Scholarship
Photograph caption: A cropped black-and-white photograph from the nineteenth century. The only visible parts of the photograph are the skeletal branches of trees without leaves and the top of the veranda at the entrance to the state penitentiary. There are no people in this photograph. Bars are visible on the windows. Photograph courtesy of Alabama Department of Archives and History.
Image caption: An architectural drawing of Wetumpka State Penitentiary, includes labeled rooms, roadways, and water lines.
Courtesy of Alabama Department of Archives and History.
My work traces how Black women experienced, theorized, and resisted biopolitical and carceral regimes in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States. I am currently at work on my first book, tentatively titled Vanishing Points: Black Women, Carceral Margins, and Genealogies of Escape, which excavates the significance of postbellum fugitivity as a window into the evolving carceral state and its geographies.
A proposed map of Jefferson County's carceral camps (c. 1930s). Thick lines cut across the map with lighter blue lines indicating roads. An arterial river sits at the edge on the left side. Dotted lines connect the different carceral camps that are unified through towers.
Courtesy of Alabama Department of Archives and History.
“No Use to the State: Phrasing Escape and a Black Radical Epistolary of Disability”
Disability Studies Quarterly Vol. 43 | No. 1
“Black women who stepped foot in Speigner State Prison or Wetumpka State Penitentiary or eventually Camp Ketona knew that hell surrounded them. To be incarcerated in early twentieth-century Alabama was to be condemned to penal labor and the violence used to maintain it. Debilitation was not just a possible outcome, but the very condition of incarceration…” [click here for more]
“Riot and Reclamation: Black Women, Prison Labor, and Resistive Desires”
Southern Cultures Vol. 27 | No. 3
“Breaking through the discord, there was a harmony: hundreds of tables and chairs scratching against the floor. Trays of corn bread sliding across the tables, uneaten. It was not just the sound, but the smell, too. Spoiled meat and heaps of scraps sunk into the walls amid the summer’s heat. On any day, the carefully choreographed movement of hundreds of women leaving the Wetumpka State Penitentiary dining hall was loud. On July 19, 1934, it was also mutinous...” [click here for more]
Disability History Podcast: Episode 27 (March 2021) - Disability, Race, and Incarceration
Image caption: A photograph taken on April 8, 1938 of Wetumpka State Penitentiary. Photographer unknown. Toward the back of the photograph are the 20-foot high walls connected to a two-story building. Wires and fences run around the perimeter of the prison. A large tree is on the right-hand side of the photograph. High levels of water—possibly from flooding—partially submerge wooden railing and small trees. The water runs, like a lake, right up to the foot of the building and the walls.
Photograph courtesy of Elmore County Historical Society and Museum.