Decolonizing sensory rhetorics and activism in Africana prison memoirs

This papyrus – a preferred term I use throughout this chapter in honour of ancient Africans who invented writing and inscribed knowledge onto papyri – analyses the prison memoirs written by Africans and people of African descent, including those in the diaspora. It explores how prominent writers have reflected on the sensory experience of incarceration or detention from colonial to neocolonial epochs and what these reflections might offer to sensory criminologists who may want to adopt the decolonization paradigm. Sensory criminology, we argue, has the potential to open the eyes, ears, noses, tastes, and feelings of readers of prison memoirs to the abundant references to sensory stimuli that readers may miss if focusing exclusively on the political economy of mass incarceration. The papyrus concludes by saying that sensory criminology, while promising, will not be sufficient enough to meet the needs of people of African descent unless it aligns itself with the broader struggle to decolonize Africa and the rest of the world.