“The press is so powerful in its image-making role, it can make a criminal look like he’s the victim and make the victim look like he’s the criminal. This is the press, an irresponsible press. If you aren’t careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” - Malcolm X
Abolitionis seeking submissions by artists for our inaugural issue.
Abolition: A Journal of Insurgent Politics is a new radical journal which highlights work that encourages us to make the impossible possible, to push beyond policy changes and toward revolutionary abolitionism. Today we seek to abolish a number of seemingly immortal institutions, drawing inspiration from those who have sought the abolition of all systems of domination, exploitation, and oppression. ‘Abolition’ refers partly to the historical and contemporary movements that have identified themselves as ‘abolitionist,’ but it also refers to all revolutionary movements, insofar as they have abolitionist elements — whether the abolition of patriarchy, capitalism, heteronormativity, ableism, colonialism, the state, or white supremacy. Rather than just seeking to abolish a list of oppressive institutions, we aim to support studies of the entanglement of different systems of oppression and to create space for experimentation with the tensions between different movements. Instead of assuming one homogenous subject as our audience (e.g., “abolitionists of the world unite!”), we publish for multiple, contingent, ambivalent subjectivities — for people coming from different places, living and struggling in different circumstances, and in the process of figuring out who we want to be as we transform the world. With Fanon, we are “endlessly creating” ourselves.
In this struggle, we see the voices of artists, and unique insights possible through the arts, as fundamental in both speaking back to existing systems of oppression and imagining different futures. Against the dominance of ‘academic’ rhetoric, Abolition affirms a multiplicity of ways of knowing the world. We aim to include art in the journal, not as simply illustration or supplement, but as a theory/practice of engaging with the world itself. This is a specific acknowledgement that academia (and also the written word, with whatever cultural understandings the primacy of literacy implies) doesn’t have a monopoly on knowledge or on working towards different futures. Art adds to conversations about abolition in crucial ways. Recognizing that the best movement-relevant work is happening both in the movements themselves and in the communities with whom they organize, the journal aims to support and feature artists whose work amplifies such grassroots activity. We invite submissions by artists working and creating outside the ‘white cube’ circuit whose individual practice, themes or interventions engage with the goals ofAbolitionin a meaningful way. We understand ‘art’ broadly to include many different forms and media: painting, video, drawing, poetry, multi-media, documentary, among others.
Please submit a short (200-300 word) artist statement, visual images in pdf format, online portfolio or website, or other documentation that you feel best represents your work and practice to [email protected] by January 15th, 2016.
Abolition: A Journal of Insurgent Politics is seeking submissions for the journal’s inaugural issue. Abolitionis a collectively run project supporting radical scholarly and activist research, publishing and disseminating work that encourages us to make the impossible possible, to seek transformation well beyond policy changes and toward revolutionary abolitionism. In that spirit, the journal invites submissions that engage with the meaning, practices, and politics of abolitionism in any historical and geographical context. This means that we are interested in a wide interpretation of abolitionism, including topics such as (but in no way limited to): prison and police abolitionism, decolonization, slavery abolitionism, anti-statism, anti-racism, labor organizing, anti-capitalism, radical feminism, queer and trans* politics, Indigenous people’s politics, migrant activism, social ecology, animal rights and liberation, and radical pedagogy. Recognizing that the best movement-relevant intellectual work is happening both in the movements themselves and in the communities with whom they organize, the journal aims to support activists, artists, and scholars whose work amplifies such grassroots activity. We encourage submissions across a range of formats and approaches – scholarly essays, art, poetry, multi-media, interviews, field notes, documentary, etc. – that are presented in an accessible manner.
Abolition seeks to publish a wide variety of work and this call is open to various forms of writing and creative material. While strict word limits will not be enforced, we suggest the following ranges for submissions:
Short Interventions (1000-2000 words);
Scholarly Papers (5000-10000 words);
Interviews (3000-5000 words);
Creative Works (open).
All submissions will be reviewed in a manner consistent with the journal’s mission. We are building relationships for a new kind of peer review that can serve as an insurgent tool to work across and even subvert the academic-activist divide and reject hierarchical definitions of “peers.” Thus, our Collective and Editorial Review Board are comprised of individuals who approach abolitionism from varied personal, political, and structural positions. Unlike most journals, our review process includes non-academic activists and artists in addition to academics. Editorial decisions will be made according to principles of anti-hierarchical power, democratic consensus, and with a preference for work produced by members of under-represented groups in the academy and publishing. For more information about the journal, please see our website,http://abolitionjournal.org. All of our publications will be accessible, free, and open access, rejecting the paywalls of the publishing industry. We will also produce hard-copy versions for circulation to communities lacking internet access and actively work to make copies available to persons incarcerated and detained by the state.
