Susila Gurusami: “An Extra/ordinary Rending: Carcerally Conditioning Black Motherhood”

An Extra/ordinary Rending: Carcerally Conditioning Black Motherhood

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When: Dec 1, 2020 04:00 PM Central Time (US and Canada) 

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Prison abolition scholarship often traces the origins of the prison and carceral logics back to racial-chattel slavery, identifying the long historical continuity of anti-Black enslavement logics into present practices of carceral captivity. Among these practices, what is often named as “family separation” in scholarship on incarceration, immigrant detention, and other forms of carceral enclosure remains a rallying cry for reformers, who write and speak of “collateral consequences” and other euphemisms to name the intergenerational pain and punishment that ensues as a result. Such scholarship and activism rightly names that incarceration is a multigenerational, communal form of punishment that ensnares and entangles those beyond the person who is formally sentenced. But what is lost when we seek to understand impacts on the family as secondary, as though such the experiences of children with incarcerated parents are afterthoughts of state violence and not evidence of how the state targets Black families by design? What might we fail to account for, when the terms we use do not capture the affective reality of being torn apart—for both Black mothers and their children—under the legal allowances of state captivity?

 Placing the analyses of formerly incarcerated Black mothers in conversation with Saidiya Hartman’s definition of “the slave as a stranger,” I illustrate how the selling of Black children and mothers under racial-chattel slavery have modernized into the celling of Black children and mothers under incarceration. The result—the state legally denying and disrupting kinship bonds between Black mothers and their children by trying to make them strangers to each other—endures in the afterlife of slavery. This beyond family separation, or a collateral consequence of incarceration. This is a rending.

 This work of estranging Black mothers from their children is an extra/ordinary form of statemaking and world breaking. It is entirely ordinary, in that it is not new, and it is also a feature of everyday lifea for so many Black mothers and their children. It is, however, extraordinary, that we as a collective society have cultivated such animosity and indifference to Black motherhood that we still accept Black children being ripped away from their mothers as a condition of relative normalcy. Whether through maternal incarceration, the foster care system, children’s incarceration, or police murders of Black people, the extraordinary lengths to which our legal system will to go in order to estrange Black mothers from their children and justify this estrangement as public safety is perpetually on display in our everyday world. In other words, the state commits extraordinary violence against Black families through ordinary governance—and particularly through carceral punishment.

This talk, drawn from my book manuscript focusing on the experiences of formerly incarcerated Black women in Los Angeles, unpacks how these carceral conditions bear on the relationship between Black mothers and their children in the afterlife of slavery. Drawing on the legal concept of extraordinary rendition, defined as “secret or forcible rendition of a suspected criminal to another country, often a country known to violate human rights and due process of law,” I argue that the state aims to condition Black families into white supremacist governance by carcerally attacking Black motherhood. I name this governance strategy extra/ordinary rending, which I characterize as the state’s profound violation of the relationship between Black mothers and their children via carceral logics, practices, and institutions. I contend that extraordinary rending reveals how Black mothering is always a fugitive practice, and one that reveals how Black maternal love as both action and affect are foundational to feminist abolition futurities. 

Dr. Susila Gurusami is a sociologist of race, gender, punishment, and labor, with particular interests in carceral governance. She received her PhD in sociology from UCLA in 2017 and is a former University of California Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow. Her work has been published in Gender & Society, Social Problems, and Punishment and Society. Recognition for this scholarship include funding and awards from the American Sociological Association, Sociologists for Women in Society, Society for the Study of Social Problems, and the Racial Democracy, Crime, and Justice Network. She is currently writing a book manuscript titled Making it Home: Race, Gender, and Carceral Migration.