Chain-Gang Gothic: The Colonel’s Dream and the Spectacular Terrors of State Punishment

Charles Chesnutt’s 1905 novel The Colonel’s Dream meditates on the structures of spectacle and ignorance that create a continuity of white privilege and white supremacy from North to South, and on the role that the nascent prison-industrial complex plays in that process. Chesnutt uses occasional gothic irruptions within his otherwise realist and sentimental form to show how “hidden” and spectacular punishments, legal and extra-legal state violence, all function to impose a purposeful ignorance of their very existence: punishments, their spectacular renditions, and the public’s turning away from them combine to become a structuring aporia that maintains white supremacy in the face of democratic resistance.