Abolition Geography: Essays towards Liberation
Author: Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Publisher: Wildfire
Year of Publication: 2022
Print Length: 512 pages
Genre: Essay, Non-Fiction / Geography, Political Science
Topic: Abolition, Activism, Change, Colonialism & Post-Colonialism, Decolonization & Anti-Colonization, Racism, Neoliberalism, Capitalism, Internationalism, Independence & Liberation, Freedom, Resistance, Social Justice, Social Movement, Scholarship & Knowledge, Scholar & Activist, Poetics
First collection of writings from one of the foremost contemporary critical thinkers on racism, geography and incarceration.
Gathering together Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s work from over three decades, Abolition Geography presents her singular contribution to the politics of abolition as theorist, researcher, and organizer, offering scholars and activists ways of seeing and doing to help navigate our turbulent present.
Abolition Geography moves us away from explanations of mass incarceration and racist violence focused on uninterrupted histories of prejudice or the dull compulsion of neoliberal economics. Instead, Gilmore offers a geographical grasp of how contemporary racial capitalism operates through an “anti-state state” that answers crises with the organized abandonment of people and environments deemed surplus to requirement.
Gilmore escapes one-dimensional conceptions of what liberation demands, who demands liberation, or what indeed is to be abolished. Drawing on the lessons of grassroots organizing and internationalist imaginaries, Abolition Geography undoes the identification of abolition with mere decarceration, and reminds us that freedom is not a mere principle but a place.
Edited with an introduction by Brenna Bhandar and Alberto Toscano.
Table of Contents
Original Sources
Editor’s Introduction
PART ONE: WHAT IS TO BE DONE?
1. What Is to Be Done?
2. Decorative Beasts: Dogging the Academy in the Late 20th Century
3. Public Enemies and Private Intellectuals: Apartheid USA
4. Scholar-Activists in the Mix
PART TWO: RACE AND SPACE
5. Race and Globalization
6. Fatal Couplings of Power and Difference: Notes on Racism and Geography
7. Terror Austerity Race Gender Excess Theater
8. Race, Prisons, and War: Scenes from the History of US Violence
PART THREE: PRISONS, MILITARISM, AND THE ANTI-STATE STATE
9. Globalization and US Prison Growth: From Military Keynesianism to Post-Keynesian Militarism
10. In the Shadow of the Shadow State
11. The Other California (w/ Craig Gilmore)
12. Restating the Obvious (w/ Craig Gilmore)
13. Beyond Bratton (w/ Craig Gilmore)
14. From Military-Industrial Complex to Prison-Industrial Complex: An Interview with Trevor Paglen
15. Prisons and Class Warfare: An Interview with Clément Petitjean/Période
PART FOUR: ORGANIZING FOR ABOLITION
16. You Have Dislodged a Boulder: Mothers and Prisoners in the Post-Keynesian California Landscape
17. Forgotten Places and the Seeds of Grassroots Planning
18. The Worrying State of the Anti-Prison Movement
19. Race, Capitalist Crisis, and Abolitionist Organizing: An Interview with Jenna Loyd
20. Abolition Geography and the Problem of Innocence
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Index
Ruth Wilson Gilmore is professor of Earth & Environmental Sciences, and American Studies, and the director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics. She also serves on the Executive Committee of the Institute for Research on the African Diaspora in the Americas and the Caribbean. She is a co-founder of many grassroots organizations including the California Prison Moratorium Project, Critical Resistance, and the Central California Environmental Justice Network. She is also the author of the prize-winning Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (UC Press). Gilmore has lectured in Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America.
Source: https://www.gc.cuny.edu/people/ruth-wilson-gilmore
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