Date of Award
Fall 2022
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
African American Studies
First Advisor
Feimster, Crystal
Abstract
This is a history of Black women’s experiences within, around, and outside of the perimeters of the southern carceral regime. Through an expansive case study of Alabama through the post-World War I moment, the interwar years, the Great Depression, Great Migration, the New Deal, and the infrastructural modernization in the post-World War II moment, this dissertation examines the relationship that carcerality forged between space and time. From penitentiaries, penal camps, and jails, incarcerated Black women challenged the boundaries of carcerality in the rural and urban South. In response, the state ritualized recapture as a mode of epistemological, ontological, and genealogical violence. This dissertation traces how Black women’s fugitive movements reflected and responded to these spatial and temporal vulnerabilities.Through its consideration of spatiality, this twentieth-century history of carceral fugitivity deepens the rich body of scholarship by Black activists and scholars that articulate the relationship between slavery and carcerality. This dissertation contends that by attending to the histories of escape in the aftermath of slavery enriches our understanding of how specific technologies of surveillance—in tandem with coerced labor—were direct responses to incarcerated Black women’s attempts to dismantle the prison’s spatial domination by stealing themselves away from its boundaries. In this way, Black women’s escape exposes that at the nexus of the prison there was a profound entanglement of past and future. Tracing both literal escapes and fugitive practices from within the prison delineates how the concrete relationship between slavery and prisons was co-constitutive with the future implementations, designs, and configurations of carcerality by century’s end. In other words, it was not just the recursive use of specific technologies of violence that survived the abolition of slavery, but its very logic of spatial domination that conditioned twentieth-century responses to Black fugitivity. “Unable to Find Any Trace of Her” is about movement, a shifting relationship between people and space. The criminalized and surveilled movement of Black women as well as the movement of carceral violence out from behind prison walls. Both offer critical narratives about the temporality of the southern carceral regime: as a racialized project steeped in violences that survived the abolition of slavery and as an anticipatory model of late-twentieth century carceral expansion under neoliberalism.
Recommended Citation
Khater, Micah Grace, ""Unable to Find Any Trace of Her": Black Women, Genealogies of Escape, and Alabama Prisons, 1920 - 1950" (2022). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 780.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/780
