Carceral Ecologies: Incarceration and Hydrological Haunting in Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing

This chapter demonstrates how Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017) merges ghosts, water and prisons to narrate an ongoing trajectory of carceral ecologies in the U.S. South. By invoking the history of Parchman Prison alongside memories of the Middle Passage, Sing, Unburied, Sing provides a lens through which we can develop a concept of hydrological haunting in relation to aqueously mediated captivity and violence. African American activism and scholarship has done much to expose the racialized nature of the US criminal justice system. The ecological features of mass incarceration, however, are rarely acknowledged despite how heavily toxic environments have historically shaped the American carceral experience. In 2016, the Human Rights Defense Center’s Prison Ecology Project began campaigning against the extent to which public policy has failed to recognise the relationship between mass incarceration and environmental degradation, emphasizing the pollution produced by overpopulated prisons and the impact they have on surrounding water ways. Water is thus a medium for reading continuities of ecological violence, from slave ship to penitentiary. This chapter argues that by highlighting the longstanding relationship between water and incarceration, Sing, Unburied, Sing illuminates the ways in which the carceral model of the Middle Passage constellates into the present.