Racialized Spatial Violence from Slave Ships to Prisons: Black Placelessness and Fundamental Spaces of Racialized Punishment in Beloved and Beyond

       Transatlantic enslavement, from the slave ship and beyond, was and are predicated on various practices of spatialized violence that targeted and continue to target black bodies and profited, as well as continue to profit, from erasing a black sense of place. From the plantation to modern prisons, black spaces of racialized violence sanctioned black placelessness and constraint. These were and are spaces where enslaved blacks were kept “in place” as a consequence of their legal and cultural placelessness. Toni Morrison's invocation of the transatlantic slave trade frames the narrative of Beloved within the context of spatialized violence - a complex, industrial and capitalistic project that specifically targeted and continues to target black identity. The slave ship moves through time and space, creating a rupture which guides bullets, police surveillance, and the prison-industrial complex. By centering the Middle Passage and the plantation as fundamental spaces of racialized punishment in the novel, Beloved, Toni Morrison pushes her readers to reevaluate what is meant by “the prison.”

       Following the Civil War, groups of prisoners were frequently involuntarily forced to work while imprisoned. Convict labor became a substitute for slave labor. After being incarcerated, much like Paul D in the novel Beloved by Toni Morrison, people were leased as manual workers by the state or prison owner. The mostly neglected experience of Paul D and his forty-four fellow chain gang prisoners demonstrates that nothing about the chain gang was sanitary, clean, or vermin proof. Beloved underscores that the terror modalities of chattel slavery have not only survived the supposed borderline of 1865, but have actually reached their apogee with the “Super-maximum” security prisons and “Security Housing Units” of today’s prison-industrial complex. Through this new approach to Beloved, it is evident that constructions of chattel slavery have resurfaced in modernized forms in the context of a system of mass civil, premature/ “living death” and humyn incapacitation, which entombs more than 2.3 million people and, more than one in eight black men in the United States between the ages of twenty and twenty-nine (Childs 275).

       Toni Morrison's invocation of the transatlantic slave trade frames the narrative of Beloved within the context of spatialized violence - a complex, industrial and capitalistic project that specifically targeted and continues to target black identity. Racialized moments necessary for the formation of identity and subject actively construct and recreate the spaces occupied by singular and collective identities. The historical curse of racism finds a spatial embodiment in various literal and metaphorical prisons throughout the novel: the plantation/ school Sweet Home, the jails in Alfred, Georgia and in Cincinnati, Ohio; and the haunted house, 124 Bluestone Road. In Morrison’s narrative re-creation of the slave ship hold, the author exposes a space whose subjectivity and purpose were determined by its capacity to immobilize, torture, and kill. Toni Morrison in Beloved describes a scene resurrected from the collective unconscious, a murk race memory of the black diaspora:

[D]aylight comes through the cracks and I can see his locked eyes I am not big--- small rats do not wait for us to sleep---someone is thrashing but there is no room to do it in…We are not crouching now---we are standing but my legs are like my dead man’s eyes---…she does not like the circle around her neck---in the beginning the women are away from the men and the men are away from the women… (Morrison 248-250).

The belly of the slave ship is a precursor to more familiar, although less violent, contemporary spaces that might be demarcated as placeless. The slave ship was the first in a long line of spaces that “sixty million and more” occupied (Morrison Epigraph).

       The plantation, the big house, the slave quarters, and the auction block were all spaces where to varying extents, as Katherine McKittrick notes, white hegemonic structures "situate black people and places outside modernity" (McKittrick 949). The plantation is a particularly meaningful geographic prototype that not only housed and normalized racial violence through enforcing “placelessness,” but also naturalized a plantation logic that lead to the empirical decay and death of a complex black sense of place (McKittrick 951).

       The plantation evidences an unequal colonial-racial economy, that while articulated differently across time and place, legalized and normalized black servitude while at the same time sanctioning black placelessness and constraint. Katherine McKittrick in “On plantations, prisons, and a black sense of place” explains black placelessness:

In terms of the willful destruction of a black sense of place, then, a limited conception of race, and a limited conception of the plantation prevails: blackness is recognizably placeless and degraded and therefore justifiably without, which is not only the commonsense outcome of our analytical queries but also evidence of a myopic plantation past (McKittrick 954).  

Black spaces have historically been deemed “worthless.” The construction of Black-occupied spaces as “worthless” results in placelessness for Black subjects or the displacement of the Black subject from the values more generally traceable to belonging and freedom from danger. Belonging and a sense of security are vital ingredients in establishing a sense of place. Black placelessness has been constructed as a consequence of the racial underpinnings of modernity, of which transatlantic slavery, convict labor, and prisons are salient features.

