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Prison Agriculture Lab directors Carrie Chennault and Josh Sbicca discuss the ubiquity of carceral agriculture in the United States, its structuring logics of racial capitalism, and possibilities for abolitionist food futures.
The post Mapping the Unfree Labor of Prison Agriculture: A Conversation with Carrie Chennault and Josh Sbicca appeared first on Edge Effects.
In a provocative essay, scholar and author Sophie Lewis, best known for her 2022 book in support of “family abolition,” makes the case for how society can not only protect trans children, but also learn from them. This is a call for a more expansive, generous, utopian way of thinking about the potential of youth:
The fear I inspired on the parent’s face riding the subway was what distressed me most about the incident in New York. Later that day, when I recounted the anecdote on Facebook, an acquaintance commented – unfunnily, I felt – that I was a “social menace”. A threat to our children, et cetera. Ha, ha. But what was the truth of the joke? What had I threatened exactly? A decade after the event, “The Traffic in Children,” an essay published in Parapraxis magazine in November 2022, provides an answer. According to its author, Max Fox, the “primal scene” of the current political panic about transness is:
a hypothetical question from a hypothetical child, brought about by the image of gender nonconformity: a child asks about a person’s gender, rather than reading it as a natural or obvious fact.
In other words, by asking “are you a girl or a boy?” (in my case non-hypothetically), the child reveals their ability to read, question and interpret — rather than simply register factually — the symbolisation of sexual difference in this world. This denaturalises the “automatic” gender matrix that transphobes ultimately need to believe children inhabit. It introduces the discomfiting reality that young people don’t just learn gender but help make it, along with the rest of us; that they possess gender identities of their own, and sexualities to boot. It invites people who struggle to digest these realities to cast about and blame deviant adults: talkative non-binary people on trains, for instance, or drag queens taking over “story hour” in municipal libraries.
Our favorites this week included the truth behind the term “burnout,” an incisive analysis of rap scapegoating, flowers for an aging icon, the beauty of noticing hidden wildlife, and an engaging look at history’s forgotten children. We hope you enjoy them as much as we did.
Bench Ansfield | Jewish Currents | January 3, 2023 | 3,358 words
I might have recommended this essay based on the excellent headline alone, but in fact the substance is the star of the show. Like many millennials, I have adopted the term “burnout” into my vocabulary as a way of describing the feeling of working too hard, juggling too much, and feeling depleted by the grinding expectations of late-stage capitalism. After reading this piece, I’ll be endeavoring to use the word differently. As historian Bench Ansfield shows, the true origins of burnout as a concept have been obscured over time. Burnout isn’t a reference to a candle burning at both ends until there’s nothing left, but to the shells of buildings left by a wave of arson that ravaged Black and brown neighborhoods in New York City in the ’70s. Much of the damage was caused by landlords looking for insurance payouts. “If we excavate burnout’s infrastructural unconscious — its origins in the material conditions of conflagration — we might discover a term with an unlikely potential for subversive meaning,” Ansfield writes. “An artifact of an incendiary history, burnout can vividly name the disposability of targeted populations under racial capitalism — a dynamic that, over time, has ensnared ever-wider swaths of the workforce.” If this were the premise of a college class, I’d sign up in a heartbeat. —SD
Justin A. Davis | Scalawag | February 9, 2023 | 4,089 words
Put aside the chewy headline for a moment. Also put away whatever you know or don’t know about Young Thug, one of Atlanta’s most influential rap luminaries for a decade, and the epicenter of a sprawling and questionable criminal investigation into his YSL crew. What you’ll find is a shrewd, fascinating analysis that combines a music obsessive’s encyclopedic genre knowledge and a Southerner’s geographical intimacy, refracted through a lens of accessible (a crucial modifier!) political theory. It ably unpacks the hydra-headed beast of gentrification and economics and policing, as faced by the young Black man who’s currently the Fulton County DA’s public enemy number one. “As working-class and poor Black Atlantans fight against displacement and fall back on everyday survival tactics,” Justin A. Davis writes, “they’re joining a decades-long struggle over who exactly the city’s for. So is YSL.” This sort of piece is exceedingly rare, not because of its form but because it demands an outlet that understands and nurtures its particular Venn diagram. Credit to Scalawag, and of course to Davis, for creating something this urgent. Required reading — not just for Thugga fans or Atlantans, but for anyone seeking to understand the world outside their own. —PR
Wright Thompson | ESPN | February 8, 2022 | 12,111 words
