Cannibal Time responds to the commonly heard refrain condemning the contemporary racism of the political world, 'but we are better than that!'. This book demonstrates that 'we' are not 'better' as it narrates the history of that European-imposed carceral regime that has transformed, and, sadly, continues to transform, the entire geographical and epistemological worlds of North America. Seeking the origins of today's world of mass incarceration, where a powerful white overculture imprisons millions of those from the U.S.'s racialized communities, the book tracks a number of conjunctures, beginning with the Pilgrim/Puritan conquest of New England and the English importation of enslaved Africans. From these early chapters, the book moves across the continent, stopping to explore the landscapes of enslavement, of prison reservations, of indoctrinating Indian boarding schools, of the first large-scale solitary confinement penitentiaries, and the post-war world of Jim Crow, focusing in each of these chapters on the myriad ways racial capitalism spread across the land and shaped every kind of life. In the 19th century, people from Asia and the Pacific arrived on the continent where they were quickly the objects of exclusion mechanisms, culminating in the infamous Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. The processes of racializing those immigrants from China and Korea soon caught up those from Japan, whose history drove straight from the early days of white racism to the terrible history of the incarceration of those of Japanese descent through the years of World War II. Last, the work explores the specific history of today's mass imprisonment in California, where those of Mexican origin predominate. This chapter explores how the racialization of 'Mexicans' from the founding of the state in the mid-19th century to the present world of mass incarceration, characterized by the extreme brutality of extended solitary confinement, led, finally, to the mass hunger strikes that ultimately ended the practice of long-term sentences to solitary cells in the state's prisons. The book concludes with a deep look into the growing universe created by the racist forces massed to condemn and imprison all those members of immigrant communities of color whose presence within the U.S. lacks the certifications required by immigration laws. Massive privately-run, highly profitable ICE detention warehouses now dot the landscape, their numbers growing daily within the unregulated, secret and opaque worlds of the current administration's vicious racism deployed under the aegis of 'Homeland Security.'