To be considered for Issue One, please submit completed work (including papers, interviews, works of art, etc.) by January 15, 2016. Submissions and inquiries can be sent to [email protected].
In its first minute, Stranger Things had me. From the gasps of a scientist running for his life to the quiet manicured lawns of early-80s suburbia, I felt the vibe of Stranger Things on my skin and in my bones. Like its protagonists, I grew up in a tiny early-80s Indiana town, riding my bike to expansive patches of woods with friends and pretending to spy on the suspicious goings-on of adult people in big, protected buildings. But Stranger Things is not a masterful television show because it depicts the beauty and the bounty of a now-forgotten small-town America. No. What makes Stranger Things a modern classic is its relentless insistence that the terrors happening right now are being entirely missed, and mindlessly supported, by a sleeping, White, public – a strange parallel in the dawning days of Trump. … It is not time to unify behind Trump, or to stand behind his storm troopers of White Supremacy. As Malcolm X might say: the chickens have come home to roost. It is no longer appropriate for White people to sleep. It is time to slay the monster of White supremacy once and for all. People of color, Muslims and undocumented men and women, people who have been fighting White supremacy since the beginning, are already experiencing public outbursts of racist language and physical abuse. For all of us, the monster of White supremacy that has been conjured should be terrifying. But the monster that’s conjured is also the monster that’s exposed. And the monster that’s exposed is the monster that’s vulnerable. And the monster that’s vulnerable is the monster that can be killed. …
Anyone who seeks to defeat Trumpism should be extremely disturbed by U.S. and Israeli collaboration. Israel provides a model for the state that Trump wants to create: one forged in violent racial segregation, militarized policing, and white nationalist propaganda. … Now more than ever, we cannot cede the battle against anti-Semitism to Israel.
The emerging opposition to Trumpism has rightly focused on the groups facing the most dire, most violent threats–people facing deportation, exclusion, and mob assault. Within this logic, antisemitism remains a powerful ideological trope that the now-mainstreamed far Right has projected onto its authoritarian platform. From the announcement of Trump’s campaign in June 2015, it was clear that his worldview was shaped by far right conspiracy thinking, in which antisemitism is never far removed: the notion that “Mexico sends their people” is a foolish framing of why and how migration happens. Yet it reveals the antisemitic structure of Trumpian racial logic.
Put simply, Trump’s antisemitism is not primarily about Jews. Rather, the antisemitism functions as a structuring apparatus for his racist political outlook. By antisemitism, I mean a right-wing populist ideological framework that is 1) steeped in conspiracy thinking 2) premised on a misplaced anti-elitism against a secretive, racialized cabal that 3) can only be understood in crude, patriarchal nationalist terms. This kind of antisemitism is evident in Steve Bannon’s recent claim that he is not a “white nationalist” but rather an “economic nationalist.” Antisemitism here combines the neoconservative desire for U.S. militarism to fight a global “clash of civilizations” with late-19thcentury tribalist race thinking under the banner of capitalist accumulation. As the independent scholar Chip Berlet wrote in 2012, antisemitism is a racializing logic that, since 9/11, has applied as much to Muslims as to Jews. Whether it is Mexico “sending their people,” Hillary Clinton’s “secret [meetings] with international banks to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty” (yes, he said that), or a host of other paranoid utterances by the now president-elect, Trump’s worldview is antisemitic. He understands geopolitics as a series of conspiracies that need to be met with violence. Race is his shorthand for describing whether someone is an agent of a global conspiracy or its victim.
Throughout the current election cycle, it has been striking to note the ways that privilege discourse has been deployed to demand loyalty to particular parties and candidates. “Either vote Clinton,” one widely-circulated tweet demands, “or admit you’re a privileged asshole.” Bernie Sanders refused to concede to Hillary Clinton because of privilege. Third party voters are privileged. “Ultraleftists” are privileged. Privilege has thus become central to a heavily moralizing language of civic responsibility which demands that the US electorate maintain a neoliberal bulwark against the far right for the putative good of the less fortunate. This use of the concept marks an appropriation, one which transforms privilege discourse fundamentally, from an analysis of white supremacy’s capillary and quotidian power into an individuating and deeply ideological mechanism of state discipline.
“Black death and trauma remains central to the campaign of the Democratic Party. At the July 2016 Democratic National Convention, black mothers whose children had been killed by either police or white vigilantes, in the “Mothers of the Movement,” encouraged the public to vote for Clinton and thereby promoted her path for restoration and change. The assemblage of women who attested to Clinton’s “compassion and understanding to support grieving mothers” offers a profound illustration of the use of black female grief and trauma as a political strategy in solidifying Clinton’s connection to Black communities in general, and to Black women voters in particular.” - Jallicia Jolly
