'They imprison the whole population': U.S. and South African prison literature and the emergence of symbiotic carcerality, 1900--present

This dissertation is motivated by the following question: what spatial formation structures the living spaces poor Black people reside in and what effect does it have on their subjectivity? "They imprison the whole population" is a transnational comparative study of the "prisonization" of poor Black communities in the United States and South Africa from the dawn of the twentieth century to present. It seeks to understand the ways prisons affect society beyond focusing on rising incarceration rates. I argue that poor Blacks live under what I call symbiotic carcerality: prison techniques and spatial forms deployed across Black living space. I focus on how people are shaped by the carceral environment in which they live. To illustrate its impact, I examine how gender performance, physical health, body shape, aesthetics, diet, housing, mobility, and citizenship are formed and circumscribed by the symbiont circle between carceral space and the living space of poor Blacks.;I write at the convergence of what Black prison intellectual Assata Shakur called the "minimum security prison on the streets", Michel Foucault's notion of the "carceral", and what human geographers McKittrick and Wood's term "Black geographies". Academic work in Black masculine studies (gender studies), critical prison studies, Marxism, Black cultural studies, and comparative studies of race and ethnicity has contributed much to my theoretical framework, and to the mix of humanities and social science methods I use. My research has uncovered a powerful yet submerged tradition in Black American and Black South African literature that meditates on the ubiquity of prison punishment in the lives of "free" people. Its primary source is the writings of Black prisoners. Through stories, memoirs, poetry, social commentary, and letters, they articulate the entrenchment of carceral punishment in poor Black communities. Black literary artists, activists, and scholars also contribute to theorizing carceral space. To this end, "they imprison the whole population" highlights and recuperates the work of prisoners, activists, scholars, and artists who have theorized carceral space.