“So High You Can't Get Over it, So Low You Can't Get Under it”: Carceral Spatiality and Black Masculinities in the United States and South Africa

Abstract Carceral or prison space and the techniques that make prison punishment possible shape Black living and working space and in turn influence Black masculine performance. This essay uses the Robert Taylor Housing Projects—a notorious project on Chicago's South Side—and South Africa's mining compounds, as case studies. It exhumes the carceral logic that underwrote these spaces by highlighting how the project and the mine compound drew on containment, policing, surveillance, and restrictive architecture to fix Blacks spatially. It also explores how the prisonization of these quotidian spaces profoundly shaped Black male subjectivity, thus giving rise to a carcerally inflected Black masculinity, made visible through the performance of prison masculinities, embodiment of carceral aesthetics, and transference of sexual politics from prisons to other carceral sites. Keywords: Black masculinitycarceral spacehousing projectsprison literatureracism I would like to thank my mentor and dissertation advisor Angela Y. Davis for her tireless support and feedback in the completion of the project. I would also like to acknowledge my other committee members, Bettina F. Aptheker, George Lipsitz, and Tricia Rose, for all their support. I want to thank Pascha Bueno-Hansen and Marco Mojica for their brilliant feedback while this project was being constructed. Finally, yet importantly, I want to thank Glen Elder for suggesting that I write this article. Glen passed away on May 21st, so I would like to dedicate this article to his memory. Notes See Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). Howard Winant, The New Politics of Race (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 15. David Wilson, Race and Cities: America's New Black Ghetto (New York: Routledge, 2007), 25. Devereux Bowly Jr., The Poorhouse: Subsidized Housing in Chicago, 1895–1976 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978), 128. Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh, American Project (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 126. Joy James, ed., The New Abolitionists (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), 208. Paul Meincke, "Last of the Robert Taylor Homes Comes Down," ABC News report, 2007. According to philosopher David Theo Goldberg, periphrastic space "implies dislocation, displacement, and division. It has become the primary mode by which the space of racial marginality has been articulated and reproduced." See David Theo Goldberg, Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1993), 188. See Katherine E. W. Will, "Regional Diet, American," http://www.faqs.org/nutrition/Pre-Sma/Regional-Diet-American.html. Venkatesh, American Project, 123. Ibid. Ibid., 123–124. Ibid., 129–130. Meincke, "Last of the Robert Taylor Homes Comes Down." The reserves were the most visible expression of South Africa's prisonization. They were archipelagoes of carceral punishment. Developed to sequester Africans in the nation's most isolated areas, the reserves are a flagrant exercise of carceral power. The reserves enabled the exploitation of Black labor power and acted as a physical barrier to keep Blacks out of the white gene pool. A network of carceral characteristics—the pass laws, banning, and police—that worked to fix Africans in their place, echo back to my examination of carceral punishment in the United States. They served three purposes: they isolated Blacks into the far reaches of the country, away from the resource-rich urban centers; they physically contained them; and they provided a cheap, readily available source of labor. The organization of space, specifically as it applies to land distribution, was critical to the stability of apartheid. According to postcolonial theorist Achille Mbembe, at its heart, colonial occupation was a matter of "seizing delimiting, and asserting control over a physical geographical area." Moreover, he stresses, colonial occupation was a relentless practice of "writing on the ground a new set of social and spatial relations …tantamount to the production of boundaries and hierarchies, zones and enclaves; the subdivision of existing property arrangements …and resources extraction." According to Mbembe, space was the "raw material of sovereignty," and violence was how sovereignty was exercised. See Achille Mbembe, "Necropolitics," Public Culture 15, no. 1 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003): 11–40. Leonard Thompson, A History of South Africa (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 115. Jonathan Crush, "Power Surveillance on the South African Gold Mines," Journal of Southern African Studies 18, no. 4 (1992): 825–844, at 828. Ibid., 831. Ibid.; Teresa Dirsuweit, "Carceral Spaces in South Africa: A Case Study of Institutional Power, Sexuality and Transgression in a Woman's Prisons," Geoforum, no. 30 (1999): 72; Dunbar Moodie, Going for the Gold (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Dunbar T. Moodie, Vivienne Ndatshe, and British Sibuyi, "Migrancy and Male Sexuality on the South African Gold Mines," Journal of Southern African Studies 14, no. 2 (1988): 228–256. Moodie, Going for the Gold, 77. Ibid., 78. Ibid., 77. Crush, "Power Surveillance on the South African Gold Mines," 833. Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela (Boston: Little, Brown, 1994), 390. Moodie, Going for the Gold, 79. Ibid. Ibid., 246. See Jan. K Coetzee, Plain Tales from Robben Island (Hatfield: Van Schaik, 2000); Moses Dlamini, Hell-Hole, Robben Island: Reminiscences of a Political Prisoner in South Africa (Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 1984); Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom; Indres Naidoo, Robben Island: Ten Years as a Political Prisoner in South Africa's Most Notorious Penitentiary (New York: Vintage Books, 1983); D. M. Zwelonke, Robben Island (London: Heinemann, 1973). See Moodie, Going for the Gold. Liz Walker, Graeme Reid, and Morna Cornell, Waiting to Happen: HIV/AIDS in South Africa (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2004), 66. See Murray Forman, The 'Hood Comes First (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2002); Doreen Massey, For Space (London: Sage, 2005); M. Kathleen Kirby, Indifferent Boundaries: Spatial Concepts of Human Subjectivity (New York: Guilford Press, 1996). Kirby, Indifferent Boundaries, 11. George Jackson, Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1994), 4. Patricia Hill-Collins, Black Sexual Politics (New York: Routledge, 2004), 90. Ibid. Ibid. My use of performance is informed by the work of performance theorist E. Patrick Johnson, and literary theorist Vershawn Young. For Johnson, performance "facilitates the appropriation of blackness." Drawing on Johnson's work, Young suggests that Black people endure what he calls the "burden of racial performance." For Young, the performative elements of Blackness demand that Black people perform those tropes. According to Young, not doing so risks skepticism or exclusion. See E. Patrick Johnson, Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004), and Vershawn Ashanti Young, Your Average Nigga: Performing Race, Literacy, and Masculinity (Detroit: Wayne State University, 2007). Sylvester Monroe, Brothers (New York: Ballantine, 1989), 41. See Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). Don Sabo, Terry A. Kupers, and Willie James London, eds., Prison Masculinities (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001), 3. Ibid., 5. Ibid. Ibid. See Byron Hurt, Hip Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes (PBS, 2006). According to Urban Institute researcher Nancy G. La Vigne, "The return of so many prisoners to a handful of Chicago communities is only half the story…. The other half is the high rate of people being sent or returned to prison who come from these communities. This cycling in and out of prison can have significant social and economic impacts on the residents in these neighborhoods." See Christy Visher, Nancy La Vigne, and Jill Farrell, Illinois Prisoners' Reflections on Returning Home (Washington, DC: Urban Institute, 2003). Keith M. Harris, "'Untitled': D' Angelo and the Visualization of the Black Male Body," Wide Angle (1999) 21, no. 4: 66. See Hurt, Hip Hop. Stanley "Tookie" Williams, Life in Prison (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1998), 14. Sabo, Kupers, and London, Prison Masculinities, 65. Dirsuweit, "Carceral Spaces in South Africa," 72. Moodie, Going for the Gold, 13. Dlamini, Hell-Hole, Robben Island, 23. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 111, 155. Fran Lisa Buntman, Robben Island and Prisoner Resistance to Apartheid (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 245. Moodie, Ndatshe, and Sibuyi, "Migrancy and Male Sexuality," 122–128. Ibid., 128–134. Ibid., 128. Ibid., 119. Glen Retief writes that sexual repression was central to apartheid regulations. Keeping the white population "pure" and white fostered the regulation of sex between racial groups. This was expressed in the 1957 Immorality Act. Though the law did not directly reference gays and lesbians, it was extended to them. According to Retief, the Nationalist Party used the existence of "gay parties" to strengthen its repression of sex and sexuality. See Retief, "Keeping Sodom Out of the Laagar: State Repression of Homosexuality in Apartheid South Africa," in Defiant Desire, ed. Mark Gevisser and Edwin Cameron (New York: Routledge, 1995), 100. Dirsuweit writes that in the face of the repressive carceral structures that underwrote the mine, men could escape the taboos of same sex intercourse and explore other possibilities. See Dirsuweit, "Carceral Spaces in South Africa." Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Mask (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 110.