Supermaxes are technologically advanced prisons designed to keep individuals in long-term solitary confinement, structurally eliminating all physical, human contact for months, years, and sometimes decades at a time. Supermax designers and prison administrators explain that supermax prisons contain “the worst of the worst prisoners”—those too violent and dangerous to live in a general prison population. This article explores and challenges the legally and publicly accepted idea that supermaxes control violence. Drawing on interviews with and the writings of former supermax prisoners, I document the often-invisible ways supermax prisoners experience violence. I argue supermaxes should be viewed not just as tools of violence control, but as tools of violence production. Supermaxes are a novel and uniquely modern form of state violence, and their legal and ethical implications should be reconsidered.

The various attempts to find the definitive political thought of Malcolm X, after his break with the Nation of Islam, have resulted in clashing interpretations. Malcolm X’s speeches, writings, and other public forums are the root cause of the tensions. Malcolm X’s thinking is most rich and informative if its ambiguities are accepted as such and each side of a particular tension is explored. Each pole of the four tensions identified here is highly relevant for present American racial dilemmas and racial progress.

This essay attends to the specificity of indigenous peoples’ political critique of state power and territorialized sovereignty in the North American context as an indispensible resource for realizing the decolonizing potential latent within the field of critical prison studies. I argue that although the incarceration of indigenous peoples is closely related to the experience of other racialized populations with regard to its causes, it is importantly distinct with respect to the normative foundation of its critique. Indigenous sovereignty calls forth an alternative normativity that challenges the very existence of the carceral system, let alone its racialized organization and operation.

The many ways in which we interact with food, e.g., eating, cooking, purchasing, farming, legislating, etc., are intersected by ethics and politics. The terms of our interactions with food are dictated in a significant way by how we understand its metaphysical underpinnings; that is to say, by how we define “food.” When food is understood as nothing more than it becomes easier to dismiss our political and ethical obligations since, after all, food is only a thing. This obscures the others who make our interactions with food possible, and who are affected by our choices and those of our communities. In order to revitalize our engagement with the ethical and political responsibilities that we both inherit and produce in our interactions with food, it is helpful to refocus our understanding of what food actually is. I propose that food is better understood as a transformative . Building on metaphysical theories by Aristotle and Emmanuel Levinas, I explain this new understanding of food, and use examples to show how this view of food enhances our political and ethical responsibilities.

Sex offender registries have given way to residency restrictions for people convicted of sex crimes in many communities in the US. Research suggests, however, that such restrictions can actually undermine the safety of the communities they are ostensibly meant to protect. Drawing on the work of Judith Butler, this essay explores why such restrictions, and strategies like them, fail and are bound to fail. Then, it considers the work of generationFIVE, an organization that seeks to eliminate child sexual abuse in five generations, to explore modes of response to sexual abuse and assault that build community safety.

In this article I make three inter-related arguments. First, I argue that contemporary critical political theory should re-assert the city as a privileged site of political action. Second, I suggest that in the process of such a re-assertion, the dominant “open” conception of the city, characteristic of much critical urban studies, should be reworked in order to be properly “political”; that is, framed within an agonistic, Left-Schmittian model of politics. Finally, I claim that one way to “politicize” the city in this manner is to think of it as a site of “common property” (as expressed in the work of Nicholas Blomley).

Derrick Darby’s book Rights, Race, and Recognition defends the seemingly startling thesis that all rights, moral as well as legal, are dependent upon social recognition. So there are no “natural” rights independent of social practices, and subordinated groups in oppressive societies (such as blacks under white supremacy) do not have rights. Darby appeals to intersubjectivist constructivism to make his meta-ethical case, but in this critique, I argue that he conflates, or at least fails to consistently distinguish, two radically different varieties of constructivism: idealized intersubjectivist constructivism, which is objectivist, and non-idealized conventionalist constructivism, which is relativist. In neither case, then, can Darby establish the shocking thesis that white supremacy objectively takes away blacks’ moral standing.

