IDS 354SEM—Indigenous & Black Carcerality and Abolition

Since its inception, the United States has been concerned with projects of dispossession and containment. Modern policing and its consequent mass incarceration exist as examples of such projects. For Indigenous and Black peoples this has been especially apparent and has had an outsize impact on these communities. This course examines the US as a carceral state and necropolitical apparatus marking particular bodies for death and dismemberment (of bodies, of families, of communities). Through the lens of contemporary and historical accounts of policing, it will trace histories of enslavement and land dispossession across time and space to explore mass incarceration, policing, and other forms of state violence. It will also make the important turn of concentrating on contemporary abolition movements aimed to account for these historical circumstances. In so doing, it will also explore connections between Blackness and Indigeneity, Black and Indigenous peoples, and Black liberation and Indigenous sovereignty movements as a means to imagine how abolition can lead us to futures constructed on alternative structures of justice.