       Transatlantic enslavement, from the slave ship and beyond, was and are predicated on various practices of spatialized violence that targeted and continue to target black bodies and profited, as well as continue to profit, from erasing a black sense of place. Furthermore, the house that Sethe runs away to, 124, and in whose attic rafters she hides is not described as a place of relief or liberation, but a prison in which she is tormented by insects, chills, and heat. These were and are the spaces where enslaved blacks were kept “in place” as a consequence of their legal and cultural placelessness. Furthermore, the racial underpinnings of modernity situate black people and places outside modernity just as black people and places have and continue to serve in many ways as the undeclared laborers of modernity. Therefore, black people and places fully engage in the intellectual narrative of modernity. Some contemporary sites of spatialized violence include international airport terminals and refugee camps, military detention, borders, and prisons. These places all occupy that liminal space betwixt and between conflicting binaries: this space is the borderland, the indefinable, a nonpermanent and shifting zone ruled by both lawless and regulatory forces.

       The slave ships, barracoons,[1] coffles,[2] and slave pens are spatial, ontological, economic and ideological analogues of contemporary punishment that haunted their way into the present via formations of spatial violence such as the chain gang (Childs 274). The experiences of imprisonment of those such as Paul D, Sethe, Beloved, and Sethe’s mother underscore how for Africans and people of African descent, the modern prison did not begin with the Panopticon[3], the Walnut Street Jail[4], or the Auburn System[5], but with the slave ships, barracoons, coffles and slave pens of the Middle Passage. According to Katherine McKittrick in “On plantations, prisons, and a black sense of place,” analyses of racial and spatial rely heavily on describing and re-describing spaces of otherness (McKittrick 954). Katherine McKittrick goes on to claim that people who inhabit and have inhabited spaces of otherness have been and continue to be isolated:

[T]hose who inhabit spaces of otherness, are actually not connected to us…precisely because they are dead and dying, because they live in slums and prisons, and thus are radically outside the conceptual boundaries of emancipation, humanness, and global citizenry and, in most cases, disconnected from the land itself. Thus, the analytical difficulty lies in the ways in which descriptions of … racial violence actually contribute to the ongoing fragmentation of human relationships rather than identifying what is really at stake when place is massacred: our collective replication of, and thus implication in, descriptive statements that profit from racial violence (McKittrick 954).

People who inhabit spaces of otherness lie radically outside the conceptual boundaries of emancipation, humynness, and global citizenry, and in most cases isolated from the land itself. Racial and spatial violence is shackled to narratives and codes that honor a cycle of life, wherein particular communities and the places they inhabit are condemned to death over and over again. Thus, narrative and coded descriptions of racial violence actually contribute to the ongoing fragmentation of humyn relationships rather than identify what is really at stake when place is massacred: our collective replication of, and thus implication in descriptive statements that capitalize on racial violence.

       Throughout Beloved, the transactional connection between carceral spaces established on opposing sides of the 1865 borderline, underscores a mode of radical counterhistorical theorization within Morrison’s text. That Beloved testifies to the living and the dead being piled on top of each other and fastened together by chains in the holds of slave ships, graphically attests to how the slaying of the African enslaved person involved more than the taking of hur/his/their biological life. Current and Black Atlantic mass imprisonment, servitude, and genocide were and are constructed as much through the mass reproduction of living deathas through the creation and formation of biologically lifeless bodies. Here one might consider the radical significance of Sethe’s only monologue in which she explains the untold reason for her ostensibly insane act of infanticide: “How If I hadn’t killed her she would have died and that is something I could not bear” (Morrison 236). Through sacrificing her child, Sethe claims her role as a parent, claiming the autonomy, the freedom she needs to protect her children and give her some dignity. Sethe saves her child from slavery. Sethe attempts to reclaim a sense of moral law and agency through this monstrous act, which exists apart from sensible interest.

       The integration of the category of living death within the techniques of state and corporal killing allows one to note the ways in which today’s current form of mass humyn warehousing-that is, the prison, constitutes a continuation rather than an antithesis to Middle Passage genocide. The incarceration and caging of people has become an alternative to slavery in the present-day practices of punishment in the United States. Joan Dayan in “Legal Slaves and Civil Bodies,” explains that prison has come to sacrifice civil bodies to the civil order: “The prison ha[s] become the materialization, the shape and container, for what ha[s] been the language of civil death” (Dayan 15).  Society has determined that certain bodies are diseased and therefore must be extirpated from civil society; and once removed and put in prison, the convict becomes the visible record of the sacrifice upon which civilization maintains itself. Prison, similar to chain gangs and slavery, has become another kind of receptacle for imperfect creatures whose civil disease justifies containment.

