Pub Date : 2022-08-03DOI: 10.1215/00382876-10066552
Zach Gillespie, Mychal Pagan, Aiyuba Thomas, Derick McCarthy, Vincent Thompson
In the course of a group discussion, five student members of New York University’s Prison Education Program (PEP) reflect on their transition from prison inmates and students to their training as peer researchers in the PEP Research Lab. They trade their experiences of life on the inside, debunking a variety of public myths about the welfare and treatment of those caught within the prison system. Discussing their postcarceral roles as students and researchers, they analyze the differences between the two, drawing particular attention to the social status accorded to researchers. Building on the independence and resources offered by PEP’s Research Lab, they describe the initiatives they have taken to launch new paths of inquiry into carceral life and the financial and social burdens that continue to afflict the formerly incarcerated upon reentry.
{"title":"From Prison to Researcher","authors":"Zach Gillespie, Mychal Pagan, Aiyuba Thomas, Derick McCarthy, Vincent Thompson","doi":"10.1215/00382876-10066552","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-10066552","url":null,"abstract":"In the course of a group discussion, five student members of New York University’s Prison Education Program (PEP) reflect on their transition from prison inmates and students to their training as peer researchers in the PEP Research Lab. They trade their experiences of life on the inside, debunking a variety of public myths about the welfare and treatment of those caught within the prison system. Discussing their postcarceral roles as students and researchers, they analyze the differences between the two, drawing particular attention to the social status accorded to researchers. Building on the independence and resources offered by PEP’s Research Lab, they describe the initiatives they have taken to launch new paths of inquiry into carceral life and the financial and social burdens that continue to afflict the formerly incarcerated upon reentry.","PeriodicalId":21946,"journal":{"name":"South Atlantic Quarterly","volume":"130 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2022-08-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76752564","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-08-03DOI: 10.1215/00382876-10066580
Manuel Galindo, Hannah Appel
The majority of people incarcerated in the United States have not been convicted of any crime. Rather, they are there because they are too poor to pay their way out of jail. The financialization of the criminal legal system means that wealthy people go free while poor people suffer through indefinite detention or face an interest-bearing price of freedom: commercial bail bonds contracts, an industry worth more than $2 billion annually. Bail debt is held disproportionately by poor women of color who act as cosigners, bailing out the men in their family who are caged pretrial. The Debt Collective—the nation’s first debtors’ union—is piloting work to abolish $500 million in bail debt held by cosigners across California as a new form of collective action around carceral debt. We explore the concept of a carceral debtors’ union as part of broader debtors’ union and abolition movements.
{"title":"Let’s Get Free","authors":"Manuel Galindo, Hannah Appel","doi":"10.1215/00382876-10066580","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-10066580","url":null,"abstract":"The majority of people incarcerated in the United States have not been convicted of any crime. Rather, they are there because they are too poor to pay their way out of jail. The financialization of the criminal legal system means that wealthy people go free while poor people suffer through indefinite detention or face an interest-bearing price of freedom: commercial bail bonds contracts, an industry worth more than $2 billion annually. Bail debt is held disproportionately by poor women of color who act as cosigners, bailing out the men in their family who are caged pretrial. The Debt Collective—the nation’s first debtors’ union—is piloting work to abolish $500 million in bail debt held by cosigners across California as a new form of collective action around carceral debt. We explore the concept of a carceral debtors’ union as part of broader debtors’ union and abolition movements.","PeriodicalId":21946,"journal":{"name":"South Atlantic Quarterly","volume":"28 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2022-08-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81106810","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-08-03DOI: 10.1215/00382876-10066538
J. Livingston, Andrew Ross
Consumer lore in the United States celebrates the automobile as a “freedom machine,” consecrating the mobility of a free people. Yet, paradoxically, the car also functions at the crossroads of two great systems of unfreedom and immobility—the debt economy and the carceral state. Drawing on interviews with formerly incarcerated people, this article investigates this paradox in detail, tracing how the long arms of carcerality and debt operate in tandem in the daily life of car use and ownership. It describes the ways in which credit dovetails with capture—pretextual traffic stops, revenue policing from fines and fees, the overreach of automobile-related surveillance, the predatory auto loan and repossession businesses, and criminal justice debt—all shot through with profound racial bias. In the autocentric United States, transportation is a basic need, yet it has never been recognized or funded as a public good. As the “age of mobility” beckons, with autonomous driving as its technological centerpiece, the authors call for the social liberation of the automobile. From the outset, the automobile has traded on the romance of the open road, but it has too long served as a vehicle of inequality and injustice.
