Abolition Geography : Essays Towards Liberation

First collection of writings from one of the foremost contemporary critical thinkers on racism, geography and incarceration.

Gathering together Ruth Wilson Gilmore's work from over three decades, <i>Abolition Geography</i> presents her singular contribution to the politics of abolition as theorist, researcher, and organizer, offering scholars and activists ways of seeing and doing to help navigate our turbulent present.<br><br><i>Abolition Geography</i> moves us away from explanations of mass incarceration and racist violence focused on uninterrupted histories of prejudice or the dull compulsion of neoliberal economics. Instead, Gilmore offers a geographical grasp of how contemporary racial capitalism operates through an "anti-state state" that answers crises with the organized abandonment of people and environments deemed surplus to requirement. Gilmore escapes one-dimensional conceptions of what liberation demands, who demands liberation, or what indeed is to be abolished. Drawing on the lessons of grassroots organizing and internationalist imaginaries, <i>Abolition Geography</i> undoes the identification of abolition with mere decarceration, and reminds us that freedom is not a mere principle but a place.<br><br>Edited with an introduction by Brenna Bhandar and Alberto Toscano.