10: Abolition and the Colonial Carceral Archipelago

Publication Date:
19 Mar 2025
Pages:
181–199
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.51952/9781529224061.ch010
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The prison abolition movements have reinvigorated debate on the left about the function of carceral estates in maintaining class and racial differences under late capitalism. In this chapter we argue that, viewed through a critical colonial lens, abolitionism is only meaningful if it engages with decolonizing, as well as abolitionist currents and impulses in the Global South. For Indigenous peoples, the carceral gulag has always been a ‘place of exception’ where penal and non-penal sites meshed together in the pursuit of colonial, rather than disciplinary, objectives. We maintain that prison in the contemporary colony should be viewed as part of an archipelago of camps existing to extinguish Indigenous sovereignty. We employ Agamben’s particular turn on the ‘camp’ – ‘the space that is opened up when the state of exception begins to become the rule’ (Agamben, 1998) to explore the ways in which its logic underpins settler colonial interventions across time and space to create dispossessed rather than simply ‘docile’ subjects in the Foucauldian sense.

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