ABSTRACT
The Louisiana State Penitentiary (Angola) is a site embedded with historical legacies of plantation slavery and settler colonialism; as the largest maximum state security penitentiary in the United States, the prison also reflects the racial injustice of contemporary US mass incarceration. Situated on the site of an old plantation, the prison hosts the Angola Rodeo twice a year, an event that crystallizes violent multispecies social relations in the merging of the US West and South as two distinct kinds of colonial projects. Whereas much scholarship and activism has worked against the wholesale dehumanization inherent in chattel slavery, settler colonialism, and mass incarceration, this chapter works to interrogate and disrupt the human–animal binary through which processes of dehumanization are sustained. Drawing together postcolonial studies and animal studies, the chapter centers empirical research on the Angola Rodeo to highlight how racialization and anthropocentrism are intertwined logics of subordination and exclusion that carry forward into the present. Ultimately, the chapter suggests the need for a mode of analysis and action that does not maintain the subordination of the animal, and, instead, takes a de-anthropocentric and decolonial approach to injustice.
