Love and Abolition: The Social Life of Black Queer Performance: Black Performance and Cultural Criticism
Autor Alison Rose Reeden Limba Engleză Paperback – 11 feb 2022
Reed identifies abolition literature as an emergent field of inquiry that emphasizes social relationships in the ongoing struggle to dismantle systems of coercion, criminalization, and control. Focusing on love as an affective modality and organizing tool rooted in the Black radical tradition’s insistence on collective sociality amidst unrelenting state violence, Reed provides fresh readings of visionaries such as James Baldwin, Ntozake Shange, Sharon Bridgforth, and vanessa german. Both abolitionist manifesto and examination of how Black queer performance offers affective modulations of tough and tender love, Love and Abolition ultimately calls for a critical reconsideration of the genre of prison literature—and the role of the humanities—during an age of mass incarceration.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9780814258194
ISBN-10: 0814258190
Pagini: 262
Ilustrații: 7 b&w illustrations
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 23 mm
Greutate: 0.4 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
Seria Black Performance and Cultural Criticism
ISBN-10: 0814258190
Pagini: 262
Ilustrații: 7 b&w illustrations
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 23 mm
Greutate: 0.4 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
Seria Black Performance and Cultural Criticism
Recenzii
“Passionately argued, Love and Abolition is a compelling exploration of the power of Black queer performances to forge affective landscapes that rebel against carceral psychology, while inspiring new ways of being in and for the world. Performance, in this project, is a domain in which the impossible and the unthinkable become tangible and doable. More than rehearsing tough and tender love, it makes it in the here and now of an urgently abolitionist present.” —Joshua Chambers-Letson, author of After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life
“With her deep investigation into the historical and present-day manifestations of abolition, together with her incisive analysis of Black queer performance’s rootedness in social transformation and careful attention to embodiment, Alison Rose Reed makes clear the specific ways that Black queer art invests in love as an abolitionist practice. She has done a great service for all of us who believe in the freedom strokes necessary—and available—in the here and now.” —Omi Osun Joni L. Jones, author of Theatrical Jazz: Performance, Àṣẹ, and the Power of the Present Moment
“Taking its cues from ‘queer networks of creative solidarity,’ Love and Abolition stages a valuable dialogue between performance studies and abolitionist scholarship. Reed puts forward an interpretive framework for engaging how radical practices of care shape and are shaped by Black radical traditions of both conflict and collaboration.” —Felice D. Blake, author of Black Love, Black Hate: Intimate Antagonisms in African American Literature
“One of the contributions Love and Abolition makes to scholarship and activism are the countless moments when Reed’s more polemical argumentation and analysis provoke new opportunities for research and thought. … Like all great manifestos, Reed’s provocations open up new worlds for thought and action. At the same time, her analysis of affect and abolition offer urgent and necessary interventions to feminist studies, queer studies, and Black studies.” —Stephen Dillon, The Journal of African American History
“With her deep investigation into the historical and present-day manifestations of abolition, together with her incisive analysis of Black queer performance’s rootedness in social transformation and careful attention to embodiment, Alison Rose Reed makes clear the specific ways that Black queer art invests in love as an abolitionist practice. She has done a great service for all of us who believe in the freedom strokes necessary—and available—in the here and now.” —Omi Osun Joni L. Jones, author of Theatrical Jazz: Performance, Àṣẹ, and the Power of the Present Moment
“Taking its cues from ‘queer networks of creative solidarity,’ Love and Abolition stages a valuable dialogue between performance studies and abolitionist scholarship. Reed puts forward an interpretive framework for engaging how radical practices of care shape and are shaped by Black radical traditions of both conflict and collaboration.” —Felice D. Blake, author of Black Love, Black Hate: Intimate Antagonisms in African American Literature
“One of the contributions Love and Abolition makes to scholarship and activism are the countless moments when Reed’s more polemical argumentation and analysis provoke new opportunities for research and thought. … Like all great manifestos, Reed’s provocations open up new worlds for thought and action. At the same time, her analysis of affect and abolition offer urgent and necessary interventions to feminist studies, queer studies, and Black studies.” —Stephen Dillon, The Journal of African American History
Notă biografică
Alison Rose Reed is Associate Professor of English at Old Dominion University.
