« Relating differently: Angela Sparks, ‘Kinship ecology and the bildungsroman: the child–animal relationship in Louise Erdrich’s The Birchbark House series’, Textual Practices, 2022
Settler education for settlement: Vanessa Fernandez Greene, ‘Mercer’s Belles and Sarmiento’s Teachers: Female Pedagogues within Two Transcontinental Emigration Projects of the Nineteenth Century’, History of Education Quarterly, 2022 »

Repressing similarly: Stian Rice, ‘Divide and cultivate: The role of prisons and Indian reservations in U.S. agricultural imperialism’, Food and Foodways, 2022

07Feb22

Abstract: This article examines the spatial history of U.S. food production through the evolution of two carceral spaces: rural penitentiaries and Indian reservations. These sites have long provided opportunities to spatially fix surplus labor and capital in U.S. agriculture: from the confinement of Indians during settler colonialism, through the regulation of labor surpluses after Reconstruction, to the present-day expansion of convict leasing to backfill migrant labor shortages. This article challenges traditional framings of prisons and reservations as peripheries excluded from core landscapes of food production and consumption. Instead, these “carceral fixes” participate in specially mediated relationships with “free” agriculture—relationships that respond to the crisis-driven demands of capital and currents of racism and nativism. Within the U.S. food system, this flexibility has made prisons and reservations indispensable for spatially fixing not only capital and labor, but racial violence. Through these relationships, the indirect violence of falling farm prices is translated into the direct violence of physical and mental abuse, exploitation, alienation, diabetes, and malnutrition. Critically, this state-mediated violence is redirected from white to nonwhite bodies.


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