“No. 16 is no longer what it once was. Joe Montana now must be something else.” I haven’t kept up with American football in at least 20 years, but that didn’t stop me from devouring Wright Thompson’s astonishing profile of former 49er quarterback Joe Montana. I grew up watching the Niners (Ronnie Lott 4eva) and have fond memories of attending games at Candlestick as a child. But you certainly don’t need to be a Niner fan, a football fan, or even be into sports at all to appreciate this beautifully written and revealing piece. Thompson paints a portrait of a complicated man and an aging athlete — one of the greatest of all time — and what it’s like to watch someone else take over that throne. —CLR
Lucy Jones | Emergence Magazine | February 2, 2023 | 5,179 words
The forest path near us is a never-ending source of delight. I love being the first to see animal tracks in the snow. I look forward to the first yellow lady slippers that appear as if by magic near the marshy section, not to mention all the leaves and flowers as they sprout, and the myriad fungi that cling to the trees. Lucy Jones shares this wonder in nature (at slime molds in particular!) in Emergence Magazine. There she finds equal parts beauty, mystery, and wonder — a coveted yet all-too-elusive feeling nowadays — as she scans the forest for varieties that she’s just now starting to notice. “My eyes were starting to learn slime mold,” she writes. “My ways of seeing were altering, thanks to my new friends who were showing me what to look for. What was once invisible was quickly becoming apparent. It challenged my sense of perception. How little and how limited was my vision! How vast was the unknown world.”—KS
April Nowell | Aeon | February 13, 2023 | 4,400 words
April Nowell opens this piece with a delightful story about a Palaeolithic family taking their kids and dogs to a cave to do some mud painting, which feels like the modern-day equivalent of exhausted parents taking their offspring to McDonald’s and handing them a coloring book. I was instantly entranced. Such stories are rare, partly because evidence of children (with their small, fragile bones) is tricky for archaeologists to locate, but also because of assumptions that children were insignificant to the narrative. Nowell explains how, with the help of new archaeological approaches, this is changing, and the children of the Ice Age are getting a voice. I am ready to listen, so bring on these tales of family excursions and novices struggling to learn the craft of tool sculpting (as Nowell explains, “each unskilled hit would leave material traces of their futile and increasingly frustrated attempts at flake removal”). A Palaeolithic archaeologist and professor of anthropology, Nowell is an expert in this topic, but her vivid writing and human-based approach makes her fascinating field accessible to all. —CW
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It’s devilishly difficult to pick apart the tangled knot of policing, gentrification, and economics that besieged so many Black communities — but Justin A. Davis does so with agility and insight in this analysis of the deeply flawed criminal investigation against rapper Young Thug unfolding in Georgia.
In a city that’s been shaped by redlining, white flight, and crisscrossing transportation lines, Atlanta’s Black neighborhoods form a complex network of cultural transmission. This cultural network has led to the huge aesthetic diversity that’s defined Atlanta hip-hop, especially in the past decade. And it’s a huge contrast to the way these same neighborhoods are often politically isolated: deprived of city funding, resources, and infrastructure. Beneath these two trends—cultural diffusion and political isolation—there’s YSL’s Atlanta, a place built by the Black working class and urban poor in the shadow of state abandonment. This is a place built on the sensibilities of contemporary trap, where the everyday war stories of Bush-era Jeezy and T.I. have mixed with more than a decade’s worth of experiments in production and vocal style.
The Crafts, a married couple in Macon, Georgia, fled bondage in plain sight: she disguised as a white man, he as her slave. In a riveting excerpt from her new book, Master Slave Husband Wife, Ilyon Woo documents their flight:
As dawn began to break, the station filled with travelers bound for Savannah. Ensconced quietly in the only car where a Black man was supposed to sit, William carried the cottage key and a pass. And he, or perhaps Ellen, carried a pistol. On this morning, William had to hope that they would not need to use it. He himself had resolved to kill or be killed, rather than be captured.
Traffic at the station thinned as travelers crowded about the train, ready to board. They said their goodbyes. For enslaved riders, this may have been the last time they would see the faces of loved ones, if their loved ones even had permission to see them off.
With the engine fed and the water tank full, the conductor made his final calls. William dared to peek outside. Linked to him, he knew, if only by way of rickety clasps between the cars, was Ellen, who by this time should have been seated in first class. It would be difficult for William to see her before the train stopped. But briefly, William could glimpse the ticket booth, where Ellen, as his master, would have purchased two tickets.
Instead of his wife, he saw another familiar figure hurrying up to the ticket window. His heart dropped. The man interrogated the ticket seller, then pushed his way through the crowd on the platform, with purpose. It was William’s employer — not his legal enslaver, but another white man who “rented” William’s labor in a cabinet shop. This man, who had known William since childhood, scanned the throng as he approached the cars.
The cabinetmaker was coming for him.
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