Babylon war: black nationalism, black imprisonment, and white supremacy.

• Author: Martin, Waldo

IN CAPTIVE NATION, DAN BERGER CENTERS AND DEEPLY PROBES THE experiences and voices of militant Black prisoners during the Civil Rights movement and Black Power era. In turn, this multifaceted historical analysis offers fresh understandings of Black prison organizing. In particular, it compellingly illuminates how racial capitalism--the dynamic interaction between white supremacy and the capitalist economy--has powerfully shaped the history of imprisonment not only during this period, but also before and after it. A highly original history of the neglected intersection between Black imprisonment and the Black Freedom struggle emerges, making several important contributions.

First, Captive Nation reframes and perceptively represents the history of Black resistance to incarceration as an integral element of imprisonment's history. Most previous studies concerning incarceration emphasize the institutional and political domains to valorize a top-down view. Central to the originality of this work remains its emphasis on a far more complex view of imprisoned Blacks and the prisons themselves that deftly manages to center on imprisoned Black voices and experiences, engaging in a bottom-up view of these prisons. This approach allows readers to clearly witness not just the brutality of repression--what was done to Black prisoners--but also the prisoners' agency and resistance. Berger demonstrates why, how, and with what consequences Black prisoners struggled--collectively and individually--to gain measures of dignity and control over their own lives. In other words, readers gain a better understanding of the short- and long-term impact of specific Black prison organizing events, including insurrections, strikes, and litigation over rights and treatment.

Second, Captive Nation forces readers to rethink and expand their understanding of the enduring and broad Black Freedom struggle as well as the more narrowly defined Civil Rights and Black Power phases within that struggle. An especially powerful contribution of this work lies in its vivid and cogent demonstration of the synergetic relationship between Black prison activism and Black activism within the context of the Black Freedom struggle, notably within its Civil Rights and Black Power manifestations. Captive Nation demonstrates this relationship through the illuminating window of Black prison organizing. By centering this struggle within the evolving Black Freedom movement of the 1960s and 1970s, Berger allows readers to witness both the movement and Black prison organizing in new and insightful ways. The excavation and exploration of a previously ignored terrain of struggle within the movement emerges: the catalytic and thus crucial roles played by Black prison organizing in interrogating and seeking to realize, and even to expand, society's ideas and practices of freedom.

Captive Nation must also be acknowledged as an important work in Black radical history. Careful and sensitive histories of Black radicalism are far fewer in number than most seemingly relevant histories that, in fact, misrepresent, ignore, and trivialize the radical tradition. Unsparingly and unflinchingly--warts and all--the radicalism of Black prison organizing seen in Captive Nation resides in its...