Abolition’s Afterlives

Abstract

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.