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Heath Pearson, "Life Beside Bars: Confinement and Capital in an American Prison Town" (Duke UP, 2024)
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Hello and welcome to the Anthropology Channel. This is your host, Aliza. My guest today is Heath Pearson, assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Justice and Peace Studies at Georgetown University. We'll be talking about his book, Life Beside Confinement and Capital in an American Prison town, published in 2024 by Duke University Press. Thank you very much, Heath, for joining us today.
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Thank you so much for having me.
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So I'll start with something maybe a little bit basic, which is the title. And I'm doing that just because I am personally not great with titles. But yours, I think, does this great job of capturing the essence of your book. So, to start, I was wondering if you could Tell us how you came to this title by way of how you came to this project.
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Yeah, so I, I came to the project by, by way of family experience. When I first moved or when I was on my way to move to New Jersey first for my master's. Prior to starting my PhD, a very close family member was incarcerated. And so that obviously sent me on a, on a, on a kind of personal journey of, you know, joining my, my other family members to work to, to help this person, to get this person out to, you know, try to try to get good legal representation, things like this. And along the way, you know, I just started reading about policing in prisons and this kind of thing for the first time. This is 2009, and when I got out to New Jersey in 2010, the new Jim Crow, I think, was published that year or some, somewhere right around there. And a friend gave me that for my birthday, knowing what kind of, what was going on with my family and this kind of thing. And that book opened a lot of, of things up for me in terms of understanding. And so I spent a few years in New Jersey working with others, fighting against solitary confinement, fighting for incarcerated person out of, out of Pennsylvania named Mumia Abu Jamal. And really just, just kind of learning different facets of the system and how it was working and what was going. Continuing to read more since, you know, that's what I kind of do. And so those kind of twinned projects of working on the outside and then sitting in the library, so to speak, and reading up on it pushed me in that direction than when I started applying for graduate work. And so my initial plan was to go back home to the prison that's about 20 minutes from where I grew up. I'm from rural Indiana, and I was gonna move back home. There was a prison that was built on a retired military base, and I was gonna do my project there. In this little, little town that has a circus school and a prison. Those are the two things that the town has. Yeah, yeah, it's like an actual, like, people actually go there to learn how to be in the circus, which apparently circuses still exist too. I didn't know that. And during my very first semester of coursework in, in graduate school, I was riding the train one day into the city, and I, I, someone struck up a conversation with me next, next to me, and we started talking, and someone behind me, you know, tap on my shoulder halfway through that conversation, and I turn around and I see this, this, this person peeking over the, over the chairs on New Jersey transit saying, I'm so sorry to eavesdrop, but I've been listening to your conversation for the last 10 minutes and I would love to have lunch with you, you know, if you could come down and, and come to my town, because I'd love to show you around my town. My town has five prisons, so her town was in South Jersey in a, in a county called Cumberland county, which is the. Where I ended up. And after having one lunch with her and going and visiting one prison, I, I just, I, I knew that was where I was supposed to stay. There was no, I, I wish there was more planning and things that I could say. I was, I was being strategic, but I had this gut feeling that I, I needed to stick around there. So that's what really. Those are the kind of nuts and bolts that got me to this project. Of course, along the way I met all kinds of people, both inside and outside, both people who didn't know anything and people who were experts and, and everyone in between. And so, so, so that's what, what really sent me into the project. And I spent three years down there doing the, the ethnographic research, doing the, the archival research, which, you know, the archival research, although is a major structuring, print kind of principle of the, of the book, it shows up very little in there. It's, it's. I had to take out a lot of it, actually, but it, but it is there in the background. But initially, the book, the book was going to be titled In Search of El Chapo. That was the kind of the working title for all, all my years in the field and then writing up and this kind of thing, because when I was down there, there was, there was a lot of local discussion about El Chapo having escaped. That was when I was down there, when he escaped prison. And there was a ton of chatter down there about him hiding out in the basement of, of someone in his organization that was posted up in, in South Jersey. And so I was kind of, you know, referencing Bergwaz In Search of Respect. And El Chapo kind of became this, like, figure in the background that, of course, I never met El Chapo. Big reveal. I never met mi del Chapo. But then, you know, everybody hated that title except me. And I still like that title. I kind of still wish it was the title. Everybody's like, you can't name the book something that never actually comes up in the book. It's like, well, that