Containing the Surplus Rebellion: Prison Strike/Prison Riot

Stark Alejo ()
Additional contact information
Stark Alejo: University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

New Global Studies, 2020, vol. 14, issue 2, 193-203

Abstract: The 2016 and 2018 wave of prison strikes in the United States presents itself as an extraordinary flashpoint of the prisoner resistance movement. But how might these events be understood in relation to what has been broadly characterized as an “age of riots”? Following Joshua Clover’s characterization of the contemporary riot in Riot. Strike. Riot. as a “surplus rebellion” of racialized “surplus populations” and given the characterization of the contemporary carceral state as a warehouse to contain such racialized populations, this essay characterizes the contemporary wave of prison riots accordingly as a “surplus rebellion.” More specifically, it focuses on the Kinross prison strike-riot that broke out in September 2016 in Michigan’s Kinross prison in order to derive some general parallels between the surplus rebellion and the singularity of recent prison strikes.

Keywords: prison strike; riots; carceral state; racial capitalism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1515/ngs-2020-0015 (text/html)
For access to full text, subscription to the journal or payment for the individual article is required.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bpj:nglost:v:14:y:2020:i:2:p:193-203:n:9

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/ngs/html

DOI: 10.1515/ngs-2020-0015

Access Statistics for this article

New Global Studies is currently edited by Nayan Chanda, Akira Iriye and Saskia Sassen

More articles in New Global Studies from De Gruyter
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().