this book finally turned me into someone who reads with a pen in hand. I am now down to make marks in my books, especially to keep track of things that I need to marinate on or revisit. Lots of that here.
February 8, 2022
Everyone should read this fucking book
June 2, 2022
Eu a pensar que ia só ler sobre prisões e a Jackie Wang a explicar me as teorias da lumpenização do Black Panther Party, a acumulação primitiva do Marx, as contribuições da Rosa Luxemburgo, etc 🥰🥰🥰
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November 17, 2023Sustained, rigorous critique (as is needed). Imaginative in its call for life and liveliness !
November 19, 2023
an utterly brilliant, insightful, and thoroughly-researched collection of essays
September 5, 2024
I only want to read academic books by poets because they can imagine new worlds.
May 30, 2019
everyone should read this!
especially
Ripples in Time: an update
Against innocence: race, gender and the politics of safety
and the prison abolitionist imagination: a conversation
especially
Ripples in Time: an update
Against innocence: race, gender and the politics of safety
and the prison abolitionist imagination: a conversation
August 31, 2020
Smart and scathing. Will be rereading
July 13, 2019
Incredibly important book to read on the reality of incarceration and racism in America.... should be required reading for everyone.... disturbing saddening information but so concisely written and not too dense
July 1, 2020
Extremely good /detailed . Very dense... for me at least (had to use Oxford dictionary a lot and made my bro explain the money jargon to me). But very glad I read this. Particularly liked the essay ‘against innocence’ and Wang’s poems and personal interludes
November 26, 2021
"carceral" is used outside of prison contexts enough that i was viewing it as a stand in for oppressive in those contexts. this helped me redefine and narrow the word. i don't have the book anymore but i want to find this quote at the end of intro about how debt, credit, fines, etc. circumscribe the ways people can fully live life, and the way this effect is chronic, disorienting, and cruel.
January 19, 2021
that last chapter!! Rosa!!
December 23, 2024
Combines a groundbreaking state theory with a lucid application and explanation of Marxist and black radical thought. Really felt like a rare achievement—I can totally understand why everyone is obsessed with this book. Also!! Poetry in a theory book??? SO cool
May 5, 2020
Jackie Wang identifies herself as many things, with abolitionist, poet, and “trauma monster,” appearing much higher on the list than scholar. This book is ultimately an academic text, but not a reference text, with parts of it more accessible than others & certainly designed to read through from end to end. This book is also an incredible contribution to the abolitionist handbook & imaginations. Her training and desire as a poet present itself inside of well-researched and densely rich arguments for a world without incarceration & state violence. Her essay, “Against Innocence,” got her recognition & for good reason. It is a powerful and digestible diagnosis of what is wrong with the way we talk about and advocate for an end to state violence. Hidden in the back as the second to last chapter, it is a MUST read for anyone interested in carceral abolition conversations. By far my favorite semiotext(e) publication I have encountered in a long series of works. In a talk recently, I was so awestruck by Wang’s humble, honest, and welcoming voice as she spent so much time lifting up grassroots anarchist movement happening in the country. I will follow her work as long as she keeps making it!
May 19, 2021
This book is a collection and intersection of all the modern day effects capitalism, policing, incarceration have on our lives. Jackie Wang is a complete mastermind. I find it rare to encounter a book so remarkably balanced with hard-research, emotion and raw passion. Jackie brings to light many outcomes and disastrous policies that tear through BIPOC communities at overwhelming rates.
I learned an enormous amount about our judicious system and the ways capitalism, policing, and even big tech impact our communities. Many of which is just enough out of plain sight that we are unaware. Jackie Wang’s book is a work of art.
I learned an enormous amount about our judicious system and the ways capitalism, policing, and even big tech impact our communities. Many of which is just enough out of plain sight that we are unaware. Jackie Wang’s book is a work of art.
May 6, 2018
I had a lot of strong reactions to this book, and I want to save them for the discussion in my book group and not spoil them. To summarize, this is a book about how predatory lending and financialization (two fancy ways of saying making money off of poor people) fuel other kinds of injustice, including the absurdly high level of incarceration in the US. None of it could happen without racism. On one foot: some people destroy the entire society to make money on the backs of the most vulnerable, the rest of us allow them to because of our delusions about race.
February 7, 2019
Excellent set of essays on the predatory nature of our penal system. Especially important for those tempted to ask "what's so bad about privatization anyway?" or "why should 'criminals' expect to have the same rights as me an 'innocent' law-abiding citizen?"
At the same time, it is a scathing repudiation of capitalist ideology and the way it has utterly gutted government infrastructure and social programming. It includes a ton of historical events and figures typically excluded in mainstream education/media. Likely worth revisiting for the sheer body of information.
At the same time, it is a scathing repudiation of capitalist ideology and the way it has utterly gutted government infrastructure and social programming. It includes a ton of historical events and figures typically excluded in mainstream education/media. Likely worth revisiting for the sheer body of information.
November 17, 2020
this book rocks ass. Jackie wang is confident, honest, and unmerciful—my favourite kind of academic. A distinctive and urgent voice in an otherwise apathetic academe.
June 23, 2020
Having begun the book just before the Minneapolis protests erupted, this book serves as an extremely clear guide to the economic reasons for the disenfranchisement of black people in America. Wang presents her case in the 7 chapters where she highlights exactly why the police disproportionately target black people for arrests and incarceration — for exploitation and expropriation. It is this normalised over-policing that had led to the police brutality against black people in America.
In Carceral Capitalism, the author Jackie Wang writes about how the carceral, policing and the legal system is influenced by the finance and banking sectors, which aim to extract and expropriate from the destitute blacks. She discusses the fact that they see black people as but a tool for them to compensate for economic downturns and loss of tax revenues by fining, incarcerating, and putting them in involuntary indebtedness. The system sees black people as disposable and exploitable subjects and the violent treatments towards black people are a symptom of such a mindset, rather than an anomaly.
As we have seen with the murder of George Floyd and the response by police departments in support of their police brutality, black people aren't seen as equivalent human beings to the whites. The policing of black people are seen in a different paradigm as they are seen to be 'non-productive' and 'have a propensity for crime', thus their murders are but managed risk factors.
This book shows how the system perpetuates these racist ideas even after the abolishment of slavery and Jim Crow laws. Segregation is still well and alive and the government, in cahoots with the financial sector, only seeks to maintain the status quo of white supremacy.
"Against Innocence" has an extremely interesting stance where Wang argues that we ought to fight for justice not only for the 'innocent' but also for those who had fought back. The problem with the 'innocent' narrative is that black people are presupposed to be guilty, and once they have fought back, it would have been a reflection of this guilt. Having fought back, they lose the protection of activists, who choose to distance themselves away from them, when the alternative would have been death at the hands of their oppressors.
Overall, Carceral Capitalism is a brilliant book that demonstrates the way the system seeks to extract as much as they can from people whom they categorised as disposable and thus extractable. I think it's quite the required reading to untangle the complex relationships between society, government, and black people.
In Carceral Capitalism, the author Jackie Wang writes about how the carceral, policing and the legal system is influenced by the finance and banking sectors, which aim to extract and expropriate from the destitute blacks. She discusses the fact that they see black people as but a tool for them to compensate for economic downturns and loss of tax revenues by fining, incarcerating, and putting them in involuntary indebtedness. The system sees black people as disposable and exploitable subjects and the violent treatments towards black people are a symptom of such a mindset, rather than an anomaly.
As we have seen with the murder of George Floyd and the response by police departments in support of their police brutality, black people aren't seen as equivalent human beings to the whites. The policing of black people are seen in a different paradigm as they are seen to be 'non-productive' and 'have a propensity for crime', thus their murders are but managed risk factors.
This book shows how the system perpetuates these racist ideas even after the abolishment of slavery and Jim Crow laws. Segregation is still well and alive and the government, in cahoots with the financial sector, only seeks to maintain the status quo of white supremacy.
"Against Innocence" has an extremely interesting stance where Wang argues that we ought to fight for justice not only for the 'innocent' but also for those who had fought back. The problem with the 'innocent' narrative is that black people are presupposed to be guilty, and once they have fought back, it would have been a reflection of this guilt. Having fought back, they lose the protection of activists, who choose to distance themselves away from them, when the alternative would have been death at the hands of their oppressors.
Overall, Carceral Capitalism is a brilliant book that demonstrates the way the system seeks to extract as much as they can from people whom they categorised as disposable and thus extractable. I think it's quite the required reading to untangle the complex relationships between society, government, and black people.
June 9, 2020
"Militancy is not just tactically necessary; its dual objective is to transform people and "fundamentally alter" their being by emboldening them, removing their passivity, and cleansing them of the "core of despair" crystallized in their bodies.
"I think of your [Rosa Luxemburg's] fate, of George Jackson's fate, of Fred Hampton's fate--the state must know when the universe gives birth to a true revolutionary--it must see in them a light it must extinguish, lest their spark find and set alight the divine spark in us all, which would spread unti lthe world as we know it has been upended...You were the secret. You were the principle of life itself. You were a tree they had to cut down."
This is an incredible book. I don't quite know what to say, I've just finished it and I'm in awe of this little book. It's a collection of essays examining policing, finance, biopower, predictive policing, the relation of space to bodies, the dynamic between innocence and safety, and all of the ways in which these topics overlap. In addition to being a critical and thoroughly researched academic text, Jackie Wang weaves in stories of her own life--her own experience with the criminal justice system in the form of her brother first being sentenced to juvenile life without parole, then taking a plea deal for a forty year sentence. She discusses her own experiences of violence as a queer woman of color and how these facets of her life have informed her academic work.
Finally, and what I think is the perhaps the most spectacular part of this book, is the use of poetry woven throughout. Using her own poetry, as well as the words of revolutionaries, Wang insists that poetry deserves a spot in the revolution. Poetry, she writes, keeps us connected to the stars, to the vast spaces of our dreams where freedom is born. The final pages of the book feature a quote from Assata Shakur: "Dreams and reality are opposites. Action synthesizes them."
"I think of your [Rosa Luxemburg's] fate, of George Jackson's fate, of Fred Hampton's fate--the state must know when the universe gives birth to a true revolutionary--it must see in them a light it must extinguish, lest their spark find and set alight the divine spark in us all, which would spread unti lthe world as we know it has been upended...You were the secret. You were the principle of life itself. You were a tree they had to cut down."
This is an incredible book. I don't quite know what to say, I've just finished it and I'm in awe of this little book. It's a collection of essays examining policing, finance, biopower, predictive policing, the relation of space to bodies, the dynamic between innocence and safety, and all of the ways in which these topics overlap. In addition to being a critical and thoroughly researched academic text, Jackie Wang weaves in stories of her own life--her own experience with the criminal justice system in the form of her brother first being sentenced to juvenile life without parole, then taking a plea deal for a forty year sentence. She discusses her own experiences of violence as a queer woman of color and how these facets of her life have informed her academic work.
Finally, and what I think is the perhaps the most spectacular part of this book, is the use of poetry woven throughout. Using her own poetry, as well as the words of revolutionaries, Wang insists that poetry deserves a spot in the revolution. Poetry, she writes, keeps us connected to the stars, to the vast spaces of our dreams where freedom is born. The final pages of the book feature a quote from Assata Shakur: "Dreams and reality are opposites. Action synthesizes them."
Displaying 1 - 30 of 173 reviews