Abolition’s Afterlives

Abstract

The positioning of movements for social and political change as forms of postemancipation abolition democracy has a long history. Abolition has been the watchword under which initiatives proceed to eradicate the death penalty, human trafficking, nuclear weapons, the hegemony of Wall Street, prisons, police, the deportation of immigrants, and more. The essays in this forum examine nineteenth-century abolitionism’s complicated legacy through the prism of contemporary frameworks and agitations for justice and social transformation. The working papers reflect vital ongoing debates about abolition’s afterlives while meditating upon a series of pressing current concerns: migrant justice, the humanitarian rhetoric of some anti-racist initiatives, the activism of Erica Garner following the murder by police of her father, the racialization of madness and violence, the prison-abolition movement, and climate activism. By addressing the mobilization of rhetorics of slavery and abolition in our own vexed political moment, the contributors reveal that to think abolition now is necessarily to rethink abolition then.

Captivity, Kinship, and Black Masculine Care Work under Domestic Warfare

“…For James, the captive maternal is not an identity but a function, one that is ambivalent in relation to radical and revolutionary struggle. The captive maternal enables the social reproduction of Black life, but in doing so stabilizes the predatory systems of oppression under which Black life is lived (James 2020(James , 2021). James's work raises a question that remains open: How can Black folk reproduce ourselves and abolish our oppression in the face of pervasive captivity, war, and terror?…”

Imprisoning Intimacy: The Expanding Sites of Racialized-Gendered Carceral Violence

“…Carceral care has a structural component, as Hwang (2019, 561) states, “carceral care is not simply the deterrence, reduction, or interruption of carceral violence; rather, it is a mode of tracing how the penal administration of care multiplies the very scales, technologies, and cultural structures of violence itself.” In addition, researchers argues that the U.S. security state uses the social services system as a mechanism to grow the criminalization of racial ethnic marginalized groups, while seemingly appearing to assuage historical injustices, such as racial profiling and coercive policing (Nguyen 2021; Roberts 2022). The data presented here make a case for expanding our understanding of the coercive nature of the state by underscoring the ways in which it becomes embodied in the form of gendered labor, particularly as this labor is often disproportionately performed by women who have loved ones who are involved in the criminal-legal system, whom Joy James (2020, 1) describes as the “captive maternal”—“Black female, male, trans, or ungendered persons, feminized and socialized into caretaking within the legacy of racism and US democracy.” James argues, “As caretakers who minister to the needs of their communities and families, Captive Maternals expend emotional and physical labor in stabilizing the social and state structures that prey upon them” (Insko et al 2021, e29). In this vein, the state is coercively co-opting the care work of Black women as subsistence to maintain the violence of the carceral state (James 2021; Monterrosa and Hattery 2022).…”