Extras
Specifically looking to performance, this book examines how the affective dimensions of love in the Black radical tradition invigorate the unfinished work of abolition. My usage of abolition follows the contemporary movement to eliminate prisons, policing, and surveillance while rebuilding the world anew, and therefore it is informed by grassroots organizing that takes its lead from people targeted for criminalization and cages. It also follows the tradition of abolition democracy offered by Black radical thinkers such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Angela Davis. Despite some critical distinctions in scope and strategy, the motivating spirit of this contemporary movement finds parallels in the abolition of chattel slavery, where this institution was considered existentially a given in the natural order of things. Similarly, the system of policing and punishment today is seen as inevitable and ineradicable but, like slavery, had to be built, legitimized, and continually developed to maintain its status as such. Abolition is about challenging the inevitability of cops and cages, just as historically activists worked to uproot presumptions of permanence around slavery. While eighteenth-century scholars and activists principally defined abolition in the context of the transatlantic slave trade, Black abolitionists called for the “death of both the institution and the spirit of slavery” that sustains white supremacist ideology and endures in political, economic, cultural, and social technologies. Contemporary abolitionists extend their legacy to understand the term much more capaciously than the continuities of anti-Black containment and criminalization embedded in the Thirteenth Amendment alone. That is to say, while slavery was abolished “except as a punishment for crime,” the contemporary abolition movement seeks not just to rectify the law but to transform a society that sanctions ongoing violence in the name of progress. Therefore, abolition also means the end of global racial capitalism and all systems of domination, including how those systems manifest interpersonally and epistemologically. This project is necessarily expansive, for as the Abolition Collective asserts: “Abolitionist politics is not about what is possible, but about making the impossible a reality.” And, as Mariame Kaba and Kelly Hayes affirm, “It’s time for a jailbreak of the imagination in order to make the impossible possible.”
With particular emphasis on what I describe as queer networks of creative solidarity, this book constellates an imaginative archive of performance literature that offers provisions for justice actionable in coalitional spaces—from protests to classrooms to block parties. I define performance literature broadly as texts that exist on the page and stage (plays, ensemble pieces, choreopoems and other works that combine dance, gesture, music, and spoken word)—materializing in and between situated bodies. A genre by definition meant to be read aloud and to transform (in) provisional communities, performance literature can (re)shape reading publics. While English departments, of which I am a part, often invoke empathy as an end in itself, or as a feel-good solution to the neoliberal university in a crisis of its own design, marketing the discipline of literary studies as an opportunity to become a better “global citizen” by consuming the so-called Other, queer networks of creative solidarity forge collectives of care through their call to social action. The Black queer performance works I identify as abolitionist are not solely concerned with a critique of dominant ideologies of crime and punishment. Rather, in this book I look to Black queer performance sites that also propose healing and holistic forms of collectivity. Affective responses to the social life of abolition can generate new affections for justice rooted in the Black (queer) radical tradition’s conceptualization of love.
Cuprins
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Prologue Abolition (Is) Now!
Introduction Abolition Literature: Calling on Tough and Tender Love
Chapter 1 Listening for Emmett Till: James Baldwin, Laurie Carlos, and Black Love as Survival
Chapter 2 Transforming Harm into Healing: Ntozake Shange and the Combahee River Collective
Chapter 3 Concrete Utopias: Activating Spirit in the Performance Worlds of Sharon Bridgforth and Josefina Báez
Chapter 4 Love in the Streets: Stephanie Leigh Batiste, vanessa german, and Vigils for State Violence
Chapter 5 Contraband Love: Humanities Behind Bars and Abolition Pedagogy
Epilogue Abolition as Renegade Presence
Appendix Abolitionist Resources
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
Prologue Abolition (Is) Now!
Introduction Abolition Literature: Calling on Tough and Tender Love
Chapter 1 Listening for Emmett Till: James Baldwin, Laurie Carlos, and Black Love as Survival
Chapter 2 Transforming Harm into Healing: Ntozake Shange and the Combahee River Collective
Chapter 3 Concrete Utopias: Activating Spirit in the Performance Worlds of Sharon Bridgforth and Josefina Báez
Chapter 4 Love in the Streets: Stephanie Leigh Batiste, vanessa german, and Vigils for State Violence
Chapter 5 Contraband Love: Humanities Behind Bars and Abolition Pedagogy
Epilogue Abolition as Renegade Presence
Appendix Abolitionist Resources
Bibliography
Index
Descriere
Examines queer performance and affective response in the Black radical tradition to demonstrate how love animates the contemporary prison abolition movement.