From the 1811 German Coast Slave Rebellion to the 1971 Attica Prison Uprising, from the truancy of enslaved women to the extreme self-discipline exercised by prisoners in solitary confinement, Black Americans have, through time, resisted racial regimes in extraordinary and everyday ways. Though these acts of large and small-scale resistance to slavery and incarceration are radical and transformative, they have often gone unnoticed. This book is about Black rebellion in captivity and the ways that many of the conventional well-worn constructs of academic political theory render its political dimensions obscure and indiscernible. While Hannah Arendt is an unlikely theorist to figure prominently in any discussion of Black politics, her concepts of world and worldlessness offer an indispensable framework for articulating a theory of resistance to chattel and carceral captivity. Politics in Captivity begins by taking seriously the ways in which slavery and incarceration share important comm
