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The classification of all non-Westerners as fundamentally non-historical is tied . . . to the assumption that history requires a linear cumulative sense of time that allows the observer to isolate the past as a distinct entity.
-Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past (1995)
There is a law of progressive dehumanization in accordance with which henceforth on the agenda of the bourgeoisie there is-there can be-nothing but violence, corruption, and barbarism.
-Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (1972)
Worse than the taunts and the threats of the jailers, worse than the tortures they inflicted upon me, worse than the horrible conditions under which I lived, was the way time dragged and dragged for me. Every minute became an eternity of suffering.
-Angelo Herndon, Let Me Live (1937)
In November of 1994, as the number of prisoners in the United States was about to reach 1.6 million,1 the North Carolina Department of Correction (DOC) issued a press release announcing that it had unearthed a relic of America's carceral past at one of its facilities. The release read in part: the "Community Resource Council for the Alexander Correctional Center arranged for the National Guard to forklift the cage out of the mud and vines. The original three-inch concrete floor, a small toilet and braided metal bars are all that remain of the prison cage where 12 convicts slept."2 The news item goes on to point out that "the cage" is one of the two remaining examples in the state of the portable prisons within which, until the 1930s, chain gang captives were hauled from place to place as they were working to build the North Carolina highway system (fig. 1). It then relates how such cages were purchased for $500 apiece from a Georgia company called "Manly Jail Works," which in its advertisement for the "moving prisons" boasted that a "bucket of disinfectant once or twice a month and a bucket of paint once a year will keep this cage clean, sanitary and vermin proof," and that the cage was "officially endorsed by state and county prison boards all over the South."
Early twentieth-century North Carolina chain gang and prison officials more than corroborated the company's claims, stating that the cage allowed for fewer guards at the chain gang...