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The article provides a historical account of the abolitionist white supremacy work of Henry N. Frisbie and his defrauding of Black and white proponents of abolition in the name of profit, power and capitalism in the Civil War era. Information is provided on the role of elite capture in the persistence of racial capitalism and egalitarian movements, as well as Frisbie's systems of deception of enslaved Black working class using a fraudulent land company to steal their crops and wages.

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]

Over two decades, extensive research and heated debate have addressed tensions between carceral and abolitionist responses to gendered violence within feminism. Disagreements arise from the existing multiplicity of feminist approaches and divergent socio-economic and political contexts in which such violence occurs. At the same time, different conceptions of the state and community also impact on feminist organizing around these issues in particular contexts. This article analyses the tensions between so-called carceral feminism and abolitionist feminism in the context of Albania and Kosovo, two countries not only heavily impacted by domestic and sexualized violence and feminicide but also with a significantly rising feminist mobilization. Using the photo-elicitation method, we interviewed feminist activists and academics regarding the ways they interpret gendered violence, the strategies and interventions they deem most relevant in addressing it, and the contradictions and tensions that exist in their discourses and practices. Our aim is to offer a contextualized critique of carceral feminism, while illustrating the reasons and lack of alternatives that have impeded a transformative imagination towards abolitionist feminism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces and explains the key concerns that have informed and inspired this Special Issue of the Community Development Journal. It sees punishment and prisons as troubling issues for community development despite the comparative lack of attention they have received in the journal to date. The article acknowledges that the specific forms that punishment, incarceration and their alternatives take have profound implications for the lives people live in communities; but that those forms of punishment, as well as resistances to them, are also shaped by collective activism and actors operating from , on , through or on behalf of communities, both real and imagined. We reflect on changing conceptions of the carceral state, positing that 'carceral community development' is playing an increasingly prominent role in the extension, outsourcing and normalization of punishment internationally. Against such tendencies, we consider the potential for abolitionist theory and practice to contribute to a critically self-reflexive community development that is committed to anti-carceral or de-carceral futures, and to the building of concrete forms of community in the here and now. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The U.S. Constitution is profoundly undemocratic, as generations of abolitionists, socialists, labor activists, and Black radicals have loudly proclaimed. Just as it did a hundred years ago, the document creates an infrastructure for minority rule—a specific and very American brand of white authoritarianism. This is because the Constitution organizes representation around states rather than the principle of one person, one vote. And it fragments and undermines popular authority through endless veto points. The consequences today are numerous: presidents elected who lose the popular vote; a Senate that gives vastly more power to voters in Wyoming than in California; an impassible route for constitutional amendments; a tiny, lifetime-appointed Supreme Court that repudiates popular policies, including the right to abortion, and elevates the president above the law—abetting a culture of impunity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay weaves an 'upena of critical discourse to contribute to a Kanaka Maoli abolitionist theory and praxis. Following the lead of Kumu Haunani-Kay Trask, I explore the intersection of the Black Radical Tradition and Critical Hawaiian Studies at the nexus of carcerality and multiple forms of Native and Black Dispossessions. Specifically, this essay builds upon Tiffany Lethabo King's The Black Shoals and George Terry Kanalu Young's Rethinking the Native Hawaiian Past to imagine and create freedom places beyond incommensurability. With a study of Pu'uhonua (places of refuge) I investigate the pilina (intimacies) between Indigenous resurgence and Black struggles for liberation and abolition. I argue that the comprehensive abolition of carceral systems and the ongoing resurgence of Pu'uhonua are cooperative projects that can be imagined and built upon the shoal and the Papa (reef/foundation) to create new futures for Black and Indigenous comrades in pursuit of collective liberation. [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]

The article focuses on the need for a new framework in criminal law education that moves beyond traditional punishment theories. Topics include a critique of the "four horsemen of the carceral state" taught in law courses, the proposal of an alternative framework incorporating abolitionist principles, and the potential impact of this new approach on legal education and future lawyers.

