Reshaping Beloved Community

The Experiences of Black Male Felons and Their Impact on Black Radical Traditions

Marlon A. Smith

Reshaping Beloved Community: The Experiences of Black Male Felons and Their Impact on Black Radical Traditions offers a reflexive interrogation on the history of black male incarceration in the United States starting in the nineteenth century to both illustrate the complex ways black male felons have been discursively constructed and the various techniques utilized in the United States to erase the contributions of black male felons and their black radical projects. This erasure has left many black men without the benefit of fellowship and community.

Therefore, Reshaping Beloved Community focuses on particular black male felons and their cultural production to highlight experiences of blackness that is often marginalized or ignored. In order to characterize these experiences and contributions of black male felons, Reshaping Beloved Community expands Victor Anderson’s definition of creative exchange by offering contemplative conversations of black male felons in history and the cultural works they produced. It draws on an interdisciplinary approach to reveal how some black male felons have used prison and the experience of incarceration to craft narratives and liberation movements.

The philosophical approach within Reshaping Beloved Community deploys constructive and innovative concepts, particularly of the grotesque, to interpret how black male felons have resisted American political and cultural restraints on their humanity. Anderson’s concepts of creative exchange help create a framework that enables readers to see how the cultural production of black male felons reveals the unique experiences and worldview of black men trapped in various forms of penal captivity. These experiences speak to a deeper reality that is largely hidden because of the ways incarceration and penal captivity diminishes certain people in society. Yet a reengagement with those movements helps to link black male felons to the whole of black life and culture.

In the end, Reshaping Beloved Community allows black radical scholars to gain deeper insight into the roles black male felons have played in critiquing American politics and culture. Moreover, it shows that the cultural productions of black male felons are just as important to understanding black life in American society as slave narratives, blues music, and the like.

Lexington Books

Pages: 220 • Trim: 6⅜ x 9

978-1-4985-6933-0 • Hardback • October 2018 • $117.00 • (£90.00)

978-1-4985-6935-4 • Paperback • August 2020 • $47.99 • (£37.00)

978-1-4985-6934-7 • eBook • October 2018 • $45.50 • (£35.00)

Series: The Africana Experience and Critical Leadership Studies

Subjects: Political Science / History & Theory, Political Science / General, Social Science / Discrimination & Race Relations, Social Science / World / Africa

Reshaping Beloved Community

The Experiences of Black Male Felons and Their Impact on Black Radical Traditions

Hardback

Paperback

eBook

Summary

Reshaping Beloved Community: The Experiences of Black Male Felons and Their Impact on Black Radical Traditions offers a reflexive interrogation on the history of black male incarceration in the United States starting in the nineteenth century to both illustrate the complex ways black male felons have been discursively constructed and the various techniques utilized in the United States to erase the contributions of black male felons and their black radical projects. This erasure has left many black men without the benefit of fellowship and community.

Therefore, Reshaping Beloved Community focuses on particular black male felons and their cultural production to highlight experiences of blackness that is often marginalized or ignored. In order to characterize these experiences and contributions of black male felons, Reshaping Beloved Community expands Victor Anderson’s definition of creative exchange by offering contemplative conversations of black male felons in history and the cultural works they produced. It draws on an interdisciplinary approach to reveal how some black male felons have used prison and the experience of incarceration to craft narratives and liberation movements.

The philosophical approach within Reshaping Beloved Community deploys constructive and innovative concepts, particularly of the grotesque, to interpret how black male felons have resisted American political and cultural restraints on their humanity. Anderson’s concepts of creative exchange help create a framework that enables readers to see how the cultural production of black male felons reveals the unique experiences and worldview of black men trapped in various forms of penal captivity. These experiences speak to a deeper reality that is largely hidden because of the ways incarceration and penal captivity diminishes certain people in society. Yet a reengagement with those movements helps to link black male felons to the whole of black life and culture.

In the end, Reshaping Beloved Community allows black radical scholars to gain deeper insight into the roles black male felons have played in critiquing American politics and culture. Moreover, it shows that the cultural productions of black male felons are just as important to understanding black life in American society as slave narratives, blues music, and the like.

Details

Lexington Books

Pages: 220 • Trim: 6⅜ x 9

978-1-4985-6933-0 • Hardback • October 2018 • $117.00 • (£90.00)

978-1-4985-6935-4 • Paperback • August 2020 • $47.99 • (£37.00)

978-1-4985-6934-7 • eBook • October 2018 • $45.50 • (£35.00)

Series: The Africana Experience and Critical Leadership Studies

Subjects: Political Science / History & Theory, Political Science / General, Social Science / Discrimination & Race Relations, Social Science / World / Africa

Author

Marlon A. Smith is lecturer at the University of Houston.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1

Slave and Free: The Mapping of Race, Religion, and Punishment in the New World

Chapter 2

The Construction of Nineteenth Century Black Prison Radicals: An Address to Non-Reflexive Interpretations

Chapter 3

A Challenge to Black Heroic Images: Huddie Ledbetter and the Politics of a Black Male Felon

Chapter 4

20th Century Black Radical Prison Intellectuals: Malcolm X, George Jackson, and the Expansion of Nineteenth Century Black Prison Praxis

Chapter 5

Prison Prophets: Twenty First Century Black Male Felons on Race, Religion and Mass Incarceration

Chapter 6

Expanding the Beloved Community: Black Church, Black Felons and Mass Incarceration

Conclusion

Where Do We Go From Here: Gender, Education and Sexuality

Bibliography

About the Author

Reviews

Marlon Smith provides a necessary critique of the black felon experience in a carceral state where slavery remains constitutionally mandated within the structure of the 13^th Amendment. This brilliant collection of experienced thought serves as a necessary evolution from Alexander’s New Jim Crow to a development of the deconstruction of those ritualistic sacrifices at the altar of justice.
— Howard Henderson, Professor and Director of the Center for Justice Research, Texas Southern University

Marlon Smith has written a fine book which expands the ways in which we think about the black radical intellectual tradition. It needs to be read by all those who struggle for justice today.
— Anthony Bogues, Brown University