Carcerally Speaking: Fact Patterns and Practices of Speech Unfreedoms

Abstract This essay looks at the limitations of the legal purchase of “freedom of speech” in relation to what the author terms “speech unfreedoms” or “carcerally speaking,” both expressions understood as conditions of utterance inflected and curtailed by structural racism. The essay examines the work of artists and writers whose work speaks to current political struggles over free speech, due process, bodily autonomy, and racial pessimism.