In what follows, my primary theoretical concern is with the location and operation of the U.S. prison regime within the material and cultural production of American globality, by which I mean the process and modality of state power that works and mobilizes in ways distinct from (though largely in concert with) American “globalization” and neoliberalism. Globality, conceptualized as an ongoing reconfiguration, imagination, and institutional prototyping of dominance, is animated by a genealogy of racial and civilizational confrontation, which posits the compulsory historical progression of global white supremacy: in excess of nationalist/imperialist ambition, capitalist expansion and hegemony, and righteous war, globality is a coercive articulation of the nature and institutionality of “good” power itself, the production of a geography of biopolitical dominance that is not sufficiently covered by common scholarly or activist cartographies of American empire.
In this sense, American globality speaks to the contemporary production of U.S. state and state-sanctioned technologies of human and ecological domination—most frequently formed through overlapping and symbiotic institutional practices of profound bodily violence, including genocidal and protogenocidal warmaking, racist and white supremacist institutionalized violence, and mass-scaled imprisonment—while analytically emphasizing the capacity of these forms of domination to be discretely mobilized, institutionally indexed, and materially invoked across political geographies, including by governments and states that are formally autonomous of the United States. This formation of dominance is composed by the U.S. state’s conceptualizations and articulations of its own power (here, through the regime of the prison), as well as by the immediate usefulness and essential accessibility of these conceptualizations and articulations of power to—and frequently, their overbearing structural and political influence on—other state formations and local hegemonies (e.g., the U.S. prison regime as a “universal” blueprinting of how “good” states ought to work). American globality is simultaneously 1) a vernacular of institutional power; 2) an active and accessible iteration of violent human domination as the cohering of sociality (and civil society) writ large; and 3) a grammar of pragmatic immediacy (in fact, urgency) that orders and influences statecraft across various sites of jurisdiction and influence. It is in the sense that American globality forms a lexicon (the principles governing the organization of a vocabulary) of U.S. statecraft in its disciplined and distended global productions.
I am suggesting that the lived surfaces, institutional productions, coercive practices, and global statecraft of carceral violence compose a crucial theoretical and pragmatic problem for opponents of U.S. global hegemony as well as progressive, abolitionist, feminist, and antiracist critics of the putatively localized U.S. prison industrial complex. More polemically, I am positing that conventional symptomatic treatments of “violence in prison” as episodes of institutional excess, “bad policy,” bungled protocol, unconstitutionality, or illegality—vis-à-vis a critical focusing on specific imprisonment policies (e.g. immigration detention policy) and/or particularized case studies of state organized and state sanctioned brutality, torture, and abuse (e.g. episodes of sexual violence in women’s and men’s prisons)—only scratch the surface of a more substantial and comprehensive conceptualization of carceral violence.
On the one hand, this means that we must consider the complex formation of “the state” through the dynamics of its public intellectual, popular cultural, and knowledge producing apparatuses—how is “The Prison” a modality (and not just a reified product or outcome) of American statecraft in the current political moment, particularly as it crystallizes multiple abstractions and (juridical) metaphors of state power and legitimated violence at a rather discrete (though still often metaphorized and abstracted) institutional site? On the other hand, we must also ask what it would mean to theoretically center a complex conception of carceral violence—at the dynamic and uneven intersections of neoliberal globalization, white supremacist patriarchy, and what Ruth Wilson Gilmore has called the essential white supremacist violence of American nationalism’s reactionary “restorative tendencies”1—as the animating force of U.S. globality in its various forms.
- Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “Terror Austerity Race Gender Excess Theater,” in Reading Rodney King, Reading Urban Uprising, Ed. Robert Gooding-Williams. New York: Routledge, 1993, 26. [↩]