was the way the field work was. It came up in the field work all the time. So, so I ended up Retitling the book Confinement and Capital in an American Prison Town. And. Or no, maybe the book was just Confinement and Capital and then some other subtitle that I had come up with. And so that ended up as the running title up until, I want to say it was like the weekend before the final thing was due to. It was a Friday afternoon. The manuscript is already in. I'm not allowed to touch the manuscript at this point. We're going kind of back and forth like, oh, this footnote, that footnote, etc. Etc. Etc. It's all these, you know, things it's gone through 5 million back and forth and da, da, da, da. I get an email from the editor that I was working with, Ken, at the time, who says, okay, everything is good to go, except the board does not like the title. So we need a new title by this afternoon. So you're going to give me three hours to come up with a new title for a book that I'd been working on for a decade. So I wrote back and said, I will get a new title by Monday morning, but I cannot send a new title by Friday night. That will give me 14 ulcers. So I, I start brainstorming, I pull out all my old, you know, workshopping titles. I call my. A handful of friends who I'm like, I, I trust bouncing all these things off with. And I, quite literally, this is not an Exaggeration, started at 1:00 o'clock on Friday afternoon after, after lunch, I spent until about 6 o' clock and I quit for the day. And then I got up the next morning and I worked until dinner the entire day just going back through the manuscript and like, how about this for a title? Pulling a little phrase out here, or like, here's a couple phrases I was working on. How about this? And it just, everything felt wrong and contrived and so I called one of my, you know, one of my closest friends. Uh, he, he had been helping me, his partner had been helping me. We'd been bouncing things off for hours. It was, it was, I was becoming, you know, a bit exasperated by, by the entire thing because you think like, you put all this work into it and you really don't want to fuck up the title like that much. I mean, you don't have to like kill it with the title, but you don't want to, like, you don't want the title to undermine all the work you've done. And so we, we just kind of started spitting all these things out, this kind of rapid fire. And he said, I had. I had kept sticking on this thing. Something beyond bars. Something beyond bars. Something beyond. I kept thinking I. I was trying to fit all these words in. Like, nothing felt right, you know, too many. Too much alliteration or too what. Whatever, this, that, or the other. And he said, life beyond bars. And I said, wait, life beside bars actually is what I'm doing. And it was like both of us just kind of stopped right there. And he goes, that's it. And I said, I think that's it too. And so I sent it out to, like, 15 people that I had been kind of pinging titles with for the last 35 hours. And everybody sent back right away is like, oh, I like that title. Works at this. And, you know, a few of the people had read the manuscript and they're like, yes, that kind of captures. And honestly, that did it. It was like that word beside, somehow captured. Because what I was running into was, you know, I'm. It's not just an ethnography from below, so to speak, like via Robin Kelly or James Scott or something like this. Right? It's. It's not just about unruliness and insurgency and resistance in. In whatever large and small or seen and unseen ways. It's. It's actually looking from the ruling class to. To folks who are perhaps most targeted, most dominated, I guess we would say. And so those kind of like, familiar Marxist phrasings or analytics, they just. They weren't working because they were inaccurate. And so when I landed on that, the kind of spatial idea of besideness, it really unlocked everything. So I sent that to Ken first thing Monday morning with a little note that also said, by the way, I have to change the Intro for the 57th time now. And so they. He. He. He loved it right away. The board loved it. And. And yeah, I rewrote the intro, which also kind of helped. It really unlocked the intro as well. And, you know, I think there was actually something in. I had been pounding on that title for. For years, like, quite literally for years, and nothing really felt right. And that thing that I was kind of forced into this, like, okay, this is it. Like, this is for all the marbles. You know, you're at the free throw line. There's.01 seconds left, and you got to sync this free throw shot. Something about the. That pressure it. Like, it unlocked it for me. And that's. That's kind of where it. How it. How it happened.
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Wow. The story is both. I mean, I like that it has a happy ending, but it's also my Nightmare. But, yeah, thanks for sharing that with us. And, like, I think it really shows how, you know, a book, like even the title exceeds the oath. Random material. Right. It's. It just exceeds what you come out with, which I think maybe mirrors one of the takeaways that stood out to me from the book. You mentioned your archival work. You really beautifully show that confinement long exceeds the construction of prisons and prison towns. And I love how you show that by your conversations with people about your archival work and not just the rich archival work you've done, which readers can find in the appendix to some extent. Let's plug that in, because you've done that work too. But, yeah, look, I loved this historical excess, but also, you know, you kind of exceeded the archives besides people who work with the archives. Right. So can you speak to both, like this approach of confinement, but also this approach to writing about confinement that way or working with confinement in that way?
