Book review: Spatializing Blackness: Architectures of Confinement and Black Masculinity in Chicago

21st Jan 2018

Book review: Spatializing Blackness: Architectures of Confinement and Black Masculinity in Chicago

A new book review by Austin Cummings is now available online

In ‘Women in prison: How we are’, Assata Shakur notes the similarities between urban spaces and carceral spaces: ‘For many, prison is not that much different from the street … For many cells are not that different from the tenements … The police are the same. The poverty is the same. The alienation is the same. The racism is the same. The sexism is the same. The drugs are the same and the system is the same’ (Shakur, 2005: 85). Shakur’s observation problematises the distinction between prisons and domestic spaces, illustrating the entanglements bet-ween freedom, enclosure and incapacitation. In Spatializing Blackness: Architectures of Confinement and Black Masculinity in Chicago, Rashad Shabazz elucidates the construction of the symbiotic relationship between urban landscapes and prison spaces, detailing both the production of racialised space and the gendered consequences of living in those spaces. The infusion of surveillance and technologies of prison punishment into the urban landscape, what Shabazz defines as carceral power, established boundaries that confined Black Chicagoans to a prisonised landscape. Employing a combination of historical geography, ghost mapping, literary analysis and insights from imprisoned intellectuals, Shabazz investigates how carceral power and the experience of living in architectures of confinement are intimately connected to Black men’s performance of masculinity.

You can access and read the full review here