Over 277,000 African Americans migrated to Chicago between 1900 and 1940, an influx unsurpassed in any other northern city. From the start, carceral powers literally and figuratively created a prison-like environment to contain these African Americans within the so-called Black Belt on the city's South Side.

A geographic study of race and gender, Spatializing Blackness casts light upon the ubiquitous—and ordinary—ways carceral power functions in places where African Americans live. Moving from the kitchenette to the prison cell, and mining forgotten facts from sources as diverse as maps and memoirs, Rashad Shabazz explores the myriad architectures of confinement, policing, surveillance, urban planning, and incarceration. In particular, he investigates how the ongoing carceral effort oriented and imbued black male bodies and gender performance from the Progressive Era to the present. The result is an essential interdisciplinary study that highlights the racialization of space, the role of containment in subordinating African Americans, the politics of mobility under conditions of alleged freedom, and the ways black men cope with—and resist—spacial containment.

A timely response to the massive upswing in carceral forms within society, Spatializing Blackness examines how these mechanisms came to exist, why society aimed them against African Americans, and the consequences for black communities and black masculinity both historically and today.

| Cover Title Contents Preface: Geographic Lessons Acknowledgments Carceral Matters: An Introduction 1. Policing Interracial Sex: Mapping Black Male Location in Chicago during the Progressive Era 2. "Our Prison": Kitchenettes, Carceral Power, and Black Masculinity during the Interwar Years 3. Carceral Interstice: Between Home Space and Prison Space 4. "Sores in the City": A Genealogy of the Almighty Black P. Stone Rangers 5. Ghost Mapping: The Geography of Risk in Black Chicago Epilogue. Fertile Ground Notes Bibliography Index | "Shabazz does an excellent job of demonstrating how Black Chicago's prisonscapes leave little place for the presence of black masculinity to exist without feeling like a fugitive."—Society and Space

"An important and timely book that should be widely read and carefully discussed." —Environment, Space, Place
"In Spatializing Blackness Shabazz elucidates how the carceral operates in the everyday lives of Black Chicago. In doing so he forges a new historical geography of Blackness that provides a path for others to follow."—Laura Pulido, author of Black, Brown, Yellow, and Left: Radical Activism in Los Angeles
|Rashad Shabazz is an associate professor in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University and was previously assistant professor of geography at the University of Vermont.