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In. In the excess, you mean? Yeah, in that excess. Yeah, yeah. You know, I think part of what I was really committed to because I had experienced, you know, the kind of a personal side of. Of things, both not being inside, but having someone I deeply loved inside is like. Is. Is. Is. Is a very simple kind of. Kind of standard anthropological point, which is, you know, all the folks who were most directly impacted by policing and prisons and the legislation that makes those two things such forces of terror in this country is that almost every book you read, every article you read, every. Everything that you encounter in the. In the vast amount of literature, which. It is vast at this point point, the literature, it's all policy people and experts and the occasional person who is formerly incarcerated, and that's about it. And, you know, that has a way of making one, the problem feel like it's someone else's problem because it doesn't affect anything else or anyone else or. Or. Or anything like that. But two, it's also the reality that there is a wealth of knowledge and understanding and perspective. And, you know, as people working in the. In the scholarly realm of theorizing, that is entirely ignored. It's not even ignored is almost not strong enough of a word. It's like it doesn't exist there. Like folks who get out couldn't possibly theorize what might make a better social system, what might allow us to weaken the carceral state or abolish it altogether, et cetera, et cetera. And so part of what I went in, committed to do in that was one, all the. Well, I. I just simply wanted to talk to every. The Everydayness of it, you know, it's like the banality of, of the whole thing. Right? So, so that was very important to me. And, and, and with that banality was I wanted to talk to everyone, every people who benefited and profited from it, people who, people who were targeted by it, people who shrugged their shoulders about it and everything kind of in between. And so part of that for me meant going into the place and communicating what I was learning in real time. You know, it's not like, okay, I'm going to be here with everyone for two years, and then four years from now, I'm going to send you an article that you get to read and give me feedback on. And I'm not, I'm not trying to, I'm not trying to hate on that at all. But just to say part of what I was trying to do in that space was, was to, was to open up the, the. The sharing of information, understanding and perspective. And also to say, you know, there ended up being people that I had. I, I developed very deep relationships with who started going into the archives on their own. Which is exactly what I was hoping for. You know, I like, because I was going into these archives and it was as if that no, no one else knew that they even existed. Like, they were just sitting there in the basement. And so other people started going in, public defenders, other folks. And sometimes they would send me information and sometimes they were just doing it for, you know, they had their own curiosities. And so in part that was, you know, for me, I wanted that to open up not just a space for me to gain understanding for this project, but for, for me to maybe make, like to help make a kind of inroads into this place where the, the, the knowledge and the information and understanding at a, at a kind of governmental level becomes more visibly. And so I think working in that became a way of saying, okay, we're going to start thinking of this in all of the ways in which it's not being thought of right now or considered right now. Like, what's happening on the outside? Where are people living? Where are they not living? What are they doing when they're in between visits? And so trying to open up a picture of this thing that is like adding to the picture that Orisonmi Burton has given us, adding to the picture that Andrea Morell or that Melissa Burch or that Ruthie Wilson Gilmour or that all the people that we can name, they've given us these pictures. And there's a way in which we can kind of seize onto one of those things and think that that's the whole picture. And all I was hoping to do with this project was to add more to that picture, to add more feel, to add more or more emotion, to add more a wider range of human experience. And you know, I think then along the way, what I became extremely committed to is I want the book to be, I want it to be everyday life. Like, I, I, I also think it's cool to open up a book and read stories and they have these tantalizing, oh my God, what's going to happen? Oh my God, is the ethnographer safe? Oh my. Like, and, and you just won't find that in my book. It's, it's, it's actually like, it's so boring what's happening in my book that I think maybe there's, there's times where probably folks are like, is anything going to happen? I mean, are we going anywhere in this book? Which, you know, is also probably why they wanted me to get rid of the In Search of El Chapo. Because at least like, people were thinking, okay, eventually we're going to, you know, but in my book, it's just, it's banal, you know, it's, it's sitting around, it's going to lunch, it's, you know, it's those kinds of things. But, but for me, there's something there that resonates, I think, very deeply with, I can't speak for anyone else, but, but for me, because, you know, we're watching fascists like, take over vast portions of our world and commit genocide just unchecked and destroy the planet and, and, and increase the means of confinement.
