Steven Zultanski Reviews Jackie Wang's Carceral Capitalism

"The Poet and the Jailer: Cracking the US Prison System" takes a good look at poet and essayist Jackie Wang's hotly anticipated Carceral Capitalism (Semiotext(e), this month). The book "confronts mass incarceration in the US by delving into the processes that feed into and maintain the prison system: anti-black racism, predatory lending, algorithmic policing, privatized prisons, credit scams, data analytics and histories of exclusion." More, from Steven Zultanski:

The invisibility of violence allows white Americans to imagine themselves as innocent, and to understand crime and punishment as matters of individual morality. Wang stages this insight from a variety of formally incongruous angles, from rigorous explanations of financial processes to freewheeling experiments: there’s a chapter recounting the story of her brother’s incarceration, a script for a performance about Robocop, and a chapter that collages quotes from radicals and abolitionists. And the book ends with a poem.

After recapping a book about expropriation and death, it might seem crass to discuss aesthetics, but the book’s form is part of its argument – it’s not possible to see systemic violence from an objective position, one has to examine it through a series of partial views. Some of those views are factual and historical, some are abstract and theoretical, and others are opaque and experimental. But perhaps most importantly, the formal variation is a rejection of paranoia: Wang elucidates a system, but she’s also affirmative of writing, dreaming, and possibility, which are cracks in that system. In the final chapter, she quotes the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish on the prisoner’s freedom to dream and the guard’s reduction to ‘pointless eavesdropping’. Wang responds: ‘The profession of the poet is dreaming. The profession of the jailer is to contain. The poet is the one who makes the light. The guard is the one who takes it.’

The full review is at Frieze.