Annihilation and Freedom: How Chain-Gang All-Stars Examines the Intersection of Incarceration and Empowerment

In light of this year’s theme of freedom, Nana Kwame Adeji-Brenyah’s Chain-Gang All-Stars does an impeccable job of asking how freedom can coexist with annihilation. In this paper, I will discuss how the book allows us to understand the multitudes of ways we can both achieve and lose freedom, specifically during events of annihilation. I will be examining this using the theological insights of Katie Geneva Cannon’s examination of chattel slavery and Kathryn Tanner’s definition of empowerment from God.  

Chain-Gang All-Stars is a dystopian novel dealing with imprisoned people being offered a chance at ‘freedom’—but the cost is participation in gladiator-style death matches. If you are successful, you can earn your freedom (paired with the celebrity benefits that come from televised sports). If you are unsuccessful--well, you have a different type of freedom. In the novel, Adeji-Brenyah examines a myriad of ways that people (particularly Black people) are forced to sacrifice their autonomy for survival. There are clear connections (as well as many factual footnotes) to the current prison industrial complex, but also clearly hints toward the brutality of professional sports (he calls out American football in particular). It is the ending of the novel, though, that truly calls into question these concepts we have about freedom. As two women are paired in a death match against each other—two women who are lovers, who have found freedom in a loving relationship—we are faced with a terrible choice. One woman can earn her ‘freedom’ at the expense of killing her lover. Is this freedom? Or is this annihilation? Can it be both? 

Cannon’s foundational work in Womanist theology includes important discussions of the realities of chattel slavery, and the theology that both supported it as well as worked to end it. In Katie’s Canon, she works through the ways that Black people were able to gain freedom in slavery. Freedom that was not defined by the white slave owners, but instead by their own dignity and communal stronghold on life. She says,  

For the masses of Black people, suffering is the normal state of affairs. Mental anguish, physical abuse, and emotional agony are all part of the lived truth of Black people’s straitened circumstances. Due to the extraneous forces and the entrenched bulwark of White supremacy and male superiority that pervade this society, Blacks and Whites, women and men are forced to live with very different ranges of freedom. (59) 

Acknowledging Cannon’s focus on dignity, the ethical struggles of Black people (particularly Black women), and the ways that White supremacy gatekeeps success for only an elite few, I finally will turn to Tanner’s discussion of empowerment and God as a call, especially for those with privilege. It is not solely the responsibility of Black people to find freedom within this corrupt system. Instead, all people must work in con-competitive empowerment toward true freedom. I intend this paper to be an opening to see how perhaps freedom may not be separate from annihilation--for those who have ‘freedom’ may need to choose annihilation of their privilege. Through this type of non-competitive empowerment, annihilation can be seen as freedom.