Forging Black Safety in the Carceral Diaspora: Perverse Criminalization, Sexual Corrections, and Connection-Making in a Death World.

• Author: Rodriguez, S.M.

Your aesthetic standards what--what Again?

Bitch, I penned my pieces on the prison floors.

... I sleep in a prison ward renown for ideas.

... Would beautiful poems dethrone a tyrant?

--Stella Nyanzi, No Rosesfrom My Mouth (2020)

FORMER POLITICAL PRISONER STELLA NYANZI INTIMATELY AND passionately writes, on any surface available, of conditions in Luzira Womens Prison, Kampala, Uganda. Nyanzi, a beloved academic, gender justice activist, mother, and now poet, refused silencing. Instead, she slipped her fugitive poetry through prison bars and into the international spotlight with the help of the radical publishers of Ubuntu Reading Group (Nyanzi 2020). The feminist anthropologist writes of her experiences and observations: the cruel and perverse reality of criminalization, the sexuality and humanity of those imprisoned, the drastic loss and suffering produced by a regime of punishment under the Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni. However, reading within and through her text, I argue that Nyanzi exposes much more while incarcerated. Her words reveal the prison as the preeminent sphere of social, economic, political, and physical death throughout the African diaspora: a carceral death world that exists to stifle Black dissent.

Outside of the actual prison, cameralism ensures that this death world extends in tentacular fashion outside of the cell and into Black communities and countries. Death worlds, according to Achille Mbembe (2019), are spheres of social existence conferred upon certain populations that render them subject to perpetual injury, loss, and death. They are intentional political formations created to relegate some to slow death, which is imagined as necessary for the sustenance of life and vitality for privileged and powerful world subjects. Serving death world-making, a global carceral regime enlarges state capacities for criminalization, which Dylan Rodriguez (2019, 1586) defines as the "discursive and legal formulation of 'crime' as an affixation of notions of pathology/antisociality to particular [gendered, sexualized, racialized] human acts, behaviors, ecologies and bodies." Criminalization thus controls racialized and pathologized masses through the perpetually colonial cycle of labeling, surveillance, disciplining, silencing, and extraction.

Therefore, states not only expand the mechanisms, but the very meaning of crime. Strikingly, Nyanzi--arrested for the cyber harassment of first lady Janet Museveni--also demonstrates the experience of a newly virtualized cameralism. Words uttered on the scholars personal Facebook account were found to be so politically repugnant that she suffered jailing as corrections. Simultaneously, it is through the anti-carceral queer feminist praxis developing throughout the African diaspora that we witness life-building practices and historical-futuristic collectivity. Within collective praxis, we counter corrective violence.

In 1894, the British formalized a colonial system of indirect rule to establish the protectorate of Uganda, a territory ensnaring thirteen kingdoms and politically centering the kingdom of Buganda. Immediately, they invested in a prison system that would transform the separate, autonomous relationships that historically kingdoms had developed for punishment or accountability after social transgressions. Prisons mushroomed alongside the political and economic domination of the newly colonized (and racialized) peoples of Uganda to entrap those who rebel against colonial standards of productivity; the undisciplined are imagined as in need of civilizing. Today, the prison continues imperial aims, suppressing radical, liberatory thought among African people, and serving as a mechanism for the ultimate, upward redistribution of the products of stolen labor.

It is within the kingdom of Buganda that Luzira Womens Prison currently sits and where Stella Nyanzi suffered from a year of punishment, a miscarriage, and the deplorable conditions of maximum security shared by other Africans labeled woman and criminal, whether suspected (49.8 percent) or convicted (50.2 percent). (1) According to Nyanzi, "idle and disorderly suspects approved the rhythm" of her poems: incarcerated women became a new set of peer reviewers for the academic. Political imprisonment reveals the utility of prisons as a space of social, political and physical death. Even the productive African body can be determined unruly and targeted for silencing. In a time when the world questions whether Black lives matter, I argue that we must recognize the prison as a crucial site in which antiBlack coloniality enjoys continuous reanimation. Within a postcolonial nation inhabited almost exclusively by people who are globally racialized as Black, it is at the machinations of cameralism (especially through militaristic policing and the utilization of imprisonment) where we must look--and then destroy--in order to make manifest the mantra. Black lives (do, can, must, will) matter.

In this article, I will use Nyanzi's poetry to analyze three generalizable detriments to Black safety globally. The first remains the perversity of criminalization, specifically in the utilization of criminal law to forcefully transform the poor or the political dissenter into productive citizens. Then I turn to sexual corrections, or the surveillance, punishment, and disciplining of the sexed body. Sexual corrections demonstrate the interplay of the corrective violence of regulating sex and gender with the colonial carceral--or the so-called civilizing structure of prisons. Lastly, I uplift evidence of connection-making as a life-affirming practice that produces the possibility of a counter to the death world.

Ultimately, this article asserts that prison relies on dominant, oversimplified notions of sex and gender that create increased challenges to Black safety, particularly those who are sexed differently (intersex, aged, or trans). The solution is not to create individual remedies like housing transpeople in facilities housing the gender with which they identify, or limiting decarceration to the elderly alone. Rather, I argue that we must rid the colonial carceral from global culture, including the institution of gender. We need to situate the prison as the preeminent space of Black death (personal, political, and social) so that we can abolish it. To arrive at this situation, this acknowledgment of the carceral death world, I offer this analysis through a methodology of connection considering historical method and engaged activist praxis (Rodriguez 2019).

Perverse Criminalization

Prison expansion is a feature of neoliberal political economies in which prisons are imagined as catchalls for surpluses. Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2007) explores California's growing prisonization, which she attributes to surpluses in finance capital, population, land, and government. She theorizes that at the juncture of these four surpluses, prisons became a way to consolidate and transform excess into something imagined as productive or useful. While expansion has been explored vis-a-vis neoliberalization in the United States (Gilmore 2007), in Nigeria (Agozino 2005, Saleh-Hanna 2008), in the United Kingdom (Bell 2014, Lamble 2013), and in other parts of the world (Sudbury [Oparah] 2005), there remain very few studies that consider the relationship of prisons to the political economies of any of the postcolonial African nations. This remains the case despite the acknowledgement of a forced neoliberalization (no doubt its own carceral relationship) to the "global north." When we think about the unjust utilization of carceral punishments in Africa, we are discouraged from situating it in a global politic that connects these injustices to the same regime of punishment targeting (disproportionately Black) people in the United States and in other western nations. Instead, we are to isolate and attribute the responsibility for prison-based harms against African people to the extreme poverty and so-called corruption of any particular African national context.

Undoubtedly, however, manyfledgling and weakened nation-states within the African...