{"title":"Cars, Debt, and Carcerality","authors":"J. Livingston, Andrew Ross","doi":"10.1215/00382876-10066538","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-10066538","url":null,"abstract":"Consumer lore in the United States celebrates the automobile as a “freedom machine,” consecrating the mobility of a free people. Yet, paradoxically, the car also functions at the crossroads of two great systems of unfreedom and immobility—the debt economy and the carceral state. Drawing on interviews with formerly incarcerated people, this article investigates this paradox in detail, tracing how the long arms of carcerality and debt operate in tandem in the daily life of car use and ownership. It describes the ways in which credit dovetails with capture—pretextual traffic stops, revenue policing from fines and fees, the overreach of automobile-related surveillance, the predatory auto loan and repossession businesses, and criminal justice debt—all shot through with profound racial bias. In the autocentric United States, transportation is a basic need, yet it has never been recognized or funded as a public good. As the “age of mobility” beckons, with autonomous driving as its technological centerpiece, the authors call for the social liberation of the automobile. From the outset, the automobile has traded on the romance of the open road, but it has too long served as a vehicle of inequality and injustice.","PeriodicalId":21946,"journal":{"name":"South Atlantic Quarterly","volume":"46 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2022-08-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89832029","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-08-03DOI: 10.1215/00382876-10066566
Lynne A. Haney
Drawing on interviews with formerly incarcerated fathers and court observations of child-support hearings, this article explores the state’s role in the massive accumulation of child-support debt. Arguing that this role is too often hidden from view, the article demystifies how much “child” support debt is actually owed to the state itself—and is thus as much about state obligations as familial ones. These state obligations emerge from two main sources: public assistance payback policies, which “bill” noncustodial parents for the cost of the public aid received by their families; and interest charges on all support debt, which most states charge at rates of up to 10 percent. Both state practices hit incarcerated parents especially hard, since they are usually unable to keep up with their support orders while in prison—and often unaware of how and why their debt is accruing. By becoming a means to prop up the state, support debt acts very much like other forms of carceral debt. Yet it also inserts the state into familial relations in ways that can exacerbate conflict between parents and complicate fathers’ ability to care for their children.
{"title":"Child Support and Deadbeat States","authors":"Lynne A. Haney","doi":"10.1215/00382876-10066566","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-10066566","url":null,"abstract":"Drawing on interviews with formerly incarcerated fathers and court observations of child-support hearings, this article explores the state’s role in the massive accumulation of child-support debt. Arguing that this role is too often hidden from view, the article demystifies how much “child” support debt is actually owed to the state itself—and is thus as much about state obligations as familial ones. These state obligations emerge from two main sources: public assistance payback policies, which “bill” noncustodial parents for the cost of the public aid received by their families; and interest charges on all support debt, which most states charge at rates of up to 10 percent. Both state practices hit incarcerated parents especially hard, since they are usually unable to keep up with their support orders while in prison—and often unaware of how and why their debt is accruing. By becoming a means to prop up the state, support debt acts very much like other forms of carceral debt. Yet it also inserts the state into familial relations in ways that can exacerbate conflict between parents and complicate fathers’ ability to care for their children.","PeriodicalId":21946,"journal":{"name":"South Atlantic Quarterly","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2022-08-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84560475","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-08-03DOI: 10.1215/00382876-10066524
Tommaso Bardelli, Zach Gillespie, T. L. Tu
In the United States, going to jail or prison increasingly comes with a hefty price tag for incarcerated persons. As states continue to cut public spending, individuals are required to cover costs for basic necessities, such as food, health care, and telecommunications. Most have to rely on financial support from friends and family members to make ends meet during incarceration, thus drawing further resources from already vulnerable communities. Based on ethnographic interviews with formerly incarcerated individuals, and on the personal experience of one of the authors with the New York penal system, this article explores the effects of budget cuts and austerity measures on the everyday lives of the incarcerated, as well as the myriad forms of labor that prisoners perform to fill the gaps in institutional commitments.
