Decolonizing Imagination: Improvisations on Anti-Black Violence

• In Event: Critical Prison Studies Caucus: Making Freedom: Materializing Abolition Through Non-Reformist Reforms

Abstract

In The Aesthetic Dimension, Herbert Marcuse upholds that the imagination has the regenerative ability to resist the oppression of existing conditions, produce new ideas, and reconfigure the familiar. Like Marcuse, I am interested in mining imaginative space as a site for excavating/highlighting/creating radical strategies, practices, and sustainable outcomes that confront and dismantle anti-Black violence. In particular, I am interested in abolitionist work that concentrates itself in eradicating the State violence of the prison industrial complex.

While the growing demand to end mass incarceration is hopeful, the movement falls short in untangling the web of structural disadvantages, institutionalized racism, capitalism, gender domination, heteropatriarchy, and other ideological and material constraints. In this climate of bipartisan reform (where our movement’s demands are at best naïve and at worst, open the floodgates to harsher policies in the long-term) have our aspirations narrowed and our methods grown predictable? Are our goals situated only within the limitations of our oppression? Are we unable to see ourselves outside of the State? In other words, are we suffering from lack of imagination?

I am interested in the erotics of Black imagination, specifically the interplay between confinement and resistance that shapes our history of dislocation, exploitation, and carceral control. In this interior and sensory space, whether in dream or waking state, we create new worlds, mythologies, and counter-narratives where daily realities are appropriated, subverted, destroyed, and refashioned—sometimes within (or for the duration of) a blink of an eye. To think of this space as a psychic location, is to also see radical imagination as more than an escape vessel, but also as a laboratory and a pleasure center where we dare to take risks. The individual imagination is a readily accessible tool that can minimize harms and expand desires. It allows us to aspire beyond the limitations of our reality.

Similarly, the collective imagination, readily accessible through cultural traditions, rituals, and shared values, is a space of risk, experimentation, and improvisation. For example, the very idea of abolition is an illustration of radical imagination. To simply envision a world outside of dominant narratives and structural norms is a transgressive act. To then develop interior and exterior infrastructure that cultivates and propels democratic engagement and collective visioning is a revolutionary act.

In this sense, to create abolitionist strategies, reforms, and movements requires that we engage radical Imagination as a critical Actor to assess and guide our work. Using slave narratives, prisoner writings, public documents, visual ephemera and oral history, my presentation will discuss the role of radical imagination in navigating the space between confinement and resistance. Looking at past and present-day abolitionist organizing strategies, I will identify cultural signifiers that have helped to articulate and materialize “freedom dreams” within the Black liberation movement.

Author

• Kai Lumumba Barrow, Independent Scholar