Search

When Istanbul prohibited the trade of enslaved Africans in 1857, the Ottoman local authorities expanded efforts to curb human trafficking throughout the imperial realm. These endeavours also included Libya, which lies at the frontiers of the Greater Sahara, a major slave-raiding zone in the nineteenth century. The historiography devoted to modern Libya maintains that the Porte took action to curb slavery only in response to British pressure. In this article, I seek to situate the prohibition of human trade in Libya within the larger scope of the end of slavery in the imperial realm. I argue that the Ottomans conducted an abolitionist policy in Libya that was embedded in the reforms undertaken in these peripheral provinces, namely, to foster the Porte's sovereignty at its imperial frontier. I further argue that the enslaved population gained agency in the manumission process and in their integration into Ottoman society after their liberation. This bottom-up approach to the end of human bondage reveals the entanglement of old and new patterns of manumission in the era of abolition as well as the social integration of these emancipated slaves into Ottoman society during the Reform period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jacob D. Green's speaking career in England (1863-66) is an exploration of how an independent, self-financed Black speaker became a networked abolitionist building on the achievements of other expatriate African American activists like Moses Roper and James Watkins. Born enslaved in Maryland, Green made serial escapes from enslavement in Kentucky and elsewhere in the United States, sojourning in Toronto before arriving in Lancashire at about age forty-eight with evidently few funds. Green appealed to cotton and woollen mill town residents to oppose enslavement and the Confederate States of America from where most of North-West England's cotton originated. He initially lectured under the sponsorship of nonconformist ministers in Yorkshire and built a network that included ministers in the United Methodist Free Church, Congregational Union, capitalists, and tradespeople. Nonconformist sponsorship led to an 1864 move to Heckmondwike in the centre of his lecture circuit. He connected with those who sponsored other Black abolitionists, burgeoning his network by speaking in West Yorkshire towns and cities that had hosted African American orators before. As a networked abolitionist, he earned income from speaking and publishing an autobiography and may have died in England in 1866. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shortly after Toussaint Louverture died in 1803, a literary tradition emerged in British abolitionist texts which portrayed the character of Toussaint in heroic terms. This article takes five texts written between 1803–1863 to demonstrate how Toussaint was constructed as an antislavery hero and what the motivations were behind this construction. The hero can be understood as a lens through which Toussaint’s character, and the character of the whole Haitian Revolution, was flattened. The hero was a frame that made him knowable and understandable to European audiences, but that also erased both the mass of enslaved people that formed the grassroots of the revolution in Haiti, as well as the many aspects of Toussaint himself that were not deemed to fit the hero narrative. This literary tradition arose because the mainstream of the nineteenth-century British antislavery movement opposed and feared rebellions led by enslaved people, believing on racist grounds that they were violent, uncontrolled, and anarchic, and at odds with the new liberal vision of empire that most British abolitionists wanted to create. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this co/autoethnographic account of a school-based cyber-bullying incident, the authors discuss the challenges of current anti-bullying approaches in schools. In the incident, male-identifying students were alleged to have engaged in online gender-based abuse of female--identifying students. The authors identify three key themes toward transformation: teacher knowledge and understanding, uncertainty and liminality, and symbolic accountability. The authors discuss an anti-bullying prevention approach that focuses on protecting targets of abuse and restoring trust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on a larger ethnographic project in San Francisco, this essay illustrates the housing justice work of youth participants in San Francisco's Mission Roots youth organizing program. I introduce the concept of movement vulnerability to describe how developing ideology and political vision was central to their activism. This article draws from abolitionist political thoughtto highlight the carceral dimensions of displacement and gentrification in San Francisco. More importantly, an abolitionist lens allows us to recognize the creative and visionary dimensions of Mission Roots youth organizers' work. Furthermore, this article offers a reminder to youth studies and education scholars that organizing is a method of transforming material conditions and pursuing social justice projects, rather than a mere 'intervention' to promote conventional notions of academic and youth development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Robert Wedderburn self-published Horrors of Slavery (1824) within ultraradical networks in London, so his life narrative was not shaped by the political ambitions of white, middle-class abolitionists. By celebrating the communal, place-based resistances of his enslaved mother and grandmother as the source of his own emancipation from slavery, Horrors reworked the Romantic figuration of sorrowful, enslaved Black mothers. Wedderburn's mother, Rosanna, demanded that his enslaver father manumit him. His grandmother, Talkee Amy, was a higgler and obeah woman who "trafficked on her own account." Wedderburn's description of Rosanna and Talkee Amy's place-based abolitionist geographies then serves as an illuminating intertext for History of Mary Prince (1831). Like Wedderburn's mother and grandmother, Prince entered and navigated spaces in a way that asserted her humanness by rebelliously claiming kinship and higglering in unofficial local economies. In both narratives, Black women cultivated communal, material, and