Description
Book SynopsisAbolition can be a spiritual practice, a spiritual journey, and a spiritual commitment. What does abolition mean and how can we get there as a collective and improvisational project?
To posit the spirituality of abolition, is to consider the ways historical and contemporary movements against slavery, prisons, the wage system, animal and earth exploitation, racialized, gendered, and sexualized violence, and the death penalty necessitate epistemologies that have been foreclosed through violent force by Western thought of philosophical and theological kinds. It is also to claim that the material conditions that will produce abolition are necessarily Black, Indigenous, queer and trans, feminist, and also about disabled and other non-conforming bodies in force and verve.
Abolition and Spirituality asks what can prison abolition teach us about spiritual practice, spiritual journey, spiritual commitment? And, what can these things underscore about the struggle for abolition as a desired manifestation of material change in worlds we inhabit currently? Collecting writings, poetry, and art from thinkers, organizers, and incarcerated people the editors trace the importance of faith and spirit in our ongoing struggle towards abolitionist horizons.
Trade ReviewPraise for Abolition Collective"Abolishing Carceral Society is an immense contribution to contemporary struggles for freedom."—Dean Spade, author of Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics and the Limits of Law
"Abolishing Carceral Society is a wonderful mix of provocative ideas married with art, to help us consider a world without prisons, policing, and surveillance...This inaugural issue from Abolition Collective pushes us to ask a number of questions that are important to moving us toward an abolitionist horizon."—Mariame Kaba, author of We Do This 'Til We Free Us
"Abolishing Carceral Society, presents incisive interventions in the current debates about prison abolition and abolitionism as a political principle. It is a bold beginning for what will become an essential forum for all insurgent thinkers."—Silvia Federici, author of Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and the Feminist Struggle and Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation
"The Abolition Collective embodies the kind of work anybody interested in justice should aspire to reproduce. Astute, rigorous, and uncompromising."—Steven Salaita, author of Inter/Nationalism: Decolonizing Native America and Palestine
"The Abolition Journal project offers a unique, revolutionary lens through which to view, analyze and fight against capitalism and patriarchy on the terrain of the prison-industrial complex."—James Kilgore, author of Understanding Mass Incarceration: A People's Guide to the Key Civil Rights Struggle of Our Time
“This brilliant and absorbing collection of rigorous research articles, thoughtful political interventions, and innovative artworks is immensely important to the work of committed scholars, activists and organizers. There is much that teaches, fortifies, motivates and mobilizes here.”—Laleh Khalili, author of Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula and Time in the Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgencies
"Finally, here is a journal providing a platform capacious enough to embrace the insurgent knowledge of activists, the analytical rigor of scholars, and the visionary power of artists."—Jackie Wang, author of Carceral Capitalism
"Inspiring and incisive, these political interventions advance collective and transformative revolutionary praxis—what we need, now more than ever. On fire, indeed!"—J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, author of Hawaiian Blood and Paradoxes of Hawaiian Sovereignty and editor of Speaking of Indigenous Politics
Praise for Ashon Crawley
*Winner of the 2021 Lammy Award in Nonfiction*
*Winner of the Believer Book Award for Nonfiction*
"Ashon T. Crawley pushes his readers to contemplate the intimacy of living the life of the mind as a spiritual, enfleshed, and intellectual matter."—Imani Perry, author of Looking for Lorraine
Praise for Roberto Sirvent
“Danny Haiphong and Roberto Sirvent are two of the most courageous and truthful intellectuals in the belly of the U.S. imperial beast!"—Cornel West
Table of ContentsSearching For An Abolitionist Spirituality—Jared Ware
The Manual For Liberating Survival: Lesson 1. How self-care matters as an embodied practice of abolition—Rae Leiner and Jasmine Syedullah
Is, Was, and is to Come: Freedom Dreamworld Dispatches—Andrew Krinks
Resurrection at the Fractured Locus: Incarcerated Black Trans Embodiment and Decolonial Abolition Praxis—AK Wright
God is Blackness: Mysticism of the Unowned Earth—Peter Kline
The Abolition of Hell: Abolitionist Interpretations of Jesus’ Descent into Hell—Hannah Bowman