Abolitionist lawmakers promulgated policies during the July Monarchy designed to ameliorate the conditions of enslaved people in France's colonies. These reforms focused on family life and curtailing abusive corporal punishment. Scholars have argued these policies were weak and ineffective. However, a series of lawsuits, filed by both enslaved and freed women, reveals how reform engendered conflicts before emancipation in 1848. These lawsuits reveal three important dynamics about the final years of French slavery: how abolitionists drew on these cases to advance reform priorities, how colonial elites reinforced slavery in response, and the critical role enslaved and freed women played as Antillean abolitionists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

David Hume alluded to the politics of slaveholding throughout his career and was among the first to observe that the republican tradition has an awkward relationship with slavery. This article places Hume's critique of Roman slavery in conversation with recent debates over "neo-Roman" liberty, paying special attention to Hume's complaint that some republican advocates for political liberty have also apologized for personal slavery. Most of Hume's direct comments on slaveholding appear in the 1752 essay, "Of the Populousness of Ancient Nations," where Hume criticized Roman slavery for its negative effects on population growth. But more was at stake than ancient demography. Even abolitionists who abhorred Hume's racism still drew upon his argument against ancient slavery—which they read as a commentary on the modern colonies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article documents the impact of mutual aid, considering not just the food, resources and information that have been shared within and across communities since the onset of the COVID‐19 pandemic in New York City, but the ways in which these efforts are part of an abolitionist framework that precedes and transcends this context, aiming to transform relationships, build community and create alternative structures with justice and dignity at the centre. We centre our analysis in La Morada's mutual aid kitchen in The South Bronx, drawing from our personal experiences working there and our collaboration with La Morada from 2020–2022. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many oppressed groups describe their forms of life in aesthetic categories. This article explores the implicit conception of beauty and the shared characteristics of counter-communal aesthetic practices. It reconstructs the hegemonic conception of beauty via a reading of Schiller and explores two exemplary discourses on the beauty of counter-communities: Peter Weiss' reflections on the aesthetics of resistance and Saidiya Hartman's description of Black fugitive aesthetics. What both examples share is that they locate beauty not in harmony, but in conflict and struggle. They lay the foundation for an aesthetic standpoint theory: counter-communities are economically, politically and culturally marginalized, but they are more beautiful than dominant forms of life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of white ignorance refers to phenomena of not-knowing that are produced by and reinforce systems of white supremacist domination and exploitation. I distinguish two varieties of white ignorance, belief-based white ignorance and practice-based white ignorance. Belief-based white ignorance consists in an information deficit about systems of racist oppression. Practice-based white ignorance consists in unresponsiveness to the political agency of persons and groups subject to racist oppression. Drawing on the antebellum political thought of Black abolitionists Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, I contend that an antiracist politics that conceives of its epistemic task in terms of combating practice-based white ignorance offers a more promising frame for liberatory struggle. A focus on practice-based white ignorance calls for a distinctive form of humility that involves recognition of the limits of one's own political agency in relation to others, which is integral to democratic relations between free, equal, yet mutually dependent persons. [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]

In this conversation, Black radical feminist artist kai lumumba barrow and abolitionist geographer Lydia Pelot-Hobbs discuss the praxis of Black geographies, abolitionist play, and radical imagination in barrow's multifaceted artistic project [b]reach. Together they dialogue about the radical abundance of Blackness; the role of play and performance in abolitionist world-making; and the contradictions and discomfort of freedom projects past, present, and future. [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]

Sophie Lewis coined anthrogenesis as "the production of human beings" and, using this unfamiliar term, calls for the radical reimagining of gestational politics, as an alternative to liberal feminism's focus on choice. Revivisng Shulamith Firestone, for feminists like Lewis and Helen Hester this reimagination takes shape within a techno‐utopic communist framework. While enticing, such a framework relies on a modernist understanding of institutions that has been critiqued by decolonial and abolitionist theory and risks undervaluing the fugitive underground work of radical care and mutual aid that already exists today. In this article, two strategies at play in the contemporary Marxist reimagination of anthrogenesis are differentiated: (1) a communist approach focusing primarily on fundamentally restructuring the commons of reproductive care on a grand societal scale and (2) an "undercommons" approach that aims to fugitively abolish public institutions through small‐scale mutual aid and radical care practices that are already constituting otherworlds of reproductive justice through transnational coalitions. Highlighting abortion and birth networks in the Netherlands (the Abortion Network Amsterdam and the Geboortebeweging, a loose collaborative network of midwives) who transnationally and fugitively care for anthrogenesis, the second strategy is proposed as the more promising one for the anthrogenesis of human beings otherwise. The author develops another possible outcome of Firestone's revolutionary thought: not a gestational communism but an anarcho‐abolitionist fugitive undercommoning of anthrogenesis, through the work Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, Marquis Bey, and Chiara Bottici. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay problematizes the transformations of punishment in societies of control. To do so, it reconstructs the hypothesis, current in contemporary literature, that we are living in a prison era. The problem is that this hypothesis takes the disciplinary prison as the model for controls, imagining the economy of penality as a historical invariant. As a result, it describes contemporary social formations as “portable prisons”, “prison capitalism”, “open-air prison societies”. In order to correct what we believe to be a misunderstanding, we propose a re-reading of the main contributions of the debate on societies of control in order to reposition both the meaning of penality in these emerging social formations and to take up the abolitionist debate, in a historically situated way, on the obsolescence of prisons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article critiques carceral feminisms and advocates for abolitionist futures, highlighting the need for community-based justice rather than punitive measures to address gendered and sexualized violence. Topics discussed include the impact of carceral feminisms on marginalized communities, the distinction between restorative and transformative justice, and the role of feminist communication scholars in promoting abolitionist strategies.

