Rethinking Witnessing and Abolition

• In Event: Achieving James Baldwin’s America: Abolition and Revolutionary Politics

Abstract

I seek to rethink my previous scholarship on Baldwin, abolition, and witnessing. In 2019, I published “James Baldwin and the Force of Law: On Excessive Violence and Exceeding Violence,” in which I read Baldwin’s No Name in the Street as an explicitly abolitionist call for revolution. My 2024 book Abolition Time: Grammars of Law, Poetics of Justice levies a strong critique of “witnessing” as a framework for abolitionist ethics and proposes the injunction, “The condition of possibility for ethics is risk.” In both, perhaps I previously folded the ethics of “witnessing” together with “politics of recognition.” What our moment requires rethinking is the liberatory potential of critical witnessing, or witnessing within proximal relation to terror.
Baldwin famously refers to himself as a “witness” on numerous occasions, he does not mean something thin or simple by the word. For Baldwin, “witnessing” is inflected by his rigorous thinking through Christian theology in a way that resists conflating it with recognition. I propose, then, to think with Baldwin’s rigorous sense of “witnessing” towards a conception that takes seriously the “risk” required by abolitionist ethics.

Author

• Jess A Goldberg, New Mexico Highlands University