Monday, February 20, 2017: Black Women & the Carceral State

Find this book at your local bookstore, library or on-line.

This week on KPFA Radio’s Women’s Magazine we hear a recent talk by Professor Sarah Haley about her new groundbreaking book “No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity.”  Drawing upon black feminist criticism and a diverse array of archival materials, Sarah Haley uncovers how black women were imprisoned and brutalized in the late 19th century and early 20th century through local, county, and state convict labor systems, while also illuminating the prisoners’ acts of resistance and sabotage, challenging ideologies of racial capitalism and patriarchy. The talk was sponsored by the Center for Race & Gender at UC Berkeley.

A landmark history of black women’s imprisonment in the South, “No Mercy Here” recovers stories of the captivity and punishment of black women to demonstrate how the system of incarceration was crucial to organizing gender and race, and constructing Jim Crow modernity.

Sarah Haley is Assistant Professor of Gender Studies and African American studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity is the winner of the 2016 Sara A.Whaley Prize, National Women's Studies Association and the 2016 Letitia Woods Brown Book Award, Association of Black Women Historians.

Click here to listen to the entire show. 59:50 min.

Book Lauch:
Feb. 25, 7 - 9 PM
Frank Bette Center of the Arts
1601 Peru St
Alameda, CA

Dispatches from Lesbian America
Dispatches from Lesbian America is a collection of more than forty works of short fiction and memoir from contemporary writers, some newly emerging and some well-known. Unique in recent lesbian anthologies, these thoughtful stories address themes meaningful to us in the modern world.