This chapter traces the emergence of African American confinement literature in the contemporary African American literary tradition over the past six decades, paying careful attention to the subfield’s examination of racialized and gendered confinement in spaces that include but also extend beyond the carceral geographies of jail and prison. Highlighting the centrality of the literary work of former political prisoner and prison abolitionist Angela Y. Davis to the origins and development of this subfield, this chapter demonstrates how works of African American confinement literature fundamentally eclipse the narrow categorization of “prison writing.” These works explore confinement as both a complicated metaphor for and a recurring lived experience within socially and psychically constricting systems of anti-Black racism, gendered social control, racialized economic exploitation, political repression, and incarceration. In sum, authors of contemporary African American confinement literature draw compelling parallels between the confining racist and sexist institutions and practices from previous eras – such as slavery, the convict lease system, chain gang camps, peonage, lynching, and Jim Crow – and those that persist in the contemporary US carceral state, including racial profiling, state violence, prisoner abuse, policing, and the prison-industrial complex.

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 examines contemporary New Abolitionism as it redefined human trafficking law in Mexico. Until 2012, Mexico’s federal law understood human trafficking consistent with the United Nations protocol as action, means, and purpose. Under the ultra-right presidential administration of Felipe Calderón Hinojosa (2006–2012), New Abolitionists attained a level of national political influence and mounted a successful campaign to replace existing law with legislation defining human trafficking as slavery. New Abolitionists likewise framed human trafficking as a lucrative activity of drug cartel networks. Linking human trafficking to international organized crime fostered a new alliance between Calderón and President George W. Bush based on mutual national security interests against cartel violence and a shared view that human trafficking included sex work. With the advance of the General Law, although dubious according to labor rights and feminist critics, Neo-Abolitionism gained traction within anti-feminicide (feminicidio) circles as a potential legal instrument to fight gender violence and sexual exploitation. The drift of anti-feminicide politics toward Neo-Abolitionism, although incomplete, departed from customary feminist advocacy of labor and sex worker rights for greater individual freedoms. In such reconfigurations, violent and often lethal security measures to combat the war on drugs transferred to the fight against human trafficking.