See No Evil: The (In)Carceral Imagination

Abstract

A quick delineation of the United States reveals deep historical roots in racism, that which endures and manifests through the twenty-first century. Especially in the present, the era of mass incarceration exists as an evolution of slavery and extractive labor in its proliferation of black inmates. Through narrative (novel and memoir), this thesis observes the capacity of certain spaces in shaping the realities of minority groups, with specific attention to black boys and men. Through Richard Wright's Native Son (1940), Jesmyn Ward's Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017), and John Edgar Wideman's Brothers and Keepers (1984), this project explores the ways in which society imagines carcerailty and criminality in young black boys, an ongoing process of dehumanization.