No Mercy Here

“No Mercy Here is the most important contribution to U.S. labor history to appear in the last fifteen years. With theoretical sophistication, breathtaking archival depth, and historical imagination, Sarah Haley tells a compelling story of how the criminal punishment system, through which the state policed and exploited black working-class women, laid the foundation of Jim Crow modernity. But this is also a story of resistance—to captivity, to capital, to the carceral state. Poets, bards, philosophers, saboteurs, these women acted on dreams of revenge, retaliation, and flight; laughed and loved in the face of terror; and built an architecture of opposition that confounded the state.”--Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original

"Sarah Haley’s compelling study of black women’s quotidian encounters with post-slavery systems of punishment generates original insights regarding the role of gendered carcerality in the persistence of racial violence today. No Mercy Here also reveals a long line of resistance—an unacknowledged dimension of the Black Radical Tradition—from minor disruptions and acts of sabotage to poetic ruptures in the expressive culture of the blues."--Angela Y. Davis, Distinguished Professor Emerita, University of California, Santa Cruz

“No Mercy Here is a brilliant account of black women and imprisonment. Haley’s interdisciplinary breadth has enabled her to produce a history of the carceral system that defines the constituents of Jim Crow modernity, detailing the primacy of gender and sexual violence as techniques of racial terror, capitalist production, and historical dispossession. In its painstaking explication of the emergence of a modern racial order in which black life remains in peril, this groundbreaking text is certain to transform our understanding of the afterlife of slavery.”--Saidiya Hartman, author of Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route