place-based forms of liberation from slavery, and their stories supplement and even challenge current understandings of Romantic-era abolition and women's activism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anti-Blackness adumbrates rationality and reaches into phobic realms, what Frantz Fanon called the "paralogical." Ebony Elizabeth Thomas's The Dark Fantastic links the dark fantastic imagination and the Dark Other of speculative fiction to their cultural iterations and augments the paralogicality of anti-Blackness by accounting for the narrative roles of hesitation and belief. This paper argues that it is further necessary to assert the narrative significance of nineteenth century Christian, pre-Adamite and/or Serpent Seed theological anthropologies for the production of what one might call a dark fantastic theological imaginary of human being. The paper argues, further, far from being a bygone heresy, the pre-Adamite mythos lives on in the "thin blue line" anthropology of contemporary policing. The paper therefore looks ultimately for abolitionist possibilities to interrupt this imaginary, which it sees in the theological counternarrative of Black being in Matt Ruff's novel Lovecraft Country and its TV adaptation by Misha Green. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I bring together the archive of institutional activism of Niara Sudarkasa in the U.S. and the posthumous impact of activist and public administrator Marielle Franco. The 1970s historical sources show Sudarkasa's institutional solidarity with students and faculty in the creation of one of the first Africana Studies departments in the U.S. Reading them, I articulate an ethos for the curation '715 Haven Street: Art Looks Back,' a public digital art gallery comprised of art and history found in the DAAS Papers (Department of Afroamerican and African Studies) housed in the Bentley Library's digital and physical archives. The analysis of the primary sources is guided by an engagement with the 'Marielle Effect,' generating a historical parameter for Abolitionist solidarity between American, Brazilian, Latin American, African American, Diasporic, and ally scholarly communities. The discussion of these parameters is embedded in my discussion of the concept of pacification, a phenomenon of colonial and post-colonial policing that survives through the perpetuation of an extra-judicial policing impetus articulated along race, identity, legality, and sexual legitimacy of subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within reformist and abolitionist discourse on punishment, the articulation of community delimits those who can be considered a part of collective life and those who, having offended collective sentiments, are to be positioned outside the collective. By positing community at a moment of exclusion, this discourse superimposes a villain at the discursive level. This article critiques the punitive implications of delimiting community, most notably: taking for granted the dangerous few and maintaining the tenability of punitive intervention. A discourse analysis of four dominant reformist and abolitionist theorizations reveals an us-them binary across their interpretations of punitive interventions. Our discussion explores the paradox of supposing social cohesion within an exclusionary framework and considers the possibility of imagining a non-punitive discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article demonstrates how anti-trafficking media use the public memory of the Underground Railroad to racially legitimize US global policing regimes. From far-right paramilitary vigilante groups to liberal multicultural public history institutions, the anti-trafficking industry's reverence for 19th-century Black women abolitionist icons is mobilized, counter-intuitively, to build public support for carceral agendas. Through visual analysis of the media of two exemplar organizations—Operation Underground Railroad and the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center—I unpack the racial dynamics of anti-trafficking's carceral humanitarianism and the racial politics of anti-trafficking's memory of transatlantic abolition. I argue that incorporating icons of radical Black freedom struggle, such as Harriet Tubman, into anti-trafficking's neoliberal carceral agenda becomes a racial alibi for the perpetuation of ongoing racialized state violence in the name of abolition. US policing is thus racially legitimized as a set of freedom-granting institutions amid the ongoing Black women-led freedom struggles that name policing's role in perpetuating antiblack state violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we highlight the experiences of two Black early-career science teachers who transitioned from their STEM professions into the classroom. This study explored factors that influenced their decisions to choose education and how being introduced to abolitionist teaching during the preparation process informed their roles as educators. Abolitionist teaching served as the theoretical lens to examine their pursuit of teaching as a career and the classroom practices that they employed. Data sources included two semi-structured interviews with each participant and artifacts from the teacher preparation program and their science classrooms. We lifted up the voices and experiences of teachers through narrative inquiry and, two major themes emerged from their stories. Findings revealed that the participants were inspired to serve as role models and positioned themselves as extended family members for Black and Brown children to realize their potential. Findings also highlighted the significance of centering abolitionist teaching in the science teacher preparation program to equip and position these teachers to resist marring practices within their schools. We argue that educational reform efforts must acknowledge the value that Black teachers bring to science classrooms and create retention initiatives that protect and support them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on the political aspects of sanctuary, this article offers a qualitative account of responses to the criminalization and long-standing racialized exclusion of immigrants. Fieldwork findings suggest that New York City's New Sanctuary Coalition (NSC) did not screen immigrants