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Right.
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Before our very eyes. And, and we still have to get up and, and, and like, brush our kids teeth and hug our partner before we walk out the door and you know, pick them up from school and, and sit at a stoplight and like, like go grocery shopping, like. Right. And so I think something along the way there for me really resonated in the sense that was like, well, in extreme conditions like this, what do people do? They, they live, they, they find ways to love. They find ways to build support and to give support and they get pissed off and they are happy. And like, just like people who live in Georgetown where, where I work and just like people who, who live anywhere, right? We go. People find ways to, to, to build very beautiful, robust life. And I, I really wanted, really hope, I should say that people connect with that part of the book in a way that says it doesn't mean we're not fighting like hell to make a better world, to protect ourselves and our. And our people. It doesn't mean we're not organizing and strategizing and. And. And prep, preparing and. And. And continuing to analyze and theorize. It doesn't mean we don't lament and weep and all of these things. But it also, I think, is extremely important to remember that we. We. We. We do need to find joy and make joy. We do need to find moments to celebrate life with. With other people, to receive love and care and. And to have hope for. For. For something that's in excess of the domination that surrounds us. And so that's, you know, I. I really tried to. To do that in this book. To, To. To hold those two things in extreme tension. The. The reality of. And the brutality of. Of state and capital domination, and at the same time, the tenderness and the beauty and the joy of. Of human beings in relationship with one another.
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C
Yeah, I think it really comes across to the reader. But what I don't agree with is your expectation that someone reading the book would be like, oh, is anything happening? Because I. Just for some context also, maybe for our listeners a few years back, I've also had the pleasure to have Heath as a speaker to an event that I was organizing at Rutgers when I was a postdoc back there. And correct me if I'm wrong, but you presented some of your work that I think became the part about the sheepdog seminars. And when watching people respond there. War presentation. Right. Like, there is this uncomfortable laughter, but the kind of laughter that's kind of like shock value, maybe like a relative gaze that's like, this can't be us, you know, just sitting in New Jersey. Like, this is something completely different. And, you know, I can imagine that being a reaction when people are reading the book or especially that part of the book. Right. But I think, or let's say I appreciate what you do with that. Like, you don't just leave it for the reader to do whatever they want with it. You use that to do political critique. You don't just leave it at this kind of relativist storytelling. Right. And, yeah. I'm wondering if you could tell us more about this critical approach, you know, basically how your approach to ethnography as political critique, as I see it, how. Reflected in your storytelling too, about what's reality beside bars.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thanks for that. That's. You're. You're absolutely right. Yeah, that's a. It's that vignette. It's the Sheepdog vignette, which is coming out as a standalone article in February with some commentary by other people who also work on kind of white nationalism. White supremacy. Yeah, people hate that chapter. That's the one vignette in the book. And it's also been the case in the article. There is no sort of. Yeah, that was fine. It's either they hate that chapter so much that. That it. Like they can't see anything else, or they love that chapter so much. It's. It's a. It's interesting. And I found, you know, now I've given it as a talk quite a few times in, in different contexts, and it kind of does the same thing there. I mean, at the commoning conference that I, I shared that chapter that, that you were just referencing. I had an anthropologist from, from the Rutgers department come up to me afterwards, and the first thing that the person said was, I. I didn't like that at all, which I, I appreciated. And then that, you know, they unpacked it. But, you know, I think. So how do I say this? So, so this is how I would say this. I. I think. And this could be wrong. Maybe I'll say it. Would want to say it differently. But. So I, I try to approach all of my ethnography, my ethnographic writing in such a way that just a couple of, like, a couple of main things I'm. I'm trying to do with everything. One is I'm. I'm really trying to place you in the context. So I work very hard to try and make it where within a few lines, you feel like you're sitting there. I, I pull it off sometimes I think and sometimes I don't. But that's. I try to do that. The other thing I try to do at the very same time that I do that is to make it radically unfamiliar. And I, I borrow this phrase from my partner who said it to me like, like 11 years ago. But I try to make it where the door that you reach for 50 times a day, suddenly the doorknob is not there. The door's there, but the doorknob's not there. That's. That's my working metaphor when I'm. When I'm writing. So what does that mean? So in other words, the, the. When you enter into that, those little vignettes, my hope is that everything is happening at, like, it's off pace for, for