Carceral Landscape and Extreme Bodily Resistance: Case Studies in Self-Destruction in Global Prisons and Migrant Detention

This paper analyzes suicides, self-immolations, and hunger strikes in global spaces of incarceration - prisons, migrant detention, and mental hospitals. It uses a visual and spatial analysis to argue these kinds of actions make their practitioners (and arguably all incarcerated peoples) more distinct against a physical and political carceral landscape that attempts to absorb them. Drawing from work on geography and landscape, it investigates by what legal, visual, and physical methods carceral systems globally obfuscate their own mechanisms and logic - locating prisons and detention centers in remote areas or islands, incomprehensible and inaccessible databases and law, and market-driven capitalist logistics that shuffle people around according to the needs of detention corporations or political whim. As transnational capital and political expediency more frequently determine the visual and cultural landscape of global detention, prisoners and detained migrants increasingly resort to drastic bodily self-destruction. It argues these kinds of actions work directly against this obfuscation, even while they sacrifice that which they make more visible.