       By centering the Middle Passage and the plantation as fundamental spaces of racialized punishment in the novel, Beloved, Toni Morrison pushes her readers to reevaluate what “the prison” refers to. The echo of slavery cuts across linear history, where the enslaved person is murdered out of the Middle Passage over and over into the past and present. The slave ship moves through time and space, creating a rupture which guides bullets, police surveillance, and the prison-industrial complex. Morrison reveals how the slave ship and the plantation functioned as spatial, racial, and economic models for later templates of coerced labor and humyn warehousing-as the United States’ earliest prison-industrial complex. Toni Morrison describes Paul D getting nearly buried alive, when referring to his experience in the prison cell in Beloved:

By the time they unhitched him from the wagon and he saw nothing but dogs and two shacks in the world of sizzling grass, the roiling blood was shaking him to and fro. But no one could tell. The wrists he held out for the bracelets that evening were steady as were the legs he stood on when chains were attached to the leg irons. But when they shoved him into the box and dropped the cage door down, his hands quit taking instruction. On their own, they traveled. Nothing could stop them or get their attention. They would not hold his penis to urinate or a spoon to scoop lumps of lima beans into his mouth. The miracle of their obedience came with the hammer at dawn (Morrsion 126).

Paul D is forced to work on a chain gang in Alfred, Georgia where the “whitemen” who control his every action, intentionally disassemble any connection the black man has with his humynity. The passage describes the incredible brutality of Paul D’s situation. The experiences of the characters in Beloved symbolize the extent to which, from slavery to neoslavery, surveillance, incarceration and collective punishment have made normal life tantamount to a state of siege, if not all-out war, for those labeled internal aliens or natural-born enemies of the state on the basis of the social construct of race.

       The brutality and vastness of racialized carceral genocide in the United States and its continued formation in and within the present rejects any template of tidy or triumphalist resistance. In her literary exhumation of the American chain gang, Morrison warns global freedom fighters to claim no easy victories. Nevertheless, Morrison’s narrative exhumation of the chain gang box demonstrates how the act of disrupting and undermining master narratives of black criminality and perceptions of liberal progress are a primary zone within which radicality can be marshaled even as state living death numbers continue to increase and collective substantive freedom seems unattainable.

       African Americans live in the most modern country; yet have been and continue to be barred from the center of the inventions, discourses, and the emancipatory effects of modernity. The unique form of black life in the United States has endowed African Americans with a reflexive attitude toward modernity that is both ingenious and anti-modern. Taking this into consideration, a black sense of place can be understood as the process of materially and creatively situating historical and current struggles against practices of domination and the difficult entanglements of racial encounter. Even within a landscape where identity is uprooted, the processes of re-visioning and remembering invokes counter-hegemonic forms of agency. Racism and struggles against racism are not the sole defining features of a black sense of place, but rather point to how the relational brutalities of modernity produce a condition of being black in the Americas that is founded on struggle.

       The circular time-space structure of Beloved represents a narrative unburial of the undead vestiges of the United States’ prison/ slavery past. If the reader listens carefully to the wailing of the womyn surrounding 124, he/shi/they can still hear the sounds of living death coming from the Georgia chain gang and the cries from the slave/prison ships of the Atlantic crossing, not only as they echo through Beloved, but also as they continue to be sounded from spaces such as Leavenworth, Polunsky, United States Penitentiary Tucson by the 2.3 million and more of the U.S. prison state (Childs 294). Such a reading of US imprisonment as an indeterminate Middle Passage calls upon everyone to follow the model of community protection exhibited by the womyn who surrounded 124-that people continue to cry loudly for the abolishment of prison slavery and racial capitalism.

Works Cited

Childs, Dennis. "Project MUSE - "You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet": Beloved, the American Chain       Gang, and the Middle Passage Remix." Project MUSE - "You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet":         Beloved, the American Chain Gang, and the Middle Passage Remix. The American             Studies Association, 2009. Web. 30 Sept. 2016.

Dayan, Joan. "Project MUSE - Legal Slaves and Civil Bodies." Project MUSE - Legal Slaves         and Civil Bodies. Project MUSE, 2001. Web. 30 Sept. 2016.      <https://muse.jhu.edu/article/23910>.

McKittrick, Katherine. "On Plantations, Prisons, and a Black Sense of Place."Social & Cultural     Geography 12.8 (2011): 947-60. WordPress. Web. 30 Sept. 2016.    <https://leohenderson32.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/contentserver.pdf>.

Morrison, Toni.