to distinguish between the worthy/deserving and the undeserving, nor did it create a boundary between the host and the guest; rather, it actively worked toward an abolitionist movement of expanded sanctuary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abolitionist John Brown remains a cultural touchstone over 160 years after his execution for leading the Harpers Ferry Raid in October 1859, largely because that event and Brown's behavior after it played a part in leading the nation into civil war. To understand that legacy and his role in sparking the Civil War, this article examines the discursive field that animated around Brown within the context of the racial sensorium of his time. We argue Brown still attracts interest because he was a distinctive antebellum racial figure who catalyzed major shifts in the country's racial sensory landscape by offering a mode of radical whiteness grounded in white mobility, the use of violence, electrifying words and deeds, and shockingly bold intimacies with Black people. Ultimately, by examining the discursive field that surrounded Brown from his time in Kansas to after his execution, we demonstrate how his radical sensibilities shifted the somatic politics of racial confrontation in the antebellum period and show that John Brown became an amplifying cultural force through which both Northerners and Southerners felt the question of slavery in new ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historians of human rights have not had much to say about America's anti-slavery movement. Scholars tend to focus instead on the early enlightenment or how ideas of human rights emerged over the twentieth century. This essay, however, makes a case for why American abolitionists should be considered early rights pioneers and progenitors of what we know as human rights. It argues that though different factions of the movement had particular conceptions of rights, the movement itself mobilized around a shared rights vision and made this vision of human rights a centre piece of America's anti-slavery crusade. As a result, the essay intervenes in existing debates about how unified the abolitionists were and what made their thinking 'modern,' but it also speaks to the history of human rights by offering the field a new origin story to contend with. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the late eighteenth century, slave trade insurance was a lucrative and visible business in British and American slave trading towns. Abolition, however, proved difficult. United States laws were patchwork and never reached the federal level. Britain banned slave trade insurance in 1807 alongside the slave trade, but enforcement remained scattershot and ineffective. This article offers three reasons for this state of affairs. First, the marine insurance business's transnationality, the dispersion of its paperwork, and its sometimes deliberate obscurity produced a profound information problem for abolitionists that impeded both legislation and enforcement. The second reason has to do with the evolution of abolitionists' priorities and strategies in a complex international environment. Third, there was an enduring problem in the relationship between insurance and the law. Napoleonic-era commercial law was characterized by reversals, exceptions, gray areas, and sovereignty dilemmas. This produced a vast realm of legal uncertainty – a domain in which insurers, accustomed to assessing legal risks, had always thrived. Insurers, therefore, are not best characterized as obeying or defying a single thing called 'the law' in this period. Rather, they were co-creators of a domain of legality within which slave trade insurance could be sold profitably for years after abolition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how different types of reform can be used to progress short-, medium-, and long-term abolitionist goals. I begin by examining liberal reform – or reformist reforms – and how they often end up reifying imprisonment. I juxtapose liberal reform to the proposed abolitionist reform typology, consisting of imaginable, semi-imaginable, and unimaginable reforms. Drawing on the community organizing of the Criminalization and Punishment Education Project (CPEP) – a volunteer-based activist group working in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada – I demonstrate how different types of reforms can be pursued by abolitionists simultaneously: imaginable reforms that reduce the harms and use of carceral spaces and practices; semi-imaginable reforms that work to divert and decarcerate people from custody; and unimaginable reforms that replace oppressive structures with caring and compassionate ones. I also explore the pitfalls, possibilities, and tensions within each approach to reform within revolutionary struggles. This paper seeks to cover the possibilities and pitfalls of different types of reform and envision how they can be used in concert to progress prison abolition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The leaded roofs of the nave and south aisle of All Saints Church, Wath Upon Dearne, South Yorkshire, are covered in graffiti dating from between the early-seventeenth and the twentieth centuries. The graffiti, along with other features such as plumbers' plaques, was the subject of archaeological recording in 2013. This paper discusses the form of the graffiti, and what information it preserves about the spiritual, folk and community beliefs of those who made it. Its potential for understanding changes to the fabric of the church itself is also examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Antebellum abolitionists saw children and youths as natural allies in the antislavery cause. While significant attention has been devoted to juvenile antislavery literature produced by adults for children, little is known about the juvenile antislavery societies that sprang up in the 1830s. In this essay, I shed light on their formation, membership, and activities. I argue that children and youths who were involved in juvenile antislavery societies made a meaningful contribution to the struggle against slavery. Though short-lived, these groups were also essential in preparing the young for active participation in the abolition movement later in their lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article