On Resistance to Plantation Power.

Current critical prison and literary scholarship on the U.S. prison regime correlate the punitive punishment of the U.S. prison to that of the U.S. slave plantation. However, these studies do not analyze the master-slave and mistress-slave relationship as racialized and gendered power structures that have been preserved and reinforced through the guard-imprisoned person and matron-imprisoned person relationship in the U.S. carceral system. This essay analyzes the white patriarchal hierarchy structure on the U.S. slave plantation and how its legacy is preserved in the U.S. prison regime. Put differently, I examine how the power dynamics of the U.S. slave plantation are preserved, how these dynamics specifically target Black women, and how Black women (incarcerated or non-incarcerated) resist. I identify autobiographical writing as a mode of resistance utilized by Black women within and outside the geographical space of jail and prison. Engaging with this lineage of power, I locate Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl as a marker of the historical significance of white hegemonic power structures onto the U.S. prison regime. Further, I situate the autobiographical works of Angela Y. Davis and Assata Shakur—centered on their lives as fugitive and recalcitrant slaves, their capture (imprisonment), and their subsequent "freedom"—as exemplars of the legacy of the slave plantation's social control logic in the U.S. carceral state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]