Jasmine Syedullah reviews Rashad Shabazz’s monograph, Spatializing Blackness: Architectures of Confinement and Black Masculinity in Chicago (University of Illinois Press, 2015).
Rashad Shabazz’s Spatializing Blackness: Architectures of Confinement and Black Masculinity in Chicago maps a historical landscape of the everyday contradictions of Black life, laying bear the blind corners and liminal spaces of “possibility and punishment”—the places of precarity, criminalization, and confinement so many call home (page 69). Drawing out both the causal and structural links that conjoin the underdevelopment of Black neighborhoods and the captivity of incarceration, Spatializing Blackness argues that even before Black men enter the prison system they are already inhabiting the prison-like environments and carceral politics of the prison industrial complex in their everyday lives. Shabazz situates his study in his hometown of Chicago, in the seven-by-one-mile stretch on the city’s South Side, an area colloquially known as the Black Belt. His genealogy of Black masculinity begins in the late 1900s and traces the layers of deeply sedimented social, political, and physical containment that define the contours of race and gender formation in the geopolitics of a city notorious for the terrific tragedy of its racial tensions.
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