About | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline
LOG IN
LOG IN

25 Theoretical Criminology 3 (2021)

handle is hein.journals/thcr25 and id is 1 raw text is: Article Theoretical Criminology 2021, Vol. 25(1) 3-22 Intrusions of violence: © The Author(s) 2019 Article reuse guidelines: Afro-pessim ism and reading sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1 177/1362480619846132 social death beyond solitary journals-sagepub.com/home/tcr confinement OSAGE Ernest K Chavez University of California, USA Abstract Any serious engagement with the theory of social death must contend with Afro-pessimism. Socio-Legal Studies advances social death as an un-raced and universalizable phenomenon. Lisa Guenther's Solitary Confinement, is exemplary of this kind of work. In order to construct a phenomenology of race, Guenther attempts to analogize a theory of slavery (social death) with a theory of phenomenology and solitary confinement. Furthermore, Guenther takes up a humanistic reading of Frantz Fanon's work, as if Fanon was affirming the possibility of a new humanism that could restore social life against social death in the post-colonial wake. This essay is an attempt to provide an Afro-pessimist reading of social death; one that engages anti-blackness as a fundamental condition of civil society and provides a close reading of Fanon's psychopolitics of racial violence. Keywords Afro-pessimism, anti-blackness, social death, solitary confinement, Albert Woodfox Recent Socio-Legal scholarship has produced a surge of literature suggesting that social death-a theory of slavery introduced by Orlando Patterson's (1982) text Slavery and Social Death-can be extended by way of analogy to various modes of subjugation under the carceral state: the unraced prisoner placed into solitary confinement (Guenther, 2013); families forcibly separated under the authority of state institutions (Price, 2015); and the disintegrating subject whose position of legal exclusion is exemplified through Corresponding author: Ernest K Chavez, University of California, Irvine, CA, 92697, USA. Email: ekchavez@uci.edu

What Is HeinOnline?

HeinOnline is a subscription-based resource containing thousands of academic and legal journals from inception; complete coverage of government documents such as U.S. Statutes at Large, U.S. Code, Federal Register, Code of Federal Regulations, U.S. Reports, and much more. Documents are image-based, fully searchable PDFs with the authority of print combined with the accessibility of a user-friendly and powerful database. For more information, request a quote or trial for your organization below.



Short-term subscription options include 24 hours, 48 hours, or 1 week to HeinOnline.

Purchase Access

Contact us for annual subscription options:

Contact Us

Already a HeinOnline Subscriber?

Log In

profiles profiles most