Undomesticated U.S. Prison Regime: White Supremacist Carcerality as Module of Globality
Prof. Rodriguez’s talk is based on his book on imprisoned intellectuals and their writings, entitled Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), which has just come out and is getting rave reviews for its insightful and penetrating look into the U.S. prison system and its prevalent racism. In his lecture he will discuss how the encompassing carceral violence has been central to the post-1970s national formation and global dominance of the United States. He argues that the layered, intersectional technologies of imprisonment now form the premises of an antisocial formation that has become fundamental to the very intelligibility of "America" as a mobilization of militarized policing and juridical force. While the prison industrial complex is generally addressed as a problem of the "nation," his discussion argues for a theorization of the U.S. prison regime as a dynamic production of multiple, moving sites of confrontation—sites that are, in fact, becoming profoundly undomesticated even as they remain close by.