Excerpt: In the opening of “Conquest and Incarceration,” the brief introduction to City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771–1965, Kelly Lytle Hernández begins with the statement: “Mass incarceration is mass elimination” (1). Signaling Patrick Wolfe’s influential theory, which argues that settler societies are the structures built on the logic of Native elimination, the author invites reflection on what might be gained by bringing together, and potentially expanding the parameters of, both carceral studies and settler colonial studies.
