Abstract
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.
The first three chapters of Spatializing Blackness build a historical and theoretical framework for examining the production, maintenance and proliferation of carceral power through Chicago’s Black Belt. Building on Foucault (1977), Woods (1998) and McKittrick (2006), Shabazz frames this study as a carceral genealogy that foregrounds a Black geographic lens to illustrate how the production of space and place is mediated by race. Shabazz’s major theoretical contribution builds on Foucault’s (1977) analysis of disciplinary technologies and prison spaces by illustrating that Chicago’s ‘carceral power is an anti-Black process’ (p. 7). Overall, these chapters illuminate how the architectures of Black confinement were built into Chicago’s urban landscape. A combination of policing, surveillance, urban planning, and racial and sexual politics assembled an architecture that enclosed and truncated the mobility of Black Chicagoans. These architectures simultaneously exposed Black Chicagoans to an uneven geography of risk and social, economic and psychological harm. The last two chapters of the book specifically examine how carceral power informed the performances of Black masculinity. Expanding and deepening poverty, increased disinvestment, and crowded living spaces informed the ‘landscapes [in which] Black boys and young men learned gender’ (p. 79). In these chapters Shabazz explores how the politics of Black containment provided a fertile ground for the emergence of Black gangs’, perpetuated the HIV/AIDs epidemic in Black communities and informed a prisonised performance of Black masculinity in Chicago.
The central thrust of Chapter 1 rests in tracing the forces that fixed carceral power in Black Chicago. Carceral power, Shabazz asserts, entered and became a permanent feature of Chicago’s Black Belt through the policing of vice and inter-racial sex, ultimately creating an uneven geography of punishment and policing focused on regulating Black male sexuality. Shabazz demonstrates how racialised forms of carceral power emerged through a historical analysis of police practices in South Side vice districts and examining the role race scholars, Progressive Era politics, African American migration and Southern discourses on Black sexuality played in mobilising hysteria around interracial socialising and sex. Black male sexual agency and mobility became a target of police power because it posed a direct threat to the interlocking system of white supremacy and heteropatriarchy in Chicago. Overall, Shabazz convincingly describes how fear of Black male sexuality, Progressive Era reforms, and policing functioned to install carceral power into Black geographies and organise the racial and social geography of Chicago.
Once vice districts were pushed into the Black Belt, housing restrictions and discrimination functioned to further circumscribe Black mobility and produce hyper-confined living zones that concretised the colour line in Chicago. Focusing on housing during the inter-war years, Chapter 2 demonstrates how kitchenettes were a place of enclosure and confinement. Shabazz uses the sociological and literary writings of Richard Wright to illuminate how kitchenettes represented a racialised expression of carceral power that expanded surveillance and police power into the quotidian spaces of Black life. Two conclusions from this chapter are useful: crime in kitchenette spaces may be a direct consequence of carceral power, and the domestic spaces of kitchenettes resembled prison spaces, which informed the performance of Black masculinity.
Shabazz continues his examination of the spatialisation and confinement of Blackness through examining public housing. In Chapter 3 Shabazz argues that public housing projects were sites infused with carceral power, transforming the projects into an interstitial space that linked home and prison. These spaces ultimately produced criminality and cultivated performances of Black masculinity that public policy purported to eliminate, ultimately leading the state to use police power to confront urban crisis it helped create. Using a combination of historical analysis and insights from imprisoned intellectuals, Shabazz traces the forces that culminated to facilitate and articulate the exercise of carceral power in the Robert Taylor Homes. The central insight from this chapter is connecting public housing with the prison industrial complex: ‘Robert Taylor Homes and projects like it produced a need for the state to respond to the situation it had created, and prisons were the primary way of confronting it’ (p. 74). The Robert Taylor Homes fostered a set of relationships between Black communities and prisons, which unevenly and systematically mapped carceral power and the vast social, economic and psychological consequences of incarceration onto Black geographies in Chicago.
Drawing on the framework developed in the first three chapters, Shabazz turns his attention to examining how carceral power informed the performances of Black masculinity in Chicago between the 1970s and mid-1990s. During this time period, prisons and streets became dialectically intertwined through the production of space and the flow of bodies and conceptions of masculinity between these spaces. To illustrate this circulation, Shabazz examines how Black gangs, the war on drugs, mass incarceration and the exclusion from exercising dominant forms of masculinity shaped Black men’s understanding and performance of masculinity in Chicago. The crux of Shabazz’s argument rests on illustrating both a circulation and transformation of conceptions and performances of Black masculinity over time that coincides with changes in sociospatial context of Black geographies in Chicago. As these transformations occurred, carceral power and the techniques of confinement became increasingly deployed in Black Chicago – concentrating the social and economic consequences of mass incarceration in these neighbourhoods, ultimately undermining their stability.
The final chapter explores how the circulation of bodies between prisons and neighbourhoods created a heightened geography of risk for Black Chicagoans. Through ghost mapping the HIV/AIDs epidemic, Shabazz examines how carceral power shaped Black Chicago’s relationship with the disease. He concludes this analysis by arguing the war on drugs operated as an intake valve that circulated disease into correctional facilities where it was allowed to grow, spread and eventually get pumped back into Black communities where formerly incarcerated adults were confined to living. The coercive mobility and uneven proliferation of the HIV/AIDs epidemic throughout Black geographies in Chicago is directly connected to the historic deployment of carceral power across racialised geographies, socioeconomic disparity, community instability and existing sexual politics – not individual sexual practices.
Geography played a significant role in producing the problems plaguing Black Chicago, and as Shabazz argues, it needs to play a significant role in producing solutions. This is the first instance where resistance to carceral power is discussed. Overlooking the various ways Black Chicagoans resisted the implementation and proliferation of carceral power was a missed opportunity. Tracing the historical geography of resistance and Black insurgence may have illuminated paths to finding solutions beyond creating green spaces and developing the capacity to produce food in Black Chicago, as suggested by Shabazz. Highlighting moments of resistance could also illuminate the full breadth of the performance of Black masculinity in Chicago.
In sum, this scholarship illustrates how policing, surveillance, urban planning, public policy and racist ideologies coalesced to create the architectures of confinement used to spatialise blackness in Chicago. Shabazz forcefully argues that these factors created racialised and gendered consequences for Black people on the city’s South Side, creating an uneven geography of risk and socio-economic opportunity that structured the urban landscape to function as a prison. This study will interest Black studies, queer studies, human geography and urban studies scholars interested in understanding the connection between space, place, race and identity performance.