you. It's. It's constantly like smashing, breaking down against the expectations that the text is building. And so in the Case of the sheepdog. Like one thing, I think that. So right now, when we read it, it seems inflammatory in a particular way where people become uncomfortable. But what I was. Was working to do there, and it's. I think it's important to remember this is all the way back at the very beginning of 2016. So we're talking about a full year prior to. This is the last year of Obama. Right. So a very different. Well, a very different political landscape for the United States in certain ways, but culturally, I think there's massive differences. Right. And most specifically among the liberal neoliberal kind of normativity of the university landscape we all are in. So the first time I presented that thing was right after it happened at. At where I was going to grad school. And people were like, this is what. What are you talking about? This is like, I actually had someone, an anthropologist, a faculty member say to me, nobody cares about white supremacy anymore. That's a 90s topic. That's a 90s topic. This is what the person said. That's a. This was a tenured faculty member. That's a 90s topic. So I would recommend just cutting it all together or finding a different way to approach because despite the fact that they were listening to this rhetoric, they could not believe that something like this explicit white nationalist stuff was happening. And the way it was happening, over 300 people, everyone cheering for it, the entire prosecutor's offices just sitting right there supporting it, all the police officers supporting it. So, like, people couldn't. They didn't believe me, basically, I was like pumping up the affect in their mind. And it's interesting how that chapter has read differently. It's been read differently over the last eight or nine years, depending on what's happening politically. So part of what I do to kind of conclude this is what I try to do in that chapter, is to make it extremely local. Right. Rather than like moving off to the. I'm going to interpret this on the big. The big scale. Like, we're going to think this, that. No, I want to think about this locally. What does it mean that a white nationalist group is telling churches to store military weapons? If you're taking that as only rhetoric, me and you are on different sort of interpretive landscapes right now. Right. And so I think what I wanted to do with that piece was to allow their visions for the world to manifest, to take them to their conclusions, rather than to either rationalize them away in one direction or. Which is what most anthropologists want me to do. If the review feedback is Accurate is they want me to provide a reason for why these people primarily, you know, middle aged to upper aged white men, are filled with this, like, white supremacist rage in, in, in this space. They want to know what happened to them in their life, what happened geopolitically, what happened with labor, what happened. All this stuff for me, what makes that, that vignette. So what, what makes it upset people, or I think what connects it with people is that I actually try to allow the ethnogr stand and speak for itself. It's like, no, these people are actually being energized by saying they want to run around and kill wolves. Right. Which is just coded language for black and brown folks. And so I think the fact that I refused and in the article I do a little more, I show a little more of the kind of, the kind of scholarly edifice that I've built this on than I do in the vignette, which is kind of way, way, way Invisible Eyes, the article. I use Audra Simpson to say, no, this is a kind of refusal. And I'm going to refuse to build the conditions for empathy that the discipline relies on to make its political critique often. And instead of trying to move the readers to empathize with these subjects, I'm going to keep these subjects at the level of their language. And because I keep all of those folks at the level of their language, which is just like extremely violent and sexist and racist and very, very patriarchal, it makes everyone uncomfortable because I'm not giving these people an out to explain away their, their, their philosophy and their actions and their rhetoric. And I think it's that lack of providing an empath, like a, an edifice of empathy that really turns some folks off from, from that part.
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C
Interesting. Yeah, that's, that's very interesting to hear because I remember going back to that event, I remember everyone just being like, ha, ha ha. That was both, like, entertaining and a window into a radically different life. Right. But yeah, I'm really looking forward to this article where, you know, you make that position really explicit. Yeah. Something to look forward to also for our listeners. Yeah. So like, you mentioned this a little bit about how the book's not just this, you know, somehow Foucauldian account of, you know, carceralities everywhere and it's always giving life and there is no way out. Frankly, like, when I was just reading the first few pages, I was a bit worried that. But I was so glad to see that perhaps a huge portion of the book is actually about how it's also braided with different kinds of imagination. We create two kinds of imagination and care. And you know, I really enjoyed reading that. Not just as this theoretical point of view, but the very everydayness and things like, things that people like, Ms. Reed, Fred, Mr. Johnson and others do. So can you tell us about the role of imagination in the book and the role of imagination in your collaborators lives?
