Sarah Haley. No Mercy Here

Sarah Haley’s study of women’s imprisonment in the South represents a significant and exciting development in the history of Jim Crow racial apartheid. The stories of convict-leasing camps, penitentiaries, and chain gangs document how the histories of racial terror and industrial capitalism intertwined in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the sweep of violence and resistance that it masters, this book is as breathtaking as it is poignant. Haley takes some genre-breaking risks that enhance the analytic reach of No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity. In addition to close readings of poetry and music, there is a section of speculative narrative (fully disclosed in the text) that invites the reader in to ponder a historical possibility through a well-imagined intimacy between two subjects. No Mercy Here is structured chronologically and thematically. Haley starts by examining constructions of black women’s deviance as it was created by southern carceral regimes. She demonstrates how journalists represented various female convicts differently to underscore the femininity of white women, which negated the humanity of black women. The process of “queering” black women prisoners portrayed them as crazy, uncontrollable, and less intelligent than white women. Cultural representations of criminality, Haley shows, became important contrasts for signifying the humanity and femininity of white women, whom judges and parole boards rewarded with pardons and clemency far more often than they did black women. These portrayals and the imagined capacity of black women for hard labor contributed to what Haley describes as their supposed “hyperimprisonability” (77).

Art · Art history · Convict · Criminology · Femininity · Humanity · Imprisonment · Jazz · Literature · Modernity · Narrative · Political science · Sociology · White (mutation) · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies