Scales of Captivity

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In Scales of Captivity, Mary Pat Brady traces the figure of the captive or cast-off child in Latinx and Chicanx literature and art between chattel slavery’s final years and the mass deportations of the twenty-first century. She shows how Latinx expressive practices expose how every rescaling of economic and military power requires new modalities of capture, new ways to bracket and hedge life. Through readings of novels by Helena María Viramontes, Oscar Casares, Lorraine López, Maceo Montoya, Reyna Grande, Daniel Peña, and others, Brady illustrates how submerged captivities reveal the way mechanisms of constraint such as deportability ground institutional forms of carceral modernity and how such practices scale relations by naturalizing the logic of scalar hierarchies underpinning racial capitalism. By showing how representations of the captive child critique the entrenched logic undergirding colonial power, Brady challenges racialized modes of citizenship while offering visions for living beyond borders. Mary Pat Brady traces the figure of the captive and cast-off child over 150 years of Latinx/Chicanx literature as a critique of colonial modernity and the forms of confinement that underpin racialized citizenship. Mary Pat Brady teaches literature and Latinx studies at Cornell University and is the author of Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies: Chicana Literature and the Urgency of Space, also published by Duke University Press. Acknowledgments  ix
Introduction. The Scalar Lien  1
1. Captivating Ties: On Children without Childhoods  37
2. Plausible Deniability: Pursuing the Traces of Captivity  79
3. Submerged Captivities: Moving toward Queer Horizontality  119
4. N + 1: Sex and the Hypervisible (Invisible) Migrant  153
5. Misplaced: Peopling a Deportation Imaginary  197
Conclusion. Density's Resistance to Scale  239
Notes  249
Bibliography  275
Index  293

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