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Yeah, you know, I think part of what I encountered and learned during that time was, you know, when I showed up to live there. My very first day living there, the prosecutor's offices issued a non indictment for two police officers who had killed a black man nine months earlier. And it was caught on video and it had been circulated and there had been organizing and protesting early on. And it just so happened that you know, I was eating lunch my very first day, I get this text and from someone in Philly, from a friend in Philly who was, who was working on the, on the, on the case. And so I start racing around town and I, there was nothing, there was no, no one was protesting, no one was out in the street. Very, very few people actually even knew about the, the release of the non indictment. And so I'm kind of like running around trying to get people, you know, what are we going to do? Where are we going to go? And I, I've, I, at this point I literally know two people in, in. I don't know them, I've just, I met them in a preliminary, kind of a preliminary visit before I moved there. And they're, they're just like we're not going out into the street for this. Like I, you know, you can go look for people but we're not doing that. And that, that kind of frustrated me, it disappointed me and all of these kinds of things. But over time I began to see another, not only another form of, I don't, you know, I don't like to use the word resistance in this case because it kind of over determines what, what, what we think that that has to mean. But really other forms of resistance that were happening all over the place and part partly in the wake of what had happened in the initial protest. And so people began to imagine what is it that we can do that will not get our skulls cracked in by the police department here? What is it that we can build that might allow folks to find spaces for something other than just the, the, the extreme carceral domination that, that, that kind of pervades driving in your car, walking on the sidewalk, whatever, whatever that, that kind of thing you know, and so ultimately what. The lack of explicit, what I had come. Come into that place attuned to see as political organizing kind of quote unquote. It was the, the extreme imagination of, of folks to say, actually we're doing this over here and that's creating these other kinds of spaces and starting to see with new eyes and hear with new ears what was going on and how people were building spaces of resistance, maybe is one way to say it, or spaces where something else could happen besides carceral domination. And I think that, that, that I started to see or hear, or I should say people took the time to help me to see all of the ways in which they were imagining another kind of, of. Of landscape that they were occupying in real time, right? Not in the future, not after we get this, then we can get this, then we can get this and then we can. Or after we get rid of the police and after we, then we can. It was no, this is now, right? It's that and it's this and they don't even know about this, right? These are like hidden moments, hidden corners, hidden spaces, moments that open up and close almost as quickly. And it took an imaginative re visioning, so to speak, in order to begin to see those things and to tune into those things. Those spaces where people were building another kind of life right in the middle of the life that was being, always being reproduced in, on, under and around them. And so I really wanted to, wanted to make sure not only that I was, I was in those spaces as fully as I could be as an ethnographer, as an outsider, but that I was learning that I was allowing those spaces to kind of wash over me and give me a new sense of being there and a new sense of understanding and a new sense of sociality. And so imagination became, became a kind of cornerstone for building robust social life in a space that is dominated by individuating and isolating human beings. And so what I, rather than, and this is kind of the case with everything, right? I don't have a chapter on imagination. Imagination, it, it manifests in moments and, and, and, and I hope, I mean, as, as one reads the book, you, you kind of start to hit these, like you enter into these moments of imagination the same way I did, in the same way other folks did who were there and who were invited in. And so imagination becomes something that by the time if you get through the kind of all the vignettes, when you're looking back, imagination becomes this. Oh, okay, I see all these different ways in which imagination gave people other ways to relate to one another or other ideas for building this old rundown space into something that was vibrant and beautiful, even though it still looked like an old rundown space. Right. And so imagination is. I mean, I don't want to say it's the antithesis of incarceration, but there is something to be said about the significance of imagination to. At least in that place, but maybe anywhere, I don't know. But the significance of imagination for human beings to build something else.
- [45:32]
C
Yeah, that's very beautiful. And I think that's a note in which you end the book. Right. Like, as we maybe wind down. I want to talk about the conclusion, which is another personal nightmare of mine. You know, like, I feel like conclusions become these, like, parts of repetition for me. But what I loved about your book is it becomes, you know, a part of the book where, yeah, you kind of imagine what you hope the book will do, what you hope not just the book, but like, witnessing the work of the people you're writing about will do in the world. So I just wanted to give you some space to talk about that. Now that the book has circulated a bit in the world, what do you hope it will do for those who engage with it?