{"title":"“You Need Money to Live in Prison”","authors":"Tommaso Bardelli, Zach Gillespie, T. L. Tu","doi":"10.1215/00382876-10066524","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-10066524","url":null,"abstract":"In the United States, going to jail or prison increasingly comes with a hefty price tag for incarcerated persons. As states continue to cut public spending, individuals are required to cover costs for basic necessities, such as food, health care, and telecommunications. Most have to rely on financial support from friends and family members to make ends meet during incarceration, thus drawing further resources from already vulnerable communities. Based on ethnographic interviews with formerly incarcerated individuals, and on the personal experience of one of the authors with the New York penal system, this article explores the effects of budget cuts and austerity measures on the everyday lives of the incarcerated, as well as the myriad forms of labor that prisoners perform to fill the gaps in institutional commitments.","PeriodicalId":21946,"journal":{"name":"South Atlantic Quarterly","volume":"130 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2022-08-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86813146","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-07-01DOI: 10.1215/00382876-9825933
Jenn M. Jackson
In August 2020, prominent race scholar and thinker on anti-racism Ibram X. Kendi wrote an article in the Atlantic titled, “Is This the Beginning of the End of American Racism?” The subtitle read: “Donald Trump has revealed the depths of the country’s prejudice—and has inadvertently forced a reckoning.” Kendi’s words, though likely meant to be a rhetorical device, are one of many examples of the ways that white people’s discovery of racism, anti-Blackness, and, perhaps, Blackness, in general, is often valorized as an indicator of progress toward the democratic ideals so many believe to belie American society and culture. But what does the centering of white discovery mean for Black memory? What does white ignorance demand of Black people? How are Black Americans transcending dominator logics that often hold captive both memory and history-making power? Through a synthesis of Nietzsche’s conception of memory as a site of identity and community formation and Charles Mills’s theory of “white ignorance,” I argue that the log-ics and practices handed down intergenerationally by white Americans through the imperial project of whiteness induce a process of history- erasing and world remaking. Yet, piercing through this deployment of intentional and facilitated white ignorance, collective memory within Black communities, and specifically through Black-led social movements, is a form of militancy and resistance that disrupts the insinuated social order established by mainstream, white supremacist normativity. Of particular importance is the fact that this militancy, an insurgent force that has reverberated across the globe, opens up new avenues for Black world-building, futurity, and political imagination deemed impossible under current carceral conditions, irreconcilable with present-day politics, and incompatible with white-centered notions of justice, liberty, and democratic freedom. Critically, in this moment, as Black Americans are disproportionately harmed by the effects of COVID-19, hypersurveilled in neighborhoods plagued by neoliberal disinvestment, and over-policed en masse, mass movements like Black Lives Matter have disrupted, interrupted, and reoriented the social landscape toward a disconnection in the white supremacist archival practices that have long defined Western postcolonial culture. Now, young Black Americans, in particular, challenge notions of time, lineage, and world-making by rebuking the erasure of Black memory and Black futurity. In fact, it is through this collective memory, in the form of social organizing, community education projects, and other intraracial resistance efforts, that the anti-Black, white supremacist frameworks of ignorance may be dismantled wholesale. As the country continues to grapple with the killings of Black Americans like Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd, those most affected by these tragedies have built pathways to open up new spaces for collective memory and mourning. Young Black America
{"title":"The Militancy of (Black) Memory","authors":"Jenn M. Jackson","doi":"10.1215/00382876-9825933","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-9825933","url":null,"abstract":"In August 2020, prominent race scholar and thinker on anti-racism Ibram X. Kendi wrote an article in the Atlantic titled, “Is This the Beginning of the End of American Racism?” The subtitle read: “Donald Trump has revealed the depths of the country’s prejudice—and has inadvertently forced a reckoning.” Kendi’s words, though likely meant to be a rhetorical device, are one of many examples of the ways that white people’s discovery of racism, anti-Blackness, and, perhaps, Blackness, in general, is often valorized as an indicator of progress toward the democratic ideals so many believe to belie American society and culture. But what does the centering of white discovery mean for Black memory? What does white ignorance demand of Black people? How are Black Americans transcending dominator logics that often hold captive both memory and history-making power? Through a synthesis of Nietzsche’s conception of memory as a site of identity and community formation and Charles Mills’s theory of “white ignorance,” I argue that the log-ics and practices handed down intergenerationally by white Americans through the imperial project of whiteness induce