ABSTRACT
We are living in a time in which more than ever, as James Baldwin presciently wrote in his beautifully moving open letter to then imprisoned black radical Angela Y. Davis, ‘Americans … measure their safety in chains and corpses’ (Baldwin 2011: 255). We are living in a time of ‘chains and corpses’, death, loss and mourning, of outrage and activism in response to mass incarceration, mass detention and deportation, HIV criminalization, AIDS phobia and the ongoing AIDS epidemic, anti-queer and anti-trans police violence. Mass incarceration is the normalized backdrop on which the ideological screen of ‘post-racial’ neoliberalism is projected. The carceral and military industrial complexes are figured as necessary institutions safeguarding the American neoliberal scene and as providing a haven for ‘diversity’ through the enforcement of ‘hate crime’ legislation and DADT. Is this the dream of inclusion?