- [46:33]
A
Oh, man, that's such a big question. Well, yeah, there are. There are a lot. There are a handful of things I. I would. I hope to say correctly. And thank you for this question. So what. You know, one, at a very. At a very fundamental level as a writer, I wanted to write something beautiful. I. I mean, almost that's. I. Almost that's a point unto itself. I really wanted to write something beautiful. And I wanted to write something beautiful for a handful of reasons. One, because the spaces I was invited into and the people who invited me into their lives and into their homes and into their family units and sometimes into their jobs and just into all. All parts of how they were living. They showed me a radical beauty of living that I did not anticipate going into it and I did not understand going into it. I also wanted to write something beautiful because I think it's extremely easy to get mired in critique, and critique is essential, but critique is not all we have, and it's not all that allows us to be fully human with one another and on this planet. And so I really wanted to. I really wanted to do it for those reasons. But then lastly, I. I also. I also really hope on that. On that front that it might in some very minor way be a part of contributing to putting the book down and saying, yeah, you know, actually there's, there's beautiful spaces around me too. There's people doing beautiful things around me too, even while my, my, my news feed and my social media feed tells me otherwise. And so that on beauty, that's, you know, that's the kind of three part. I, I really hope that it has that kind of invitation. So that's one part, another, another. Another major part for me was that, and is that I hope that people will be encouraged to build rather than just enraged to tear things down. Right? And again, I'm with it. Like, I'm also enraged many times a day. I also want to tear a lot of shit down, right? But I don't want to only tear things down and I don't want to only talk about tearing things down. And I know that my soul is nourished and my, my being is nourished when I'm in spaces where people are building things together. Right. Even if it's something so small as building 15 purses and making sure the stitching is right and putting them together for something that someone can sell out of their trunk. I hope that there's some small part in that book that connects with a reader to say, yeah, I can actually also be a part of, in however small and seemingly invisible ways of building something beautiful with a handful of other people. And maybe even some of those things we build might extend beyond us and, and, and themselves. Right? So that's, that's another thing. And then lastly, and, and you know, this is very much related to the first two points, but I really, you know, as many grad students in the humanities were, and as you know, you clearly had some kind of idea from whatever you had read by me when you invited me to the Commoning conference, the book that Fred and Stefano wrote when we were all undergrads and circulated as a PDF to undercommons, you know, whatever the language, if you don't like the language, you don't like the theory, you don't like this, that or the other, whatever, fine. But I really, you know, remain convinced that we can build spaces of freedom and joy and possibility and hope and, and camaraderie and rage and anything, you know, we can critique resource sharing, all these things. We can build those in the smoke, the smoke room. We can build those, you know, at the dumpster behind the building where everybody actually smokes now. We can build those in abandoned clothing store. We can build those, you know, all over the place. And I wanted people to walk away from that saying, yeah, I can also find five high school kids at a public high school probably, and go and just spend 30 minutes with them every other Friday eating McDonald's sandwiches and talking about whatever, you know, fill in the blank, whatever. But I wanted to think about what I could do to put some very real life stories for people to enter into that make the under commons, so to speak. And I'm not trying to like, fetishize that exact concept, but just the make this idea that we can build spaces of being together, spaces of socialism, spaces of freedom, spaces of possibility. We can build those things right now in the spaces of domination that we are navigating. Right. The classroom space with all of the problems of the university that each one of us know firsthand, that each one of us have experienced just probably devastating ends in some way, shape or form. Also are spaces where we get to sit down with a handful of folks in their early 20s and say, hey, what's going on? What's going on? Like, let's talk about this texture, but let's also talk about campus. Let's also talk about what's going on in your dorm. Let's also, like, how are you wrestling with, with your news feed? How are you wrestling with the world? How are you like. And you can make these spaces that open up the possibility of care and connection in a world that is becoming increasingly isolated and individualized and disconnected. Right. I mean, in typical capitalist form, we have the structure of connection around the planet more than ever before. And yet people are more isolated than ever before, both in extremely obvious ways, like the proliferation of imprisonment and solitary confinement and all of those kinds of things, and in ways that are not obvious, like the proliferation of a thousand people on a public train all staring down at their own screen and refusing to, like, look at the person they're quite literally rubbing shoulders with as the train jostles along the tracks. And so, you know, I really hope more than anything that the book is an invitation to love and to build relationships with people that are both similar to and different from how you perceive yourself in this moment. And, and, and if, if a handful of people take that, I, I will feel like, okay, I, I, I did get something right in, in, in all that work so that, you know. Yeah, I don't know if that answers your questions, but that's, that's kind of, that's where, where I, where I really hope the book finds an afterlife. I mean, there's also also obviously all kinds of things. I was hoping to make interventions in this field and that field and Whatever. But yeah, I can say those things if you want. But I really, the, the, the. I want more love. I want more love in the world. That's, that's, that's my hope.
