“So high you can't get over it, so low you can't get under it”: Carceral spatiality and black masculinities in the united states and south africa

Carceral or prison space and the techniques that make prison punishment possible shape Black living and working space and in turn influence Black masculine performance. This essay uses the Robert Taylor Housing Projects—a notorious project on Chicago’s South Side—and South Africa’s mining compounds, as case studies. It exhumes the carceral logic that underwrote these spaces by highlighting how the project and the mine compound drew on containment, policing, surveillance, and restrictive architecture to fix Blacks spatially. It also explores how the prisonization of these quotidian spaces profoundly shaped Black male subjectivity, thus giving rise to a carcerally inflected Black masculinity, made visible through the performance of prison masculinities, embodiment of carceral aesthetics, and transference of sexual politics from prisons to other carceral sites.