Ideas on a black feminist interpretive framework for understanding experiences of convict leasing

Following emancipation, Southern states weaponized the criminal legal system to reenslave marginalized populations through felony convict leasing, a form of coerced labor that persisted from 1868 to 1928. Despite the system’s scale and significant social impacts, archaeological investigations of convict-leasing sites remain rare. This article advances an interpretive framework for the archaeology of convict leasing that centers the lived experiences of prisoners through an intersectional lens grounded in Black feminist theory, particularly Black geographies and Black feminist archaeology. Using the Lone Rock Stockade (40GY78), a late-nineteenth-century privately owned and operated convict-lease prison in Grundy County, Tennessee, as a case study, the article explores how race and gender structured incarceration, labor, and spatial control within the carceral landscape. Adapting Whitney Battle-Baptiste’s functional plantation model to the context of industrial prison labor, this framework identifies four overlapping spatial realms – carceral, extractive, disciplined, and unsettled – that reveal how power, resistance, and identity were negotiated spatially within the convict lease system. Through this synthesis, the article demonstrates how respatializing Black experience and foregrounding gendered racial oppression expand archaeological understandings of forced labor, challenge documentary silences, and reframe postbellum carceral sites as dynamic spaces of both domination and resistance.