By Bernard E. Harcourt In the chapter titled “The General Strike” of his book Black Reconstruction in America, W.E.B. Du Bois demonstrates that the women and men who were enslaved in the South used their collective power, their labor and… Continue Reading
By Bernard E. Harcourt Our task at Abolition Democracy 2/13 was to critically engage the theoretical framework of “abolition democracy”—the framework coined by W.E.B. Du Bois in his magnum opus, Black Reconstruction in America, and reimagined by Angela Davis in… Continue Reading
By Rebecca Stout The two Abolition 13/13 seminars thus far have, in discussions of forms, theories, and praxes of abolition, brought the arts, lived experiences, and human rights to the fore of the conversation. The panel of Abolition 2/13 was composed… Continue Reading
By Alex S. Vitale My abolitionist journey began about 30 years ago. In the early 1990’s I worked at the San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness doing housing policy and advocating for spending for social and health programs of benefit to homeless… Continue Reading
By Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak I am very grateful to Bernard for inviting me to join this wonderful group. Let me first compare Angela Davis’s notion of abolition democracy to Du Bois’s analysis of the same phenomenon. Davis is of course… Continue Reading
By Robert Gooding-Williams Note to Reader: I have excerpted the following remarks from a manuscript-in-progress on Du Bois’s Political Aesthetics. They focus on Du Bois’s conception of democratic despotism. They bear on our forthcoming 13/13 discussion, because Du Bois understands democratic despotism… Continue Reading
By Bernard E. Harcourt “What we manage to do each time we win a victory is not so much to secure change once and for all, but rather to create new terrains for struggle.” — Angela Davis, Abolition Democracy (2005).… Continue Reading
By Bernard E. Harcourt “Abolition-democracy demands for Negroes physical freedom, civil rights, economic opportunity and education and the right to vote, as a matter of sheer human justice and right.” — Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America (1935) W.E.B. Du Bois… Continue Reading
By Bernard E. Harcourt We live in a punitive society—to borrow a term coined by Michel Foucault in his 1973 lectures at the Collège de France, La Société punitive.[1] With over two million men, women, and children, predominantly of color,… Continue Reading