No Mercy Here

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries imprisoned black women faced wrenching forms of gendered racial terror and heinous structures of economic exploitation. Subjugated as convict laborers and forced to serve additional time as domestic workers before they were allowed their freedom, black women faced a pitiless system of violence, terror, and debasement. Drawing upon black feminist criticism and a diverse array of archival materials, Sarah Haley uncovers imprisoned women’s brutalization in local, county, and state convict labor systems, while also illuminating the prisoners’ acts of resistance and sabotage, challenging ideologies of racial capitalism and patriarchy and offering alternative conceptions of social and political life. A landmark history of black women’s 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.

Additional ISBNs: 1469652226, 9781469652221

No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity is written by Sarah Haley and published by The University of North Carolina Press. The Digital and eTextbook ISBNs for No Mercy Here are 9781469627601, 1469627604 and the print ISBNs are 9781469627595, 1469627590.