traces the rhetorical transformation from the Irish as an exemplum to the Irish as a historically situated demographic in U.S. abolitionist writings from the early to mid-nineteenth century. Through close readings of polemical essays, speeches, and newspaper articles, I argue that abolitionist writers such as David Walker, Samuel Cornish, Gerrit Smith, and Frederick Douglass begin to transition away from conceiving of the exploitation of Irish workers as a fraught, though generative comparative case to chattel slavery once a new demographic of native Irish Catholic emigrants are interpellated into the emergent category of "white labor." The Irish are thus initially used by abolitionist writers to contrast chattel slavery with other forms of labor exploitation under capitalism until the political utility of those comparisons began to wane as the Irish-American laborer proved socially and conceptionally antagonistic to free and enslaved black laborers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the activism of the London Emancipation Society (LES), a British anti-slavery organization initially established as the London Emancipation Committee in 1859 on the eve of the American Civil War. Scholars have long argued that the once-flourishing transatlantic abolitionist ties of earlier decades began to wane during the Civil War period. This article challenges that interpretation through an investigation of the LES and its key members. The article argues that transatlantic abolitionism did not wane during this period; rather, it was transformed by a new, cosmopolitan-minded generation of British abolitionists who nurtured existing as well as new ties across the Atlantic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The storytelling process weaves together personal testimonies from six or seven storytellers or narrators. (Willie P., Greensboro, North Carolina) The Mass Story Lab process centers the needs and narratives of storytellers as the key informants in the process. As I was escorted through the dark gray corridors of the Fulton County Jail in Atlanta, Georgia, the corrections officer went to work coloring our perceptions of the incarcerated men we were preparing to meet: "Don't let them touch you or get too close." Through Mass Story Lab, we used the narrative process as a way to (re)imagine a world beyond prisons. [Extracted from the article]

This essay forms a relational connection between two artivist projects of transnational border intervention—the Aylan project, and the Border Tuner project. These projects created spatio-temporal disruptions and ruptures in the normative discourses about borders and im/migration by harnessing the rhetorical power of victim images. These artivist interventions offer ways to make visible the humanity of the migrant–refugee figure. They offer a potential response to the recent abolitionist telos conceptualized in rhetoric border(ing) studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have long known the Narrative of North Carolina writer and activist Moses Roper, first published in London in 1837. This article uses newly discovered sources and the multiple editions of the Narrative to reconstitute the biography of this first fugitive slave abolitionist to lecture in Ireland and Britain. It explores Roper's interactions with British abolitionists, especially prominent Baptist ministers Francis A. Cox and Thomas Price. Roper's indisputable witness to the horrors of American slavery played a crucial role in refocusing British and Irish attention from the completed task of West Indian emancipation to the looming work yet to be done in the United States. Supporting Roper's independence, in both his campaigning and his creation of his own British family, proved too much for the British abolitionist establishment, resulting in Roper being cast out and a major opportunity to lead on matters of transatlantic moral consequence lost. More significantly, African American voice was denied its authority and a platform from which to speak. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abolitionist-academics who bring abolition into the classroom are teaching to transgress quite literally in the service of and hope for freedom. This article relies upon thirty in-depth, international interviews with academics teaching in universities and prisons. The research questions emotional labor's hidden toll on abolitionist scholars and finds that within the interdisciplinary field of critical criminology, participants commonly experienced working through hope, love, loneliness, fear and anxiety. While this research supports earlier understandings of the impact of expectations of caretaking on marginalized scholars, I also find that those who experience personal histories of criminalization may be especially vulnerable to burnout and pushout. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The idea of investigative reporting is inextricably intertwined with Watergate in the popular and journalistic imagination. But this article traces the long history of the exposé tradition in American journalism, particularly arguing that the evidentiary mindset of investigative reporters first took root in the ferment of 1830s abolitionism. In myriad pamphlets and newspapers, abolitionists began unearthing and laying before the public documentary proof of the abuses of slavery. The apotheosis of this work came in 1839 with the publication of the book-length American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses. It was a tour de force of systematic, evidence-based journalism more than a century before the phrase "investigative reporting" came into use. By connecting the idea of exposing hidden wrongdoing with the documentary method, abolition writers established an early legacy of verification as justification for moral outrage in the act of reporting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the history that my grounding in black liberation theology tempts me to enthusiastically embrace in an interdisciplinary alliance. Topics include the importance of history as a political tool for those who would defy the structures of exploitation and violence woven into nation-states, US slavery reparations movements as a model of powerful historical work, and historical context for liberative political work.

