Join Freedom Archives co-director Nathaniel Moore in conversation with American Purgatory author Benjamin Weber at Bandung Books / Eastside Cultural Center in Oakland!
Eastside Cultural Center — 2277 International Blvd. Oakland, CA
Monday Nov. 6 @ 6pm
Registration Link: uc-davis-aas.ticketleap.com/
See you there!
About the Speakers:
Nathaniel Moore is an archivist and co-director at the Freedom Archives. He is also the archivist at the UC Berkeley Ethnic Studies Library at UC Berkeley. He has been active in prisoner support work for the past decade and is the cofounder of an education program focusing on social justice inside of San Quentin State Prison. He is also active in a number of projects working to amplify voices of resistance around the Bay Area.
Benjamin Weber is an assistant professor of African American and African Studies at the University of California, Davis. He has worked at the Vera Institute of Justice, Alternate ROOTS, the Marcus Garvey and UNIA Papers Project, and as a public high school teacher in East Los Angeles. He makes his home in Davis, California.
About American Purgatory: A groundbreaking look at how America exported mass incarceration around the globe, from a rising young historian. In this explosive new book, historian Benjamin Weber reveals how the story of American prisons is inextricably linked to the expansion of American power around the globe. A vivid work of hidden history that spans the wars to subjugate Native Americans in the mid-nineteenth century, the conquest of the western territories, and the creation of an American empire in Panama, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, American Purgatory reveals how “prison imperialism”—the deliberate use of prisons to control restive, subject populations—is written into our national DNA, extending through to our modern era of mass incarceration. Weber also uncovers a surprisingly rich history of prison resistance, from the Seminole Chief Osceola to Assata Shakur—one that invites us to rethink the scope of America’s long freedom struggle. Weber’s brilliantly documented text is supplemented by original maps highlighting the global geography of prison imperialism, as well as illustrations of key figures in this history by the celebrated artist Ayo Scott. For readers of Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, here is a bold new effort to tell the full story of prisons and incarceration—at home and abroad—as well as a powerful future vision of a world without prisons.
