A Walk Along the Hudson: Contested Memories of a Carceral Landscape

This paper examines a mile-long pathway along the Hudson River as a “carceral landscape” holding a dense assemblage of images, stories, and memories—which, considered together, both reinforce and trouble dominant narratives of the prison as a necessary or inevitable feature of American life. Engaging histories of colonialism (including the seizure of Munsee land by European settlers in the 17th and 18th centuries) and carcerality (such as the establishment of Sing Sing Prison’s first cell block in 1825, built by incarcerated labor) as ongoing processes inscribed onto the geography of upstate New York, this paper contends that the Hudson Riverbank offers productively incoherent modes of remembering that actively resist the linearity of the progress (or declension) narrative. Moreover, it positions these modes of remembering as religious practices, oriented toward the recovery of excesses and silences typically relegated to the sidelines of secular histories of the prison.