This paper reflects on the first five years of the Changing University Cultures (CHUCL) collective, which conducted equality and diversity projects in four English universities between 2015 and 2020. We explore how CHUCL has been used in the service of institutional polishing (Ahmed, S. 2012. On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Duke University Press, 143) and airbrushing (Phipps, A. 2020b. "Reckoning Up: Sexual Harassment and Violence in the Neoliberal University." Gender & Education 32 (2), 230–233), how our reports have become non-performatives (Ahmed, S. 2012. On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Duke University Press, 90), and how our findings have been weaponised in the service of institutional interests. We are two of three white middle-class women who constitute the CHUCL collective; we situate this retrospective within critical reflections on our positionality and an abolitionist theorisation of the institution. We conclude that we have often been the master's tools, and while we join the work of imagining alternatives, we must build capacity for survival within the master's house. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Liberia's protracted civil conflict was sustained for a period of fourteen years (1989–2003), killing approximately 250,000 Liberians and displacing half of the population. Liberia's war, like other contemporary African conflicts, has been persistently represented as an example of wanton violence, political tribalism, chaos, or an amalgamation of such elements. Founded in 1822, the Colony of Liberia was annexed by the American Colonization Society to expatriate and colonize "free" negros and their descendants on the coast of West Africa. "Re-colonization," as it was recognized by the ruling US Southern class, was rendered a compromise between the absolute abolition of the transatlantic slave trade and perpetual black servitude. Yet, repatriation was treacherously crafted by abolitionists and their pro-slavery contemporaries, alike, as a fugitive project, an opportunity for "free" blacks to experiment with emancipation and take refuge from the sociopolitical and economic conditions which amounted to what was effectively slavery by another name. The rhetorical propagation of the West African settlement as a pre-racial site – of sorts – in which stolen peoples could escape the violence of American racialism has made articulable contemporary theorizations of the Liberian civil war as a paradigmatic example of the negro's irresponsible experimentations with freedom. The following paper offers a re-contemplation of Liberian historiographical accounts, one that attends to the racialized global orders against which this national crisis has developed and limns the impossibility of freedom in the afterlife of slavery, where anti-black terror is not only temporally unbounded but transgeographical. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the weaponization of canines by enslavers in the antebellum American South and the manner in which abolitionists used reports of canine attacks in their fight against slavery. Using descriptions and images of canine attacks to demonstrate the brutality of the slave system, abolitionists mobilized and swayed public opinion by appealing to audiences' familial empathy, religious ethos, and shared sense of physical pain. Following the slave-hunting canine trope as it evolved to reflect the changing socio-political and cultural developments of the mid-nineteenth century, this article views the Compromise of 1850 as an inflection point, after which enslaved persons were no longer depicted as victims being attacked by dogs, but rather, as empowered survivors defending themselves and their families against the canines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Moral abolitionists claim that morality ought to be abolished. According to one of their most prominent arguments, this is because making moral judgments renders people significantly less tolerant toward anyone who holds divergent views. In this paper we investigate the hypothesis that morality's tolerance-decreasing effect only occurs if people are realists about moral issues, i.e., they interpret these issues as objectively grounded. We found support for this hypothesis (Studies 1 and 2). Yet, it also turned out that the intolerance associated with realism is mediated by moral conviction and perceived consensus. People tend to feel more strongly about those moral issues they ground objectively and, in doing so, are more prone to display the vice of moral smugness toward those who disagree with them. The remedy for this that has been recommended is humility which we found (Study 3) is indeed related to reduced intolerance, in part by predicting a reduction in realism, but also in part through a direct connection to intolerance. These results put pressure on abolitionists' "argument from intolerance." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores a case study of the struggle over the cultural meanings of charity and imprisonment related to United Way's 2019 Rockin' The Big House fundraising concert in partnership with Correctional Service of Canada (CSC) and the City of Kingston at Kingston Penitentiary. Contributing to literature at the intersection of penality, prison tourism, and the charitable sector, we examine how staging authenticity and fostering penal spectatorship were central to driving ticket sales for and encouraging enjoyment at the concert held on the grounds of Canada's first penitentiary. Based on an analysis of internal government records and CSC communications with United Way, we demonstrate how event planning and advertising relied on denigrating stereotypes regarding criminalized persons. Highlighting the value of collective organizing, action research, and newsmaking interventions aimed at opposing carceral enjoyments, we illustrate how cultural meanings of penality can be confronted as a means to advance abolitionist politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we share an approach to address systemic racism by highlighting a research-practice partnership [RPP] effort between a university and STEM program (I AM STEM) to understand the extent to which centering abolitionist teaching and emancipatory practices in a science methods course supported teacher candidates' virtual microteaching experiences. This study's conceptual framework put research-practice partnership in conversation with abolitionist teaching (Love, 2019) and community cultural wealth to explore access to STEM teaching and learning. We highlight the experiences of four secondary science teacher candidates through an embedded single case study. Data sources included observation field notes, microteaching reflections, semi-structured individual interviews, and lesson plans, which were analyzed using constructivist grounded theory approaches. Findings revealed that the teacher candidates embraced the concept of abolitionist teaching to inform their microteaching experiences by leveraging social justice standards and emancipatory pedagogies. The participants developed science lessons that honored students' cultural capital through critical readings, discussions, and reflections. Furthermore, the RPP between I AM STEM and the partnering university provided supports to contextualize and humanize science learning for Black and Brown children in online learning spaces. To expose and dismantle racism in science education, we must reimagine our science teacher preparation programs and courses. Thus, emancipating STEM education means engaging in the struggle toward humanity and collective healing. Abolitionist teaching within the context of science education does not require another reform effort. To disrupt systemic oppression, we must demand restorative justice and engage in direct transformative action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay advances racial respiratory philosophy and calls for an abolitionist rhetorical studies as a response to Ersula Ore and my call for "cultivating otherwise worlds and breathable futures" in the Aftertimes. I draw from respiratory philosophy and communication and transdisciplinary scholarship on the constitutive nature of white violence, cruelty, and antiblackness, their relation to breathing/suffocation, and how the university is implicated therein. I then offer a cross-institutional analysis of the state's dismissive, violent response to Eric Garner's cry of "I can't breathe" and the social atmospheres of antiblackness that saturate the university. I read these institutions through a racial respiratory lens to demonstrate how what I call technologies of suffocation work through similar logics and parallel effects in different settings to loot Black breath and sustain white supremacy. Following this analysis, I discuss abolition as a productive force of societal transformation that also demands an embodied, world-breaking/making praxis grounded in an ethical, affective, and collective reorientation around the living and breathing relations at the core of the modern world, a thorough ontic-epistemic dismantling that could create space-times for imagining a new society and new forms of relationality. I conclude by thinking toward abolitionist futures, radical humanism, and disciplinary transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the significance of Edward Gibbon Wakefield's theory of 'systematic colonisation' within the transition from Caribbean slavery to settler colonisation to reveal the sequential relationship of these two imperial systems. In the context of industrialisation and social unrest, the anti-slavery movement performed an important purpose for Britain's ruling classes by simultaneously accruing moral authority and sanctioning oppressive new forms of disciplined labour, including the treatment of Australian convicts as slaves. During the 'ameliorative' 1820s phase of the anti-slavery movement, experimental colonial schemes combined both abolitionist principles and pro-slavery interests, particularly visible in the form of arguments against free labour and the advocacy of racial, as well as class, labour hierarchies. Wakefield's theory embodied principles of labour discipline drawn from the plantation, allied to new techniques of land commoditization, offering a solution to the looming problem of abolition. These principles were invoked in debating the emancipation bill introduced in May 1833, as all sides agreed on the need for freed slaves to work for wages; they were subsequently applied in the Caribbean after emancipation by planters attempting to maintain productivity during and beyond the apprenticeship period. After 1833, the abolitionists' zeal could be turned to other causes, and reformers seeking to end transportation and develop the settler colonies deployed an entwined discourse of anti-slavery and systematic colonisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, communities invested in transformative food politics in the United States have seen the framework food justice become widely accepted as a core framework for anti-racist practice. Critical food scholars often recognize food justice in practices that: underwrite coalitions and solidarities across difference, tend to collective and historical trauma, and expand land-based political imaginations. This paper argues that abolitionist thought can position these elements within in a