4.0
Abolition Geography
ByPublisher Description
THE POLITICS OF ABOLITION: The first-ever collection of writings from one of the foremost contemporary critical thinkers on racism, geography, police brutality, and mass incarceration.
“. . . . filled with sharp intelligence and even wit . . . Gilmore forces us to think of race, class, prisons, and the world in entirely new ways.” —NPR
Gathering together Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s work from over three decades, Abolition Geography 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.
Abolition Geography 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, Abolition Geography undoes the identification of abolition with mere decarceration, and reminds us that freedom is not a mere principle but a place.
“Scholars like Ruthie Gilmore, filmmakers like Ava Duvernay . . . have all done work to expose the many injustices of the industry of our prison system.” —Jay-Z, Time
“. . . . filled with sharp intelligence and even wit . . . Gilmore forces us to think of race, class, prisons, and the world in entirely new ways.” —NPR
Gathering together Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s work from over three decades, Abolition Geography 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.
Abolition Geography 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, Abolition Geography undoes the identification of abolition with mere decarceration, and reminds us that freedom is not a mere principle but a place.
“Scholars like Ruthie Gilmore, filmmakers like Ava Duvernay . . . have all done work to expose the many injustices of the industry of our prison system.” —Jay-Z, Time
Download the free Fable app
Stay organized
Keep track of what you’re reading, what you’ve finished, and what’s next.
Build a better TBR
Swipe, skip, and save with our smart list-building tool
Rate and review
Share your take with other readers with half stars, emojis, and tags
Curate your feed
Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesStay organized
Keep track of what you’re reading, what you’ve finished, and what’s next.Build a better TBR
Swipe, skip, and save with our smart list-building toolRate and review
Share your take with other readers with half stars, emojis, and tagsCurate your feed
Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesAbolition Geography Reviews
4.0
Lacey
Created 12 months agoShare
Report
Genesis
Created about 1 year agoShare
Report
Brittneyney
Created over 1 year agoShare
Report
“We read Abolition Geography for our Resistance Bookclub, filled with various backgrounds and educations...This is definitely a book for academics and the like.
Honestly, we struggled with the elevated vocabulary. We would love to see a more accessible rewrite in plain language like Ibram X. Kendi did for the different versions of Stamped.
We enjoyed the chapter's involving her interviews! Which brought us to research more on Ruth Wilson Gilmore. Such a gem.
This book definitely invoked lively discussion and ultimately we ended on how proud we are of the youth protesting at their colleges all over the nation currently.”
“This collection has a lot of important information and I learned a lot but I felt that the potential impact it could have had was handicapped by the amount of scholarly language present. These concepts should be more accessible to people from a wider array of backgrounds and levels of education.
"Skin, our largest organ, vulnerable to all ambient toxins, at the end is all we have to hold us together, no matter how much it seems to keep us apart."”
Rachael
Created over 1 year agoShare
Report
“Wowowow such an intense read! (Apologizing now for the long review) I went into this book completely blind to how academic it is and was definitely pretty stumped here and there trying to get through the sections but overall, it was 1000% worth it. With all the racism 101 classes I’ve taken, none have really touched on the aspect of space and geography and how it construes our definitions of identity: “Space always matters, and what we make of it in thought and practice determines, and is determined by, how we mix our creativity with the external world to change it, and ourselves, in the process.” I thought the sections on militarization and the industrial prison complex were extremely compelling but I think my favorite was the parts focusing on epistemology, the whole “the master’s tools will never dismantle master’s house” and of course “Who produces knowledge? How is knowledge policed? Who succeeds in being understood? Who teaches? What is taught? Who learns?” I always think that’s interesting, and also the role of Black women in academia and how much power/control/voice is given to them to tell stories. Lastly, innocence was a pretty interesting concept here, especially “If people living under the most severe constraints, such as prisoners, can form study groups to learn about the world, then free-world activists have no excuse for ignorance, nor should they rely on funder-designed workshops and training sessions to do what revolutionaries in all times have done on their own." Overall an incredible and important read, definitely had to invest some serious brain cells to get through it but it was so worth it. 100% will be referring this book whenever the conversation turns to how every problem ever goes back to colonialism :)”
About Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Ruth Wilson Gilmore is Professor of Earth & Environmental Sciences, and American Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where she is also Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics. She is the author of Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. Honors include the American Studies Association Angela Y. Davis Award for Public Scholarship (2012); the Association of American Geographers' Harold Rose Award for Anti-Racist Research and Practice (2014); the SUNY-Purchase College Eugene V. Grant Distinguished Scholar Prize for Social and Environmental Justice (2015-16); and the American Studies Association Richard A Yarborough Mentorship Award (2017).
Other books by Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Start a Book Club
Start a public or private book club with this book on the Fable app today!FAQ
Do I have to buy the ebook to participate in a book club?
Why can’t I buy the ebook on the app?
How is Fable’s reader different from Kindle?
Do you sell physical books too?
Are book clubs free to join on Fable?
How do I start a book club with this book on Fable?
Save to a list
0
/30
0
/100
Private List