a process of history- erasing and world remaking. Yet, piercing through this deployment of intentional and facilitated white ignorance, collective memory within Black communities, and specifically through Black-led social movements, is a form of militancy and resistance that disrupts the insinuated social order established by mainstream, white supremacist normativity. Of particular importance is the fact that this militancy, an insurgent force that has reverberated across the globe, opens up new avenues for Black world-building, futurity, and political imagination deemed impossible under current carceral conditions, irreconcilable with present-day politics, and incompatible with white-centered notions of justice, liberty, and democratic freedom. Critically, in this moment, as Black Americans are disproportionately harmed by the effects of COVID-19, hypersurveilled in neighborhoods plagued by neoliberal disinvestment, and over-policed en masse, mass movements like Black Lives Matter have disrupted, interrupted, and reoriented the social landscape toward a disconnection in the white supremacist archival practices that have long defined Western postcolonial culture. Now, young Black Americans, in particular, challenge notions of time, lineage, and world-making by rebuking the erasure of Black memory and Black futurity. In fact, it is through this collective memory, in the form of social organizing, community education projects, and other intraracial resistance efforts, that the anti-Black, white supremacist frameworks of ignorance may be dismantled wholesale. As the country continues to grapple with the killings of Black Americans like Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd, those most affected by these tragedies have built pathways to open up new spaces for collective memory and mourning. Young Black America","PeriodicalId":21946,"journal":{"name":"South Atlantic Quarterly","volume":"124 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88067326","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-07-01DOI: 10.1215/00382876-9825990
Barnor Hesse
This article theorizes the contemporary meaning and significance of populism in Black politics. It is based on a reading of the mass protests characteristic of the Black Lives Matter movement across the US during 2020. The argument developed suggests contemporary Black populism evidenced by its multicultural and multiracial mobilizations during 2020 comprised and catalyzed several strategic social orientations, organized around the public ventilation of critical affective repertoires of Black feeling. The idea of Black feeling is emphasized historically and curatorially via the public mourning of Black families over the police killing of Black people and the public rage of Black protesters. The article also develops the idea of a populism of Black feeling involved in activating and influencing a marking and critique of white sovereignty that split white solidarity into supporters and opponents of BLM. In highlighting this split in whiteness as symptomatic of a post-civil rights crisis of white sovereignty, the article suggests Black populism is now a significant dimension of entrenching that crisis.
{"title":"Black Populism","authors":"Barnor Hesse","doi":"10.1215/00382876-9825990","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-9825990","url":null,"abstract":"This article theorizes the contemporary meaning and significance of populism in Black politics. It is based on a reading of the mass protests characteristic of the Black Lives Matter movement across the US during 2020. The argument developed suggests contemporary Black populism evidenced by its multicultural and multiracial mobilizations during 2020 comprised and catalyzed several strategic social orientations, organized around the public ventilation of critical affective repertoires of Black feeling. The idea of Black feeling is emphasized historically and curatorially via the public mourning of Black families over the police killing of Black people and the public rage of Black protesters. The article also develops the idea of a populism of Black feeling involved in activating and influencing a marking and critique of white sovereignty that split white solidarity into supporters and opponents of BLM. In highlighting this split in whiteness as symptomatic of a post-civil rights crisis of white sovereignty, the article suggests Black populism is now a significant dimension of entrenching that crisis.","PeriodicalId":21946,"journal":{"name":"South Atlantic Quarterly","volume":"27 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75564634","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-07-01DOI: 10.1215/00382876-9825962
Sam C Tenorio
This article examines the spatially destructive practices of the 2020 BLM protest, which can be thought of in two often overlapping classes: broad property destruction—such as the looting of stores and burning of buildings—and the targeted toppling of monuments. Specifically, this article draws on the tools of black political thought, anarchist theory, as well as geography and carceral studies to argue that these practices offer a black anarchist critique of the governance of white carceral geographies, often hidden in Western cover stories of development and security formulated under (neo)liberal democracy. In clarifying the conceptual landscape of this relationship, this article also uses January 6 to lay plain the symbiotic bond of white nationalism to the United States’ white identity and detail how this white riot encapsulates an injunction antithetical to the critical charge autochthonous of the radically destructive practices of black politics.
