Introduction: Abolitionist Worldmaking

Abstract

Introduction:Abolitionist Worldmaking Alyosha Goldstein (bio) The publication of Abolition Geography: Essays towards Liberation, the highly anticipated collection of Ruth Wilson Gilmore's writing edited by Brenna Bhandar and Alberto Toscano, provides an auspicious occasion to reflect on Gilmore's decisive contributions and significant influence.1 There is perhaps no better testament to the importance of Gilmore's writing, teaching, and public lectures than how generative this work has been for so many community organizers, activists, students, scholars, and people engaged in everyday struggle. Active in social movement building since the 1970s, Gilmore earned a doctorate in geography in 1998 and cofounded grassroots organizations including the California Prison Moratorium Project, Critical Resistance, and the Central California Environmental Justice Network.2 In publications such as her widely influential 2007 book Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California and the essays and interviews assembled in Abolition Geography,3 she analyzes the carceral geographies of racial capitalism as a way to open up new possibilities for building a politics and practice of liberation. Abolition Geography gathers together Gilmore's critical interventions and insights at precisely the fortuitous moment when decades of abolitionist analysis and organizing and the 2020 uprisings ignited by the police murders of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and Tony McDade have converged to make abolition a matter of mainstream debate. The essays that follow, by Alisa Bierria, Lisa Lowe, Sarah Haley, Robin D. G. Kelley, and Angela Y. Davis, reflect on Abolition Geography as a vital touchstone and indispensable resource for abolitionist worldmaking. Today's prison abolition movement continues the unfinished work of the nineteenth-century movement for the abolition of slavery.4 In Black Reconstruction (1935), W. E. B. Du Bois showed how the 1876 "counter-revolution [End Page 359] of property" reanimated the conditions of enslavement through new or reinvigorated forms of racial terror, disfranchisement, extraction, coercion, and carcerality. He argued that the legal end of slavery was insufficient and that "abolition democracy" required establishing and sustaining the material conditions and institutions that would make possible substantive Black freedom.5 Taking up the project of abolition democracy, the present-day abolition movement emerged partly from the growing momentum of the prisoners' rights movement and campaigns to free political prisoners catalyzed by the 1971 Attica rebellion at the so-called correctional facility in upstate New York and the murder of the political prisoner George Jackson at San Quentin Prison in California.6 Books such as If They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance, edited by Angela Y. Davis with the Soledad Brothers and other political prisoners, published in 1971, and the Prison Research Education Action Project's 1976 Instead of Prisons: A Handbook for Abolitionists further galvanized the movement.7 The annual assemblies of the International Conference on Prison Abolition first held in Toronto, Canada, in 1983, and the organizing work of Critical Resistance that began in California in 1997 provided crucial spaces for expanding abolitionist networks and organizing. It is likewise important to note that women of color and queer, trans*, and gender-nonconforming people have consistently been at the forefront of these movements. To introduce and frame this forum on Gilmore's book, I focus here on briefly highlighting aspects of Gilmore's work in the context of the movement for abolition since the 1990s. Written over more than thirty years, the essays and interviews assembled in Abolition Geography argue for understanding prison abolition as a far-reaching project of fundamental social transformation rather than an effort focused solely on dismantling discrete carceral institutions. Gilmore shows how the abolition of the system of control, criminalization, and punishment that includes jail, prison, probation, policing, security and surveillance regimes, border patrol, and migrant detention is fundamental to building alternative futures. She demonstrates how and why the prison-industrial complex is situated within an expansive economy of United States imperialism and militarism, with consequences that extend into the intimate spheres of interpersonal violence, and must necessarily be addressed in struggles for racial, gender, and environmental justice. Abolition as a project is both specific and capacious. Abolition centers the racial, gendered, sexual, and heteropatriarchal dynamics of prisons, jails, policing, and other carceral institutions and practices while situating these...