AHA Session 46
Conference on Latin American History 10
Conference on Latin American History 10
Thursday, January 7, 2027: 3:30 PM-5:00 PM
Studio 9 (New Orleans Marriott, 2nd Floor)
Chair:
John Bardes, Louisiana State University
Papers:
Session Abstract
In the long nineteenth century, nation-states worldwide established new carceral logics based on modern ideals of punishment and rehabilitation. Bodily harm and public spectacles of violence as punishment were to be replaced with a rationalized, rehabilitative, and ostensibly more humane institution: the modern penitentiary. Based on forced labor, silence, isolation, and piety, this new carceral logic ought to reform former criminals into law-abiding and industrious individuals. In the Americas, however, this paradigm worked alongside, and often for, each of its nations’ prominent slave systems. The protracted transition out of slavery in countries and territories such as Brazil, Puerto Rico, and the United States led to new strategies of labor coercion based on the threat of imprisonment, which targeted most often racialized and (un)free populations. The introduction of immigrant labor in the Americas further strengthened the role of criminalization and incarceration as tools of labor discipline and social ordering. How could modern ideas of incarceration subsist in societies where liberal notions of freedom were systematically denied to most of their inhabitants? This panel draws connections between the crisis of slavery as a legal regime and the emergence of the Americas’ modern incarceration systems, with attention to the multiple informal and extralegal devices that adapted modern crime and punishment paradigms to hemispherical and local hierarchies of status, race, and nationality. By bringing this context to bear on prisoners’ dialectical relationship with criminal systems in transformation, we investigate the practical consequences of carceral experiences for social organization, identity formation, and visions of freedom among enslaved and free, as well as national and foreign subjects.
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