Forging Black Safety in the Carceral Diaspora: Perverse Criminalization, Sexual Corrections, and Connection-Making in a Death World

Former political prisoner Stella Nyanzi intimately and passionately writes, on any surface available, of conditions in Luzira Womens Prison, Kampala, Uganda. Nyanzi, a beloved academic, gender justice activist, mother, and now poet, refused silencing. Instead, she slipped her fugitive poetry through prison bars and into the international spotlight with the help of the radical publishers of Ubuntu Reading Group. The feminist anthropologist writes of her experiences and observations: the cruel and perverse reality of criminalization, the sexuality and humanity of those imprisoned, the drastic loss and suffering produced by a regime of punishment under the Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni. However, reading within and through her text, Rodriguez sthat Nyanzi exposes much more while incarcerated. Her words reveal the prison as the preeminent sphere of social, economic, political, and physical death throughout the African diaspora: a carceral death world that exists to stifle Black dissent.