No Mercy Here
Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity
By Sarah Haley
360 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 10 halftones, 2 tables, appends., notes, bibl., index
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Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4696-5222-1
Published: February 2019 -
eBook ISBN: 978-1-4696-2760-1
Published: February 2016
Justice, Power, and Politics
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Awards & distinctions
Selected for the National Book Foundationâs 2020-2021 Literature for Justice Reading List
2017 Joan Kelly Memorial Prize, American Historical Association
2017 Lora Romero First Book Publication Prize, American Studies Association
2016 Letitia Woods Brown Book Award, Association of Black Women Historians
2016 Sara A. Whaley Prize, National Women's Studies Association
Willie Lee Rose Prize, Southern Association for Women Historians
Julia Cherry Spruill Prize, Southern Association for Women Historians
A landmark history of black womenâs imprisonment in the South, this book recovers stories of the captivity and punishment of black women to demonstrate how the system of incarceration was crucial to organizing the logics of gender and race, and constructing Jim Crow modernity.
About the Author
Sarah Haley is assistant professor of gender studies and African American studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.
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Reviews
âHaley offers an important analysis of a particular group of women: prisoners in Georgia from 1868 to the early 20th century. Astutely mining archival records, the author offers no soft edge to chronicle the âunrepresentableâ violence against incarcerate women, especially those of color. Highly recommended.ââCHOICE
âExplores the fate of black women convicted in the southern United States and Georgia in particular. . . . Reconstructs the course of dozens of women.ââChamp Penal
âContributes immensely to US southern, economic, gender, and political history.ââSouthern Spaces
âNo 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 resistanceâto 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.â--Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original
"Sarah Haleyâs compelling study of black womenâs 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 resistanceâan unacknowledged dimension of the Black Radical Traditionâfrom 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
âNo Mercy Here is a brilliant account of black women and imprisonment. Haleyâs 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.â--Saidiya Hartman, author of Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route
Multimedia & Links
Follow the author of Twitter @sahaley.