relational, historical framework that enables organizers to name the underlying racial capitalist logics of food apartheid—including the destruction of Black, Indigenous, and poor peoples' senses of place, and white supremacy culture's dehumanization of people who fall outside the norms of liberal individualism—in order build strategic alliances with those who struggle against other manifestations of the same logics, including mass incarceration. Citing work at the intersection of food and carceral justice in New York's Hudson Valley, this paper humbly affirms what abolitionist organizers already know: that life is possible and is already flourishing well outside of racial capitalism and settler colonialism's death dealing logics. Abolitionist thought may be an essential tool for strengthening our relationships to and analyses of food and food justice, such that we may organize more effectively to end food apartheid. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, Benjamin Banneker, the early American republic's most celebrated black scientific thinker, has been routinely cast as a radical black abolitionist, while his intellectual life has largely been neglected. Drawing on the manuscripts of Banneker and his white antislavery allies, this article argues that Banneker was hardly a radical: he was a reluctant abolitionist, aiding the white-controlled movement in part so he could gain scientific recognition. Situating Banneker within the history of science and African diasporic intellectual history, it further argues that he was not America's 'first' black scientist, but one among many talented eighteenth-century black thinkers. What made Banneker unique was his ability to translate the possibly African-derived intellectual traditions of his youth into a form of 'credible' knowledge—scientific knowledge—at a moment when white antislavery elites were briefly interested in publicizing black men with intellectual skill. This essay ultimately cautions against the tendency to instinctually equate black activism with 'radicalism'. Instead, it calls for more careful attention to the dangers black people faced, the dubious commitments of their white allies, and the fullness of black lives, ones that may have included activism but cannot be reduced to it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Moral abolitionists argue that ordinary moral discourse has downsides substantial enough to warrant abandoning the discourse in favour of some replacement(s). Their most common critique is that the 'realist' character of moral discourse inhibits important forms of self-awareness. Until recently, metaethicists had operated on the assumption that abolitionism depends on error theory. To this day, there has been no discernible recognition that well-established metaethical views might strongly support abolitionism, despite rejecting error theory. Here I argue that expressivism supports abolitionism and fits very poorly with quasi-realism. That is because (1) the quasi-realist strategy for defeating error theory helps abolitionists by entailing that they have no need of error theory, (2) expressivist interpretations of belief in realism strongly support abolitionist critiques from self-awareness, and (3) there is an inherent instability between expressivism and quasi-realism, while abolitionism and expressivism fit very nicely together. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today's antitrafficking movement situates the crimes against which it struggles as invisible and possibly unknowable, even as anti-antitrafficking skeptics question the reliability of widely cited trafficking prevalence estimates. Behind this controversy, an important question has been omitted: If verifiable data are lacking, how has a sense of urgency been built around modern slavery's alleged omnipresence? The websites of leading new abolitionist organizations provide a basis for a critical reading of today's antislavery discourse. Expositions of the wrongs toggle between narrative-based/emotive and evidence-based/rational modes. The first evokes the hiddenness and hence unknowability of the wrongs. The second exhorts readers/viewers to ignore doubt and support antislavery action in spite of not knowing against what. More than sheer ambivalence, then, an imagetextual art is built by new abolitionist websites, capitalizing on the esthetic principle that not knowing is more alluring to the eye than is knowing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Operating within the Black radical tradition, through this kitchen-table talk, we seek to edify and sustain abolitionist ontologies. We begin with poetic and musical offerings that highlight our personal connections to abolition, before exploring the complexities and necessities of relationship building as foundational for this work. We encounter the incommensurability of doing abolitionist work within institutions and systems that have attempted, yet ultimately failed, to extinguish the light of our survival. We explore the deeply creative work of fugitivity and marronage, while re-membering the irresistible mundanity of freedom. With this autotheoretical conversation, we situate our onto-epistemological orientations within an abolitionist politic of wellness and care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the limitations within abolitionist scholarship and activism in relation to prisons, based on the experience of the abolitionist movement in New Zealand. Topics discussed include the failure of abolitionist scholars and activists to engage with alternatives to prisons, the concept of prison abolition, and the implications of the distinctions between prison, penal and carceral abolition for academic interest.

