Contemporary Conversation: Carceral Continuum

Join us for a Contemporary Conversation with Nadine El-Enany and Nicholas Shapiro addressing the afterlives of slavery in the carceral continuum.

What are the historical crossovers between mass incarceration systems, economic precariousness and racial vulnerability? A global pattern of environmental racism adds to the forces of production that make black and indigenous subjects intrinsic to the capitalist creation of value and financial speculation. The violence of capitalist accummulation is often incremental and concealed from public view, embodied in the figures of the slave, the migrant worker, the household worker, and the chronically unemployed. This same violence is perpetuated by the multiplication of prison complexes by residual toxic centres or immigration detention centres nearby carbon-heavy aviation centres. From the aesthetic problem of making legible deep historical injustices, can prison abolitionism and environmental vulnerability be brought together for stronger justice claims?

The event is part of the series Contemporary Conversations, which looks at arts position to its present. Acknowledging artists’ role in neither coinciding nor departing from their time, but working with its passage, pressing and transforming it, this series of evening dialogues explores the present tense in its cultural and political dimensions, visual cultures and postcolonial debates.