A01=Kristina Shull
Author_Kristina Shull
carceral studies
Caribbean studies
Category=JBFH
Category=JPP
Central America
Cold War
critical refugee studies
Cuba
El Salvador civil war
empire
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
ethnic studies
foreign relations
gender
Haiti
immigration detention centers
immigration enforcement
immigration policy and law
Mariel Cuban boatlift
migration
prisons and policing
protest and social movements
race and racism
refugees and asylum
Ronald Reagan
the Sanctuary movement
United States foreign policy
war and militarism
War on Drugs
Product details
- ISBN 9781469669861
- Weight: 363g
- Dimensions: 153 x 231mm
- Publication Date: 04 Oct 2022
- Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
The early 1980s marked a critical turning point for the rise of modern mass incarceration in the United States. The Mariel Cuban migration of 1980, alongside increasing arrivals of Haitian and Central American asylum-seekers, galvanized new modes of covert warfare in the Reagan administration's globalized War on Drugs. Using newly available government documents, Shull demonstrates how migrant detention operates as a form of counterinsurgency at the intersections of U.S. war-making and domestic carceral trends. As the Reagan administration developed retaliatory enforcement measures to target a racialized specter of mass migration, it laid the foundations of new forms of carceral and imperial expansion.
Reagan's war on immigrants also sowed seeds of mass resistance. Drawing on critical refugee studies, community archives, protest artifacts, and oral histories, Detention Empire also shows how migrants resisted state repression at every turn. People in detention and allies on the outside—including legal advocates, Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition, and the Central American peace and Sanctuary movements—organized hunger strikes, caravans, and prison uprisings to counter the silencing effects of incarceration and speak truth to U.S. empire. As the United States remains committed to shoring up its borders in an era of unprecedented migration and climate crisis, reckoning with these histories take on new urgency.
Reagan's war on immigrants also sowed seeds of mass resistance. Drawing on critical refugee studies, community archives, protest artifacts, and oral histories, Detention Empire also shows how migrants resisted state repression at every turn. People in detention and allies on the outside—including legal advocates, Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition, and the Central American peace and Sanctuary movements—organized hunger strikes, caravans, and prison uprisings to counter the silencing effects of incarceration and speak truth to U.S. empire. As the United States remains committed to shoring up its borders in an era of unprecedented migration and climate crisis, reckoning with these histories take on new urgency.
Kristina Shull is assistant professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