Using the work of Richard Wright and personal interviews to portray racial interactions in the Jim Crow South, I illustrate how law enforcement used racial and sexual assaults to maintain black subordination. Jim Crow racism constituted a caste system in which one’s race was determined, not primarily by how one looked, but by one’s ancestry. I review and reject Oliver Cox’s thesis that caste did not exist in the Jim Crow South, and cite continuing examples of physical and sexual assaults against individuals based on racial, gender, and caste differences.

The stage is often a space where artists engage in experiments with identity politics. Plays like Welcome to Thebes appear to present global human engagement and a cultural exchange of ideas. However, using European narrative structures as a playground to explore Africana political issues highlights the limitations to cross-cultural exchange between aesthetic paradigms. This essay first articulates a conflict between European and Africana aesthetics and then offers an analysis of gender dynamics operating in the play Welcome to Thebes, arguing that performative conditions not only constrain racialized realities, but also limit the possibility of cross-cultural performances of history.

Robert F. Williams, despite being a central historical figure and noted theorist of the Black radical tradition, is ignored as a subject of philosophical relevance and political theory. His challenges to the racist segregationist regime of the South influenced generations of thinkers and revolutionaries. However he is erased from the annals of thought for his use of armed resistance. This paper aims to introduce his life and work to philosophy as material for study and situate his program of pre-emptive self-defense within the Black radical tradition.

This essay situates the narrative of two Black women—one from the Black Consciousness Movement of Azania, one from the Black Panther Party—as central to the process of decolonizing philosophy and decolonizing gender. It offers a Black Consciousness critique of gender and philosophy, which both form the prelude to the narratives. Psychoanalysis, as the hermeneutics of the subject, is central to the process of interpretation and thus the interrogation of racism and colonialism. This essay shifts the paradigm of thinking by situating narrative and narration as central to the process of Black existentialism—spoken word, dialogue, exchanges, cross continental activism and scholarship—all within the same breath: the breath of the page where a simultaneous reading permits the deconstruction of the spoken word of the subject, and the deconstruction of writing.

Drawing on contexts of critical theory offered by Simone de Beauvoir, Herbert Marcuse, and Angela Davis, this article argues that Alain Locke’s theory of valuation should be of interest to theorists who apprehend struggle as a process of desire. Locke’s value theory with its classification of “form-feelings” may be used to develop appreciation for value’s genealogical dependence on desire. This has consequences for theorizing the challenges faced by liberation from oppressive structures. A case study is provided from popular film.

Much of Africana philosophy concerns itself with the social and political; that is, those issues that relate to “racism” or “racialization” as suffered by Africana persons. Within this understanding, Africana persons become defined by and studied through theories which presume a shared anthropology with their white counterparts. This essay argues that Africana philosophy would benefit in thinking beyond “race” and “racialization” towards a theorization of the cultural aspects of Africana persons as the basis of our study and understanding of Africana persons. Specifically, this essay theorizes the relationship between mytho-logos and the culturalogic as offering a new lens through which to analyze the range problems confronting Africana philosophy.

The Prison and Theory Working Group (PTWG) was founded in 2014 by a group of scholars and activists committed to prison abolition. Members of PTWG wrote "10 Key Points" collaboratively during in-person and virtual meetings over several months in 2014 and 2015. This collectively authored work is the first document that the group has produced. PTWG continues to work toward prison abolition, holds open events and workshops, and maintains a bibliography of work by currently and formerly incarcerated writers, which can be found at http://ptwg.org/.

This essay argues that the radical subjectivity of nullity defined as the part-of-no-part by Rancière and as universal-singular agency by Žižek, cannot be embodied in a group or a class, but exclusively through autonomous individuality. All group identities are essentially pragmatically-particularist, i.e., constructed through a consensual counterfeiting of public rationality whose purpose is to maintain hierarchical inequality by defining common interest as the pragmatically-interested distribution of ranks and benefits. The core irrationality of this consensual pragmatism is revealed through its constitutional enmity towards the unavoidable contentiousness of rational dialogue and its suppression of the infinity of rational curiosity. The relentlessness of rational inquiry, given that it questions paternal authority in the given context, is a deed of Desire. Yet, as Kafka’s The Castle shows, the widespread acquiescence to consensual hierarchy deploys the perfidious tool of silent ostracism to disable the autonomous individual from publicly implementing his/her inquiring Desire.