{"title":"White Carceral Geographies","authors":"Sam C Tenorio","doi":"10.1215/00382876-9825962","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-9825962","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the spatially destructive practices of the 2020 BLM protest, which can be thought of in two often overlapping classes: broad property destruction—such as the looting of stores and burning of buildings—and the targeted toppling of monuments. Specifically, this article draws on the tools of black political thought, anarchist theory, as well as geography and carceral studies to argue that these practices offer a black anarchist critique of the governance of white carceral geographies, often hidden in Western cover stories of development and security formulated under (neo)liberal democracy. In clarifying the conceptual landscape of this relationship, this article also uses January 6 to lay plain the symbiotic bond of white nationalism to the United States’ white identity and detail how this white riot encapsulates an injunction antithetical to the critical charge autochthonous of the radically destructive practices of black politics.","PeriodicalId":21946,"journal":{"name":"South Atlantic Quarterly","volume":"113 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80751784","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-07-01DOI: 10.1215/00382876-9825948
C. Harris
Building on the work of Hortense Spillers and others, this article uses the “yet to come” of Black culture as a lens to read the political and cultural interventions of the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL). The “yet to come” also serves as an avenue to consider how, on what terms, and to what end Black political thought has evolved since #BlackLivesMatter emerged. By wielding an unapologetic Black joy as both a capacious embodiment of Black presence and a prefigurative politics that forecasts a world free of antiblackness, M4BL, and its demand for abolition, has shifted the meaning and mode of Black politics and thought. At the same time, when placed in conversation with earlier Black political-cultural formations, Black joy and abolition help crystalize the current conjuncture in Black thought as rooted in a temporality that is simultaneously now, before, and not yet. This multi-temporality follows what Margo Natalie Crawford describes as “the power of anticipation” in the Black radical tradition, facilitating a new correspondence between the Black present and the Black past, one that is attuned to historically situated racial regimes. Put somewhat differently, in its circulatory, its “back and forth flow,” Black culture and Black thought, intramural renderings of Blackness itself, builds and repurposes rather than simply breaks away. Seen through this light, I suggest that M4BL’s politics and culture are not merely pronouncements of the “yet to come” but a philosophical “return to the source”—the radicalism of the colonized and enslaved.
{"title":"For the Culture","authors":"C. Harris","doi":"10.1215/00382876-9825948","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-9825948","url":null,"abstract":"Building on the work of Hortense Spillers and others, this article uses the “yet to come” of Black culture as a lens to read the political and cultural interventions of the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL). The “yet to come” also serves as an avenue to consider how, on what terms, and to what end Black political thought has evolved since #BlackLivesMatter emerged. By wielding an unapologetic Black joy as both a capacious embodiment of Black presence and a prefigurative politics that forecasts a world free of antiblackness, M4BL, and its demand for abolition, has shifted the meaning and mode of Black politics and thought. At the same time, when placed in conversation with earlier Black political-cultural formations, Black joy and abolition help crystalize the current conjuncture in Black thought as rooted in a temporality that is simultaneously now, before, and not yet. This multi-temporality follows what Margo Natalie Crawford describes as “the power of anticipation” in the Black radical tradition, facilitating a new correspondence between the Black present and the Black past, one that is attuned to historically situated racial regimes. Put somewhat differently, in its circulatory, its “back and forth flow,” Black culture and Black thought, intramural renderings of Blackness itself, builds and repurposes rather than simply breaks away. Seen through this light, I suggest that M4BL’s politics and culture are not merely pronouncements of the “yet to come” but a philosophical “return to the source”—the radicalism of the colonized and enslaved.","PeriodicalId":21946,"journal":{"name":"South Atlantic Quarterly","volume":"290 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86748237","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-07-01DOI: 10.1215/00382876-9825976
K. Perry
This essay explores how the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement’s public visibility during the summer of 2020 opened critical space to reconsider and critique entrenched narratives of British abolitionism that render the fate of post-emancipation Black futures inconsequential. It highlights some of the contestations within a British historiographical tradition that has co-opted abolitionism as a means to engender and fortify mythologies of a liberal and progressive white nation to the detriment of even conceiving of Black freedom as a requisite to emancipation. Black political thinkers from the period of enslavement to the present have continually spoken back to these abridged and romanticized histories of British abolitionism calling into view the limits of white abolitionist projects. This article outlines some of the intellectual currents that have shaped a history of Black abolitionist praxis in Britain as a political posture rooted in an acknowledgment of abolition’s unfinished work and its import in the present in anticipation of free Black futures yet to come.
{"title":"Black Futures Not Yet Lost","authors":"K. Perry","doi":"10.1215/00382876-9825976","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-9825976","url":null,"abstract":"This essay explores how the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement’s public visibility during the summer of 2020 opened critical space to reconsider and critique entrenched narratives of British abolitionism that render the fate of post-emancipation Black futures inconsequential. It highlights some of the contestations within a British historiographical tradition that has co-opted abolitionism as a means to engender and fortify mythologies of a liberal and progressive white nation to the detriment of even conceiving of Black freedom as a requisite to emancipation. Black political thinkers from the period of enslavement to the present have continually spoken back to these abridged and romanticized histories of British abolitionism calling into view the limits of white abolitionist projects. This article outlines some of the intellectual currents that have shaped a history of Black abolitionist praxis in Britain as a political posture rooted in an acknowledgment of abolition’s unfinished work and its import in the present in anticipation of free Black futures yet to come.","PeriodicalId":21946,"journal":{"name":"South Atlantic Quarterly","volume":"19 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80893429","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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