Spirituality and Abolition
Spirituality and Abolition
eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Abolition 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.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781942173823 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Common Notions |
| Publication date: | 02/28/2023 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 7 MB |
About the Author
Ashon Crawley is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and African American and African Studies at the University of Virginia. Professor Crawley works in the areas of black studies, queer theory, sound studies, theology, continental philosophy, and performance studies. He is the author of the Lammy award-winning book, The Lonely Letters and Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility.
Read an Excerpt
"Imagine we were working together to make prisons obsolete. Imagine we were queer-of-color lead and organizing for community safety, food justice, universal housing and an end to police brutality. Imagine we were spending more time fighting each other than we were fighting the expansion of the prison industrial complex.
Imagine we were effective enough to attract funding, private and public support to acquire 501(c)3 status, sustaining donors and a local following. Imagine our hearts and heads were in the right place but we were coming from completely different points in the process of waking up to our place in our own “geographies of containment,” as New Slavery Studies historian Stephanie Camp calls it.1 Imagine we were all working our edge but from various points in our own processes of bringing awareness and compassion to our own unique intersections of trauma and survival, strategies born from bearing the bodies, histories, and kin we carry with us….
Imagine our mission statements were in alignment with the core principles of abolitionist activism that inspired the 1971 Attica rebellion but our organizational practices of hiring, decision making, and conflict resolution more closely mirrored the technologies of care and accountability born of the carceral corporatism of the nonprofit industrial complex. Imagine we had grown too burned out to notice.
We have been here before, not just once, not just now, but time and again. Our movements for abolition are at a crossroads. We are the 21st century great grandchildren of the movement to abolish slavery and we draw strength from the past by coming together to learn what “improvising on reality” might look like today.[1] More than fifty years after the state sanctioned violence that forcibly brought the Attica uprising to a violent end, we find ourselves at yet another moment of reckoning. We have a choice to make. Demands to name.
We draw on Cedric Robinson’s legacy as expressed by Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin and their definition of abolition. In their “Introduction” to Futures of Black Radicalism they boldly proclaim that abolition is nothing less than the wholesale “destruction of racial regimes and racial capitalism,” (12.) We draw abolitionist strategies from the many iterative histories of the abolitionist tradition centering the fugitive as foundational. Our fugitive lineage is in conversation with the writings of Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Angela Davis, Joy James, Mariame Kaba, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and Incite! Women of Color Against Violence – divergent approaches to the work of abolition that ask us to focus our attention on all the everyday ways carceral logics colonize every acre of our political landscapes.
Carceral logics produce the carceral effects of the prison industrial complex in ways that exceed the scenes of traffic stops, court houses, jails, and detention centers to reach into our private lives, to live in the very places we call home. We see how quickly carceral logics and practices of policing, surveillance, and punishment persist beyond the bounds of the PIC to enter our intimate places of refuge, shaping the relationships we have with our families, organizations, communities, and movements. Canceling people or cutting people out, policing each other’s identities or politics, caretaking in ways that feel more like management than the intimacy of shared oppression -- these practices are so familiar many of us take them for granted. As Reverend angel Kyodo williams claims, “Our bodies take the shape of, and thus illuminate, the contours of the most insidious force of systematic dehumanization and destruction ever imagined, one which has led the global community into a downward spiral of self-annihilation” (Radical Dharma, xxi).
To abolish racial regimes and racial capital we have to divest from the seduction of carceral logics. In their essay entitled, “Transforming Carceral Logics: 10 Reasons to dismantle the Prison Industrial Complex using a queer/trans analysis,” S. Lambel writes,
"a queer/trans politics not only helps identify the role of imprisonment in perpetuating gender, racial, and sexual violence, but also provides tools for developing alternative community responses that better address problems of harm … The prison system is literally killing damaging, and harming people from our communities. Whether we consider physical death caused by self-harm, medical neglect, and state violence; social death caused by subsequent unemployment, homelessness, and stigmatization; or civil death experienced through police disenfranchisement and exclusion from citizenship rights, the violence of imprisonment is undeniable … Prisons remove people from their communities, isolate them from social support, and disconnect them from frameworks of accountability … More importantly, imprisonment does not assist with the collective healing process nor does it work to prevent harms from recurring in the future (237-245)."
Rather than continue to imagine that the PIC is out there, we are accountable to queer-of-color activist narrative, archives, and scholarship along with ancient traditions of embodied contemplative practice to see how the PIC lives in our relationships to ourselves, each other, and our protocols of resistance to it. We are practicing alternative ways to actively disrupt our own habituated relationships to safety, sustainability, and survival. We are watching our own patterns, taking note, and ritualizing ways to remember how we imagine a world without prisons. We need tools that hold us accountable to that vision and its realization in this moment. We are committed to keeping up a practice of de-shackling ourselves and disarming each other from the false security of the carceral logics of capitalist bureaucracy as daily defense against the rip tide of their pull on our lives.
Even as we practice, we face the death throes of capitalism and seeing how racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and white supremacy have pushed our planet and our communities to the limit. We are constantly under attack, physically, politically, environmentally, psychologically and spiritually. Our activist and organizing communities are responding all across the planet, fighting against policing, paramilitary presence, prison expansion, war machines, and global capitalism. We fight because we feel the effects of oppression are reaching a critical point. Our planet burns and the sounds of its destruction resonate in our bodies, in our hearts, in our bellies, in our heads. Oppression ignites us to take action, to fight and grasp for survival strategies, for notions of liberation, whatever they may look like. "
Table of Contents
Searching 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