Abolitionist Assemblage:

A version of this essay was originally published in “OUR HOUSE: An Anthology in Solidarity” in November 2020. The collection was compiled and produced by Burn All Books, a small press and riso studio in San Diego.

In a November 2018 interview with The Funambulist, when asked about the concept of abolition geography, author and scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore said,

“Abolition requires that we change one thing, which is everything. Abolition is not absence, it is presence. What the world will become already exists in fragments and pieces, experiments and possibilities. So those who feel in their gut deep anxiety that abolition means knock it all down, scorch the earth and start something new, let that go. Abolition is building the future from the present, in all of the ways we can.”

By definition, abolition refers to the movement to eliminate the carceral apparatus in its myriad forms, including—but not limited to—prisons, policing, and surveillance. Given this, I think of abolition not only as a sociopolitical framework, but also as an ongoing practice of unknowing and reimagining. Abolitionism is a fugitive ethical position that demands an alternative investment in ourselves, our neighbors, and our communities at large. It is an epistemology of insurrection, one that rejects and seeks to transform phenomena that both enable and reward violence. Abolition is an anti-imperialist, anti-racist ideology; it condemns (settler) colonialism, empire, militarism, paternalism, cissexism, and heteropatriarchy. Correspondingly, as abolitionists, we are tasked with conceptualizing (and working together to build) different kinds of communities that reflect the aforementioned morals: communities that, instead of punishing behaviors codified as criminal—and I invoke “codified” here to imply that criminality itself is socially constructed—seek to remedy conditions that principally allow harm to take place. 

Under racial capitalism and white supremacy, the task of imagining anew—though revolutionary—can often feel incredibly challenging. As we constantly reckon with the state and its actors as omnipresent objects of struggle, I wonder how abolitionists may begin to conceive of something we’ve never seen in a u.s. american context: a society void of carcerality. If a future without the prison-industrial complex is to consist of present-day experimentations, as Gilmore so brilliantly posits, I believe we can consider contemporary networks of Black kinship, care, and study as examples of the “fragments” she describes. Thus, I contend that we may think of constellations of Black people learning, living, and loving together as quotidian practical modes of resistance to carceral logic.

I consider my own close personal relationships with other Black women and Black individuals impacted by misogynoir examples of these such modes of resistance. Within said relationships, empathy, mutual accountability, responsiveness to needs, pleasure, and collaboration are all intentionally centered; in a world animated against the backdrop of our abject suffering, spaces wherein we can experience joy, education, and sociality together are not only subversive, but deeply healing, restorative, and transformative. My loved ones, peers, comrades, and I have struggled alongside one another to develop our own shared theories of knowledge and liberatory methodologies jointly. These affinities for and with one another reflect immutable components of abolitionist ideology, as well as embody particular qualities of a future without the carceral apparatus; they are examples of the “experiments” to which Gilmore refers. Given this, I believe we can think of these modalities of relationship building as socioemotional frameworks for scaffolding a society without prisons, policing, and surveillance. Furthermore, if we consider abolition a project of radical cooperative creativity, networks of kinship, care, and study like the ones I have described can ultimately function as means through which to imagine—and bring forth—dreams of freedom, both concrete and immaterial.

Abolition is a political commitment that aims to render the prison-industrial complex obsolete. I believe Black joy, sociality, education, and camaraderie can carry us forward through this obsolescence. These constellations of Black kinship, care, and study can ease transitions through unprecedented change, thereby also mitigating the “deep anxiety” around abolition that Gilmore articulates.

Finally, I believe Gilmore’s use of the word “fragments” to describe the current state of contemporary anti-carceral politics suggests we must partake in a sort of artistic assemblage when engaging abolitionist methodologies and philosophies. Together, we are tasked with gathering, arranging, and fashioning different ways of being, knowing, and living. Together, we recover found pieces and reorient them to build something out of that which exists at present. It is within my networks of kinship and study with other Black women and Black people affected by misogynoir that I am able to participate in this creative practice, and it is through our mutually caring relationships that I am able to imagine freedom as possible.