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Freedom’s Movements, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Rock the Prison Empire

Sun, November 9, 2:00 to 3:45pm, Westin Bonaventure, Floor: Level 1, San Gabriel B (L1)

Session Submission Type: Paper Session: Talk Format

Abstract

A bleak landscape of prisons, surveillance, and drone warfare are the fruit of the post-American century. In their coercive arms, we remember the neoliberal capitalist counter-assaults to the world revolutionary moment of post-World War II anti-colonial and anti-imperial struggles. From the vantage point of our dystopian present, it would seem that the beautiful struggle had been defeated. What this bifurcated staging of social change as revolution/defeat obscures is the interplay between these categories. We end up with declensionist narratives that make organizing for freedom now seem impossible. Because the very objects of struggle--namely settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and patriarchal empire--have been removed from time, they also reach into the future... indefinitely.

This, of course, is not the only way of remembering the past and present, or imagining the future. In this session, contributors seek to follow Marilyn Buck’s injunctive: “Let history’s records reflect the struggles from below inside the Empire” (in Berger 2014). Panelists situate the contemporary prison-industrial complex in relation to dialectical historiographies of empire and struggle. They not only embrace decades of decolonial, queer, critical race, and feminist scholarship, but also seek to understand why bifurcated categories – like revolution/defeat, freedom/slavery, freedom/prison, structure/agency, pleasure/pain, plenty/austerity, past/present, white/black, race/class, life/death, masculine/feminine – continue to have such a hold on our historical imaginations. In so doing, they explore how creative historical and geographical methods of inquiry might open up spaces not only for imagining more livable futures, but also for revealing how and where such futures are already being lived.

Panelists draw from a range of disciplinary and research practices as well as distinct political organizing traditions to propose new ways of creating history and the future. Patient methods of close documentation and abolition pedagogy can shape, enliven, and embolden our memories and communities of struggle. Laura McTighe blends ethnography and oral history to trace the geographies and histories that enabled New Orleans’ Women With A Vision to hold their community together after an arson attack left them place-less. Centering their relations of resistance enables her to imagine how to speak of “freedom” and “movement” without reference to captivity. Evan Bissell’s The Knotted Line project advances an abolition pedagogy. He emphasizes transhistorical liberation struggles that sometimes dance ahead of the shifting nature of oppressive institutions, placing the current struggle for the abolition of the prison industrial complex within a much longer lineage that stretches into the future. Pascal Emmer develops the hermeneutic of ‘‘meta-generationality’’ both to describe the intergenerational and multigenerational dynamics in ACT UP Philadelphia’s organizing culture, and also to challenge the discourse of “generational divides” that haunts the (new) New Left and hamstrings the critical imagining of a queer future without AIDS or prisons. Jenna Loyd develops an experimental project into landscape and memory that brings images of border and prison that she has collected into constellation with far-a-field ricochets of US empire to think about global connections between prison abolition and anti-imperialism, past and present.

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