Race, Incarceration, and Freedom in the Americas

This course examines the history of mass incarceration in the Americas, focusing on the relationship between race, policing, and punishment from colonial Latin America to twenty-first century United States. Together, we will explore ways of thinking about the long history of punishment and its relationship to racial and gender politics as well as different forms of labor exploitation, and think about how different temporal and geographic framings help us think in new ways about the history of incarceration and (perhaps) point to new futures. Among the topics we will explore are the ways contemporary carceral regimes have been shaped by the afterlives of slavery; the shifting meanings of rehabilitation; the experiences of incarcerated individuals; the Cold War politics and transnational roots of militarized policing in the United States; and the ways gender, sexuality, and age shape imprisonment across the hemisphere.