From an African American Studies standpoint, the intellectual genealogy of critical prison studies can be traced back to the practices and thinking of anti-colonial Black radical political prisoners and their enslaved abolitionist predecessors. The ongoing struggle for Black liberation in the U.S., in addition to the material, immaterial, and fragmented archives of transatlantic slavery, has offered us conceptual tools to analyze carceral continuums–from slavery to mass incarceration–which have been crucial in the formation of critical prison studies. Over the years, grassroots anti-prison activism entered into dialogue with the academic methodologies of African-American Studies, resulting in scholar-activism that combines critical research on the prison alongside abolitionist praxis. As a result, the prison has increasingly become a site from which so much theorizing about abolition, fugitivity, carceral modernity, and coloniality derives. This ‘carceral turn,’ which has energized a number of fields across the social sciences, cultural studies, and critical theory in the United States dovetailed with recent calls to defund the police sparked by anti-police protests across the country. The renewed attention gave an added boost to scholarly work on prisons. But one problem that has resulted from this increased interest in prison abolitionism is an influx of scholarship that seeks to educate white academia about carcerality while lacking a substantive engagement with the powerful critiques from the longue durée histories of the Black radical tradition. Such marginalization reproduces cultural hierarchies of how (and by whom) knowledge is produced.

Given that comparatists are well positioned to assure that the intellectual work of anti-colonial Afro-Diasporic radical thinkers, and their abolitionist predecessors who lived under plantocracies, does not fall by the wayside; why has the ‘carceral’ turn been slow to reach comparative literature? In order to amplify the period and region-specific parameters of U.S.-centric critical prison studies, this seminar asks: How can comparative scholarship utilize its cross-cultural, multilingual practices for the purposes of widening the scope of critical prison studies–both linguistically and geographically? All while maintaining fidelity to the principle that imprisoned intellectuals are the ones with the roadmap, and that becoming a scholar-activist with commitments to social justice in this struggle is essential. In this vein, comparatists who are capable of forming new constellations of imprisoned intellectual thought and practice–which will serve both a critical and political purpose in the journey towards abolition–are welcomed to join this seminar.