Spatializing Blackness

"Shabazz does an excellent job of demonstrating how Black Chicago's prisonscapes leave little place for the presence of black masculinity to exist without feeling like a fugitive."--Society and Space
 

"An important and timely book that should be widely read and carefully discussed." --Environment, Space, Place

"In Spatializing Blackness Shabazz elucidates how the carceral operates in the everyday lives of Black Chicago. In doing so he forges a new historical geography of Blackness that provides a path for others to follow."--Laura Pulido, author of Black, Brown, Yellow, and Left: Radical Activism in Los Angeles

"Rashad Shabazz's Spatializing Blackness: Architectures of Confinement and Black Masculinity in Chicago answers this question with particular attention to the lives (and deaths) of black men in Chicago from the Progressive era through 2015. . . . The book's organization, its argumentative imaginativeness, and its author's great conviction in its importance are its greatest strengths. . . . If readers would like to get a sense of the "architectures of confinement" that defined poor black living in Chicago, there Shabazz is rhetorically strongest." --H-Net Reviews

"Beautifully crafted. . . . Rashad Shabazz makes an indelible contribution to the complex study of racial formations as they intertwine with emergent Black masculinities."--Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Book Reviews

"An original work that teases out how the question of black masculinity has been linked to different processes of confinement and imprisonment with carceral power--both inside and outside the prison industrial complex--shaping and relegating black lives and inciting acts of preventable death."--Katherine McKittrick, author of Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle

"An engaging, interdisciplinary, historically situated examination of the creation of 'carceral' space in Chicago as a constituting dimension of the city's modern policing and de facto segregation of black people and communities. The work makes use of several vital intellectual traditions to make its case and thus pushes against dominant scholarly narratives of Chicago's racial-gender social formations."--Dylan Rodriguez, author of Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime

"Highlights the crucial importance of the racialization of space, the role of containment in maintaining the subordination of black people, and the politics of mobility under conditions of 'freedom.'"--Tricia Rose, author of The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk about When We Talk about Hip Hop--and Why It Matters