Distinguished Historical Geography Lecture: Carceral Space and the Usable Past

Abstract

I am among a second generation of American feminist historical geographers. My advisor Jeanne Kay Guelke was a pioneer in the field, offering in the 1980s and 1990s some of the most incisive critiques of the masculinism of American historical geography.1 I was lucky to become her student while she also served as chair of the Geography Department at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in the early 1990s; I think she was probably one of the first women to serve as such in the country. There are not many of us who would—then or now—self-identify as “feminist historical geographers,” though of course our work overlaps with that of scholars in many closely aligned fields such as critical historical geography, postcolonial studies, and feminist history and historiography. Nonetheless, it is important to pause and consider what the early feminist historical geographers and historians accomplished for us and for geography. Thanks to predecessors such as Jeanne, we can now take for granted altered notions about what events, places, processes, and especially people count in and for historical geography. They demanded new ways of thinking about traditional areas of historical geography research (e.g. settlement patterns, staple export production, and types of survey systems), and offered whole new scales and categories of study such as the home, domestic space, and social reproduction to do so. Of course what’s “in” and what’s “out” is always in flux. Thus one of the few areas where feminist historical geography aligned with critical race studies, for instance, was in colonial and postcolonial geographies.2 These, however, are now susceptible to drifting into the background, and places of colonial contact with them. We do not want to lose that foothold, though, and one way to keep race relations deeply in the mix is through historical carceral geographies, the subject of this paper. I recently became interested in critical prison studies as an activist—as a volunteer and now decade-long executive board member of a local nonprofit prisoner rights group called the Lewisburg Prison Project or LPP. The project’s focus is on conditions of confinement; that is, helping to protect the civil and human rights of inmates incarcerated in the 50+ prisons located in the Pennsylvania Middle (judicial) District. Where I live in Pennsylvania unfortunately has one of the highest concentrations of correctional facilities anywhere in the United States. Prisons are the second largest industry in Pennsylvania overall, and the state’s incarceration rate continues to outpace all the other US states.3 Recently, inspired by my association with LLP, my work has become more scholarly-activist in nature. I am presently working on a number of projects related to historical geographies of mass incarceration in the US and the “spatial violence” of late modern

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