Fair Chance Book Club: Carceral Capitalism by Jackie Wing
When: Friday, January 20, 2023
Time: 3-5 p.m.
Where: Cook Library 404B and Zoom (Zoom link will be sent to registrants prior to the event)
We will discuss the book, Carceral Capitalism, for this year’s book club. Appetizers and drinks for in-person registrants will be provided.
The first 25 registrants will receive a free copy of the book, which will be delivered in early December. Register for this event by Wednesday, November 30. Register here: https://bit.ly/FairChanceCoP22-23
A synopsis of the book is below:
In this collection of essays in Semiotext(e)’s Intervention series, Jackie Wang examines the contemporary incarceration techniques that have emerged since the 1990s. The essays illustrate various aspects of the carceral continuum, including the biopolitics of juvenile delinquency, predatory policing, the political economy of fees and fines, cybernetic governance, and algorithmic policing. Included in this volume is Wang’s influential critique of liberal anti-racist politics, “Against Innocence,” as well as essays on RoboCop, techno-policing, and the aesthetic problem of making invisible forms of power legible.
Wang shows that the new racial capitalism begins with parasitic governance and predatory lending that extends credit only to dispossess later. Predatory lending has a decidedly spatial character and exists in many forms, including subprime mortgage loans, student loans for sham for-profit colleges, car loans, rent-to-own scams, payday loans, and bail bond loans. Parasitic governance, Wang argues, operates through five primary techniques: financial states of exception, automation, extraction and looting, confinement, and gratuitous violence. While these techniques of governance often involve physical confinement and the state-sanctioned execution of black Americans, new carceral modes have blurred the distinction between the inside and outside of prison. As technologies of control are perfected, carcerality tends to bleed into society.
Categorised in: General
This post was written by Cross, Tammy M.