This essay illustrates how slavery supporters and abolitionists, through their use of the popular press, invoked the recent histories of Central America Texas, and Mexico to justify their views on the United States' peculiar institution. Slaveholders cast the historical legacy of post-independence Mexico and Central America as the story of floundering countries, comprised of unproductive people and incapable of self-government. Slavery opponents, on the other hand, invoked these same histories to highlight Mexico and Central America's success at creating peaceful slave-free societies following emancipation. Abolitionists also invoked these republics to question the morality of the South's plan to re-introduce slavery into Mexico and Central America after the conquest of these countries. This essay's larger theme is to depict both the sectional and transnational elements of the battle over slavery in the United States and to demonstrate how historical memory became a new front in the battle over slavery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the role of digital and civic literacies in the context of resurgent right-wing ethno-nationalism and movements for the abolition of oppressive institutions worldwide. We discuss how, while digital tools have opened up lines of democratized communication and action, civic life online and offline has become both more authoritarian and more polarized. As software platforms like Facebook and Twitter now dominate everyday civic and economic life, media and civic literacy frameworks fail to address this new reality. After overviewing a framework for literacies in current digital and civic contexts, we draw on critical race science and technology studies in order to contest notions of a universal digital or civic subject, and to argue for moving beyond normative progress discourses. Instead, we offer an abolitionist imagination, arguing that classroom approaches to critical digital literacies must draw on abolitionist praxis in order to challenge ways interlocking forms of oppression affect contemporary civic life, both online and offline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Entering the discussion of the current political climate as a possible "Third Reconstruction," this article reads Octavia E. Butler's recent New York Times bestselling novel, Parable of the Sower, to re-center the fugitive politics that brought about the first Reconstruction in the long struggle for Black liberation and engender what I am calling an abolitionist politics of self-care. Butler's main character, Lauren Oya Olamina, operates as literary archive that brings together an initial canon of Black feminist intellectual visionaries, each of whom contributed to the long project of Reconstruction, and provides tangible practices for abolition democracy steeped in an attentiveness to interdependence and sustainability, all ecological, emotional, and political. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay considers how "confusion" shapes narrative strategies and understandings of the 1811 Uprising in Louisiana and how artistic practice, performance, and amateur documentation differently refract public memory-making of the uprising and its brutal response. Here confusion also maps the relations between reenactment, the reenactors, and the practice and politics of abolitionist imagination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

U.S. education is built upon a system of Whiteness, entrenched in White supremacy culture, and defended by White fragility. Within this framework, even a publicly-recognizable event intended to center Blackness, the celebration of Black History Month, reinscribes White supremacy. Through the decontextualized presentation of select Black heroes and the use of pedagogies that position White teachers as authority figures who regulate the presence of Blackness, and without drawing attention to the White supremacist cultural norms that are the foundation for U.S. society, students can walk away from Black History Month with a reinforced belief in White supremacy. In order to disrupt White supremacy, White teachers must be grounded in the principles of critical race theory. White teachers must take a knee against normative Whiteness and develop as 'abolitionist teachers'. Those teachers who choose to persist with pedagogical approaches that devalue Blackness and support White supremacy cannot claim good intentions; choosing to center and celebrate Blackness is the path to racial justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the works of Benjamin Lay, an Anglo-American Quaker humanitarian and abolitionist, best known for his anti-slavery activities. Topics discussed include how Lay represents radical emancipatory struggle, argument of Marcus Rediker, Distinguished Professor of Atlantic History at the University of Pittsburgh, about class-consciousness which is central to Lay's perspicacity, and works of Lay including includes "All Slave-Keepers That Keep the Innocent in Bondage, Apostates."

This article examines the actions of Mancunians who either supported or opposed abolitionism between the years 1792 and 1807. A central part of this article is an exploration of the individual signatories (and associated addresses and businesses) who attached their names to the Manchester pro- and antislavery petitions of 1806. This is achieved by using historical geographic information systems (GIS) to understand and plot patterns of opposing ideologies throughout the city in order to present the idea that the ideology expanded beyond social clubs, parlours, and published materials. The notion that two opposing sides of the slavery debate often occupied the same space is investigated. Such an approach will offer a hitherto overlooked aspect of slavery and abolition in Manchester. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the career of Kentucky emancipationist Cassius Marcellus Clay during the years 1844–1846. During this period, Clay became a nationally known anti-slavery spokesman, forging ties with activists in the Midwest and the North and beginning publication of his newspaper, The True American. Amid his rise to prominence, Clay did two remarkable things: he manumitted several (but not all) of his own slaves, and he pressed charges of murder against his enslaved woman, Emily, on the accusation that she poisoned his infant son. This article argues that the apparent inconsistencies between Clay's anti-slavery ideals and his actions reveal both the legal complications of manumission as well as the conservative nature of conventional anti-slavery thought in antebellum America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]