The contributions of the writers attest to the immediacy of the many questions that have arisen concerning "political prisoners and detainees," across the globe. The insecurity narratives of the neo-conservative politics and state institutions of control that grip much of the West, would have us believe that the attacks of September 11, 2001, constitute a breach with the past that has moved us to a new reality, exemplified by the need for a war on terror. Indeed in U.S.A., with its global imperialist entanglements, the public and private narratives appear to assume that a new world order has emerged. The benefits of this conclusion for established criminal justice and carceral industries are considerable. Roll backs of human and civil rights, the suspension of the rule of law, abrogation of the United Nations' Minimum Rules of Imprisonment, career advancement, and profit for industrial players, all serve established interests of the prison-industrial complex.

Over 277,000 African Americans migrated to Chicago between 1900 and 1940, an influx unsurpassed in any other northern city. From the start, carceral powers literally and figuratively created a prison-like environment to contain these African Americans within the so-called Black Belt on the city's South Side. A geographic study of race and gender, Spatializing Blackness casts light upon the ubiquitous--and ordinary--ways carceral power functions in places where African Americans live. Moving from the kitchenette to the prison cell, and mining forgotten facts from sources as diverse as maps and memoirs, Rashad Shabazz explores the myriad architectures of confinement, policing, surveillance, urban planning, and incarceration. In particular, he investigates how the ongoing carceral effort oriented and imbued black male bodies and gender performance from the Progressive Era to the present. The result is an essential interdisciplinary study that highlights the racialization of space, the role of containment in subordinating African Americans, the politics of mobility under conditions of alleged freedom, and the ways black men cope with--and resist--spacial containment. A timely response to the massive upswing in carceral forms within society, Spatializing Blackness examines how these mechanisms came to exist, why society aimed them against African Americans, and the consequences for black communities and black masculinity both historically and today.