- [55:42]
C
Yeah, that's, that's wonderful. Thanks for sharing that, Heath. I guess responding to that answer, usually I end by asking what is next for you? But I think maybe I'll ask what are you building next, right, with your thinking, teaching what's on the horizon?
- [56:04]
A
I. Right now I'm working on a project that is, It's a weird mix of. I'm looking at action movies, so like the Taken trilogy and the Fast and the Furious franchise and Breaking Bad and just. There's a list, there's a big list, but the kind of, you know, non serious action movies, okay. Not documentaries or like, like, like avant garde film or anything like that. Just the very low, lowest common denominator kind of thing, which I, you know, I'm not, that's not a judgment. I. Fast and the Furious. I've. Can I, I cannot count how many times I've watched those movies, but I' those movies. I'm looking at this huge archive of conversations between the Department of Defense for the US Military and. Or what, I guess now it's called the Department of War or whatever bonkers thing. These, these, these people have renamed it the archives between the Department of Defense and Hollywood producers and then also the history of satellite slash cable television. And I'm looking at the ways in which these, These representations are 1. Have been a key architecture, I'm sorry, a key constructive apparatus of the carceral state. So going back to about mid-1970s, which is when satellites became home things on people's homes, that is they, they left kind of the government realm and, and, and were attached to people's homes. And of course what followed satellites being on people's homes was. Oh, oh shit. We've, we only had 13 channels, all of which went fuzzy at midnight and now we have 200 channels which we need to fill with 24 hours of an ending stream. A lot of that stuff became cop shows and prison things and you know, shootouts and action movies. All that stuff really exploded then following the, the rise of satellite television. And so I, I'm, I'm thinking of the ways in which, you know, the project is kind of tentatively titled Streaming man right now, which is both an idea of like humans have become streaming animals, but also we learn what it means to be man from stream. Right, the stream, the unending stream into our homes. And so it's looking at that. It's looking at representation. It's looking at the nuts and bolts of these archives and trying to build a project out of all of that mess that's. That opens up a different aspect of our. The reproductive mechanisms of. Of capital and state and thinking through that. Not because no one else looks at film, obviously that's a ginormous field of inquiry, but. But partly to say I want. I want to explicitly look at this as an appar. Status of the carceral state and think about what happens when we think of Hollywood as being one of the key architects of where we are right now. Both like, in terms of policing in prison, but even perhaps more to the point in terms of the. The federal realm, the. The global political realm. And so, you know, it's also a project that puts me at a desk rather than outside talking to people, which, you know, there's good and bad to that. Sometimes you just want to get down and go out and talk, and other times I'm like, as a. As a. More. I'm not a people. I'm not. I'm not. You know, being a people person takes a lot of work for me. You know, going. Meeting. Meeting new people is. I don't know why I chose a profession where I have to meet new people in order to write anything, but meeting new people gives me anxiety. So it's kind of nice to do something alone for. For a little while and let me kind of recharge that aspect of. Of myself. But yeah, and, and so, yeah, that's. That's one. One of the things I've been working on. There have been fighting some housing for some housing issues here in Baltimore, right in the neighborhood where I live, like, quite literally the building six feet to my. To my right, like where we are right now, you know, working on how that's. How that's going to be rebuilt stuff. Stuff like that. So that's, That's a lot of what I've been working on and really, to be honest, working on. On being. Being with my. My two kids, spending time with them and in the forest.
- [61:47]
C
Oh, that's so nice. I'm jealous. But thank you very much, Heath, for joining us and sharing all of this. And we'll be looking forward to your next projects and also humans you're raising.
- [62:10]
A
Thank you so much. This was amazing. I feel very lucky to get to talk to you about this. Thank you so much for asking me.
- [62:18]
C
Oh, thank you. I appreciate that. This is your host, Alizarja. This discussion of life beside bars Confinement and Capital in an American Prison Town, published by Duke University Press in 2024, is brought to you by the New Books Network.
- [62:34]
A
Thank you for listening.