The concluding two chapters take up cultural responses to the ongoing violence perpetuated by mass incarceration and the global cycles of warfare and terror. Dennis R. Childs examines narratives of immobility based on police and state violence, imprisonment, and detention and deportation at national borders. He argues that “anti-carceral hip-hop” is the “aesthetic practice [that] represents the quintessential storytelling method for those most commonly targeted for police killing and imprisonment.” Reading hip-hop narratives within a “long twenty-first century” of radical literary, political, and musical practices since the 1970s, he links recent works by Dead Prez, Reyna Grande, Ann Jaramillo, Kendrick Lamar, Monifa Love, Main Source, Invincible, and Askari X to those of James Baldwin, Angela Davis, Public Enemy, Chester Himes, George Jackson, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Assata Shakur, and Malcolm X.

This chapter traces how historical analogies have enabled the use of the terms slavery and abolition in both the anti-trafficking and the anti-incarceration communities. By placing the often-contradictory approaches these two communities bring to the history of slavery, we trace how a belief in historical progress and an emotional investment in the power of innocence – both concepts embedded in our understanding of childhood – have helped to forge vexed and contradictory definitions of both slavery and freedom. Ultimately we argue that the complex work of historical analogy requires us to imagine history, and the solutions we create in response to history, outside of a developmental model that views the degradation of enslavement a stage we can outgrow or discard.