In a manner similar to Tochi Onyebuchi’s Riot Baby, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s Chain-Gang All-Stars investigates the future through an exploration of the American prison system. Also like Onyebuchi, Brenyah’s focus is on the experience of black people within this system.
This future this novel tells is as dystopian as any, but it is also very different when compared to traditional climate fiction such as Heller’s The Dog Stars or Bacigalupi‘s The Windup Girl. While the novel references global warming and ecological crisis, it does not describe a future where majority society has broken down because of lack of basic resources or food scarcity. Rather, it outlines a tomorrow where existing injustices have not only greatly increased, but also been commodified by a capitalist modernity pushed to the brink.
The environmental historian Jason W. Moore has importantly argued that the crisis that is building on a planetary scale is not just ecological, it is also economic and systemic. In Capitalism and the Web of Life, he writes that global society is ‘experiencing not merely a transition from one phase of capitalism to another, but something more epochal: the breakdown of the strategies and relations that have sustained capital accumulation over the past five centuries’ (13). If capitalism in the past has been able to survive by leaving one depleted plot of land or exhausted mine for a new and fertile section, or for a new dig site or type of mineral, this is a strategy that no longer works. Nature that yields things cheaply is running out. To generate profit, capitalism is forced to employ other strategies, to become more effective and to find new sources of revenue outside nature. The neoliberal gig economy is one example of such effectivization while what Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias have termed ”data colonialism” shows how the capitalist economy has begun to capitalize on the flow of digital information.
Chain-Gang All-Stars outlines a future where both of these strategies have been employed at the cost of the incarcerated. In the novel, the predominantly black prison population is forced to work for the state and for various companies in ways that make them little more than slaves. (There is a notable body of scholarship that observes disturbing similarities between the chattel slavery system and the modern Supermax prison). The work performed by the incarcerated in the novel includes food work such as operating knives and saws in abattoirs. In one key scene of the book, one of the characters is made to saw and cut carcasses ”of soon burger and steak” (55). There is blood and meat everywhere and this particular type of food is both a marker of the carnivorous and insatiable nature of this society and a signal of food inequality since the inmates do not themselves get to consume meat or any other protein-rich Food. Indeed, as we are told in other parts of the novel, ”real food” is not served to inmates in this future.
However, the bodies of the incarcerated is commodified also in another, much more spectacular way. In this future, prison life has become exponentially worse compared to the already terrible present. Not only are prisoners routinely debased and mistreated, new technologies of surveillance and control have been developed. Surgically implanted magnetic bars make it possible to lock people to particular places. These bars are equipped with led lights that shine through the wrists of inmates. A blue light means that you are not allowed to speak or even make a sound. If you violate this or any other rule, you can be treated with the Influencer. This is a device that produces no actual bodily harm, but it does produce hyper sensitivity and extreme, unbearable pain. This is a pain of such magnitude it drives people insane.
For many inside the system, the future seems utterly hopeless. This hopelessness is also taken advantage of when the government, in collaboration with television and other sponsors launch the Criminal Action Penal Entertainment (CAPE) program. Inmates can now opt out of the prison system to instead participate in televised fights to the death. If you survive for three years, you are set free. In this way, the bodies of the incarcerated, and their violent and spectacular deaths, are also commodified. Indeed, these fights have become the top sports program in the US. Fighters get agents and sponsors and they can buy real food for so-called Blood Points by killing other fighters.
The book is an indictment of an already unusually cruel and unjust (prison) system, one that prioritizes the punishment of individuals rather than seeking to address the various societal problems that generate crime. The book is full of footnotes that draw attention to particularly glaring cases of actual mismanagement and abuse, and that tell the history of the growth of an increasingly ruthless prison complex in the US. The novel is not about food as such, but just like in Riot Baby, it makes use of food to help describe the joint escalation of ecological and social crisis. There is food in abundance in this future, but only for certain strata. This is in itself an important future food imaginary, one that centres food security and food injustice, rather than simply food scarcity.