Disciplinary Power or Colonial Power?

Abstract

This chapter offers an alternative reading of settler colonial incarceration as sites of settler colonial repression and Indigenous refusal. We assert that research on the colonial prison suggests that Euro-north American understandings of the role of the prison offer a shaky foundation on which to construct a theory of carcerality under settler-colonialism. Instead, we present an alternative genealogy of incarceration that reimagines prison, less as the apex of a hierarchical justice pyramid, but as one link in a laterally concatenated archipelago of Agambean “camps” (spaces opened through the state of exception), designed to further the colonial project of Indigenous extinguishment.