ABSTRACT
In the mapping of global struggles for subjective reemergence from state domination and oppression in the neoliberal age, one fascinating form of resistance comes from Pinta/o, or Chicana/o prisoner, poets in the United States. Written from deep within systems of carcéral control, their poetry exposes and contests the ontological, social, political, and material violence of the U.S. prison regime. It is argued that a layered network of violences is constitutive of the state, not tangential to it. Furthermore that violent process of state formation is posited as a function of neoliberal subjectivation. Consequently the prison can be theorized as an important threshold: It becomes both a site and an episteme of neoliberal (re) subjectivation. That is, the prison is a locus for the violence of subjectivation as well as a logic of it. To illuminate and critique such violence, this essay performs close readings of the Pinto poetry of Jimmy Santiago Baca to inaugurate and foreground a specifically poetic argument about the interrelation of subjectivity, neoliberalism, and U.S. carcéral culture.
