This chapter addresses the phenomenon of incarcerated writers who self-identify as “state raised”: bound to state-sponsored spaces of involuntary confinement (including foster care, juvenile detention, jails, and prisons) from childhood. The chapter begins with Kenneth E. Hartman’s reading of the work of Jack Henry Abbott; its second half, by Doran Larson, addresses the work of Kenneth E. Hartman. The chapter presents writers for whom legal confinement has formed the majority of their lived experience and who thus bring uniquely troubled while familiar (verging on the familial) perspectives to the explication of and reflection on legal caging and the writing that emerges from it.

The TV series Orange Is the New Black(2013–2019), created by Jenji Kohan, became a site through which to contest and explore Black gender nonconformity in ways rarely seen on popular television. In its first season, the show’s depictions of Black gender-nonconforming characters – Suzanne Warren (Uzo Aduba) and Sophia Burset (Laverne Cox) – produce variable results. This chapter argues that the middle-class back story of Burset as a firefighter produces a plea for relatability, distancing her from the common experiences of transwomen of color who might typically be imprisoned in the US. By contrast, the character of Warren is depicted as anti-assimilationist and threatening to the prison system, even as her characterization draws on racial and gender prison stereotypes. The exploration of Black gender nonconformity complicates historical tropes of Black women in prison with varied results, providing insight into ideologies of criminal behavior, queerness, and blackness.

Whether it took the form of plantations in the South, penitentiaries in the North, or military camps in the West, the purpose of prison in early America was to contain the freed slave, the sinner, the indigenous, and the outlaw. Prison did not just incapacitate them but also constituted them as other. As Caleb Smith puts it, prison is “one of the primary sites through which the very idea of modern humanity is imagined and contested” in America.1 Stephen Hartnett elaborates that “debates about crime, violence, and punishment helped colonials and then Americans to focus their thinking” about “identity and character, gender and sexuality, class and capitalism, religion and modernity, race and slavery, and the Enlightenment and democracy.”2

Hemingway’s work was well received from the moment he began to publish. Some of the key ways in which his work has been read were established from the beginning, as critics identified the core elements of Hemingway’s emergent style and as they responded to his resonant themes. Later generations of academic critics, however, brought to bear on Hemingway’s stories and novels the shifting frameworks that would emerge, become dominant, and linger residually in the institutions of literary studies. Chief among the frameworks that would enrich the reading of Hemingway’s work in subsequent decades were the attention to matters of gender and sexuality made legible by feminism and queer theory in the 1980s and 1990s and the attention to race as inextricable from the construction and focalization of Hemingway’s narratives in the 1990s and 2000s. Most recently, the rise of postcolonial studies, ecocriticism, and critical disability studies has enabled fresh readings of the work, readings that keep it alive in current cultural debates. Throughout these changes, attention to Hemingway’s achievements in narrative form continues to be important, and it is as a crafter of sentences, and of narratives from carefully constructed sentences, that Hemingway continues to influence fiction writers.

Albert Woodfox was incarcerated for forty-three years and ten months in Louisiana’s prison system, almost entirely in solitary confinement. His memoir, Solitary, foregrounds an intense entanglement of antiblack captivity and carceral confinement within the prison plantation known as Louisiana State Penitentiary, Angola. This chapter articulates critical moments in Albert’s life that transcend the boundaries of narration and description in order to uncover his knowledge of social death and slavery’s carceral afterlife. From internalizing and accepting racialized abuse at the hands of the criminal legal system during his youth, to witnessing mass captivity and racial terror inside Angola’s prison plantation, to facing a lifetime of separation from kin while surviving political retaliation under the torturous conditions of prolonged solitary confinement, Albert’s narrative reveals how the logics and architectures of slavery’s past endure as the social foundations to present-day mass incarceration.

The USA as a prison where Black people are confined inside a barbed wire of stereotypes – an idea memorably articulated by Malcolm X in 1963 – is influentially explored in works by Amiri Baraka, Etheridge Knight, and Reginald Dwayne Betts, a three-man mini-tradition within prison writing. Circumstances leading to Baraka’s experience of solitary confinement (memorably chronicled in his 1979 poem “AM/TRACK”) are the subject of the first third of the chapter. Etheridge Knight, who in prison forged his own poetic path out of tools provided partly by Malcolm and Baraka, is the subject of the next third. The Knight-inspired Reginald Dwayne Betts, a lawyer-poet who was incarcerated as a teenager, is the focus of the rest of the chapter (except for a brief examination of Baraka’s son, Ras, a significant political leader). All four men articulate secrets of survival in the coils of carceral culture and model alternative ways of imagining justice.

This chapter critically engages Assata: An Autobiography by former Black Liberation Army operative and political exile Assata Shakur. The argument examines how Shakur develops psychologically and politically as both a Black revolutionary and a Black revolutionary woman. The chapter offers close readings of the political messages shared throughout Assata then contextualizes Shakur’s frameworks by turning to her experiences as a runaway teen in the Village in New York City. Her story – from childhood until her time being held as a political prisoner – compels attention to how blackness and gender collide and at times collapse. This chapter illustrates how her political communiqué “To My People,” broadcast by Shakur while incarcerated, was informed by the lessons on Black gender and sexual vulnerability she learned from Miss Shirley, a transgender woman who was her surrogate caregiver during her time living in the Village.

Realist narrative genres, such as memoir and autobiography, are the most prevalent women’s prison writing. Contemporary readers rely on these narrative elements in order to believe stories. However, when the writer disassociates during a traumatic event and does not remember details that would ground their telling in recognizable details, their narratives cannot reliably reference them. As incarcerated women authors grapple with what they’ve suffered and what they’ve done, their narratives inevitably intersect with social realities that form the background violence that created the conditions for the discrete, traumatic events of harmdoing. While carceral culture essentializes people into stagnant categories of worth – good/flawed, criminal/victim, innocent/guilty – incarcerated women’s stories show how facile these conceptions are, how much harm they cause, and that incarceration does nothing to address these issues and often actively prohibits healing.

The use of the no-fly zone in the Bosnian civil war remains both underexplored and puzzling on several different levels – for one thing, many otherwise comprehensive accounts reserve only passing mention for what appears to many an unimportant by-product of US foreign policy (or lack thereof; Drew, 1994; Owen, 1997; Burg and Shoup, 1999; Holbrooke, 1999; Chang, 2011). This may be part of a larger trend: biographies and historians’ accounts tend to focus on only a few policies of the early Clinton presidency, and then ‘jump’ to 1995. Scholarly work focusing on the diplomatic, economic and military instruments used in the early stages of the conflict tend to discuss the no-fly zone as one of the many steps in a strategy of coercive diplomacy (Owen, 1997, p 151), with scarce acknowledgement of the intricate political processes surrounding this specific instrument. And yet, a focus on the Bosnian no-fly zone offers both a theoretical perspective on White House decision-making processes, as well as a richer empirical account of deeply flawed American foreign policy toward Bosnia, as it moves beyond broad narratives of ‘containment’ and ‘circumvention’ (David, 1995) to look at the details of foreign policy creation in 1992 and 1993.

The hesitant position of the Bush administration vis-à-vis Bosnia may appear puzzling. The dominance of the US in the international system arguably reached its peak in the early 1990s, as the Soviet Union had crumbled and left the US unrivalled economically or militarily. The US was the only power with the ability to project and the willingness to identify interests globally.