The article examines the role of rhetoric, storytelling, and abolitionist perspectives in envisioning transformative futures beyond carceral systems. Topics discussed include the incoherence of existing narratives supporting mass incarceration, the importance of storytelling in abolitionist praxis, and the interplay between anticarceral feminisms and healing justice.

There is a growing position among human rights advocates, academics and UN officials, predicting "the death of the death penalty", and forecasting that it will completely disappear soon. This article questions and problematizes this prediction, exploring the assumptions, premises and gaps that underpin the optimistic outlook. Based on analysis of abolitionist discourse, three fallacies are identified and analyzed: a progressive fallacy, assuming the death penalty is a barbaric anachronism in the "civilized" modern world and displaying a teleological belief in its demise; a classificatory fallacy, entailing defining-down the prevalence of the death penalty through the category of "de-facto abolition"; and a functional fallacy, assuming that repudiating the death penalty as a crime-fighting tool will cause its demise, overlooking its transformation into an institution serving political-symbolic functions. In concluding, I suggest viewing the global death penalty as bifurcated: dying as an ordinary law-enforcement tool, but relatively healthy as an extraordinary political symbol. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the history of jail construction and architecture on the occasion of a now vacant North County Jail that sits in the center of downtown Oakland. Put to use neither by the state as COVID‐19 ravaged overcrowded prisons nor by the city trying to find ways of offering shelter to the houseless, its vacancy became all the more material during the height of the COVID‐19 pandemic. What do abolitionists do with such vacancies? Inspired by the sonic geography of Angela Davis's memories of the New York Women's House of Detention, this article is a performance of how abolitionist thought both engages and exceeds the terms of panopticism by focusing on the curious boundary of the panoptic jail window. The sculptural abolitionist imaginaries provoked by conceptual artists Sonya Clark and Charisse Pearlina Weston provide new ways of doing things with the shadows and sounds these windows reflect, transmit, and occlude. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In June 2020, the Argentine Ministry of Development launched the National Registry of Popular Economy (ReNaTEP) which, among other categories, included sex workers and strippers. Sex workers' organizations celebrated the possibility of registering and thus gaining access to the mono-tax and social security instruments, but a few hours after the launching and due to the pressure from abolitionist sectors, the registry was eliminated. This paper addresses the history of this elimination in terms of lack of recognition and under the conceptual lens of epistemic injustice and violence. To this end, the article addresses both the ways in which the sex workers' movement produces knowledge, as well as the uproar caused, among abolitionist feminists and officials, by the incorporation of sex work in the ReNaTEP, which resulted in the denial of sex workers, their epistemic agency, their subjectivity and even their legitimacy as a social subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the introductory note to her play Rockets and Blue Lights (2020), black British playwright Winsome Pinnock states that the play was inspired by J.M.W. Turner's 1840 iconic paintings The Slave Ship and Rockets and Blue Lights. Taking her cue from Turner's harrowing visual impressions of transatlantic slavery and stormy seascapes, Pinnock weaves a web of interconnected stories that endeavour to retrace the lost, commodified lives of enslaved Africans, while exploring the ongoing legacy of the slave trade. This article will discuss the strategies the playwright deploys to address this disavowed history and critically engage with the memorialisation of slavery. As Pinnock claims, the wealth of commemorative events marking the bicentenary anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade in 2007 have since peddled "the abolitionist narrative of white saviourism" and turned England into "an abolition theme park" (2020: 11). Her powerful play, in turn, aims to problematise acts of memorialisation and transform a legacy of absence and silencing "into an exercise of counter-memory" (Fernández Campa 2017: 94). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the author presents a basic overview of a range of philosophical approaches to the notion of war from the early ancient Greek traditions relating to war, to the conservative tradition. The desktop research methodology employed combines a review of existing literature with a focus on analysis, synthesis, and ethical considerations. By utilizing a diverse range of sources and analytical techniques, it aims to contribute to a better understanding of a ‘just and ethical war’ and provides insights for further research. A range of philosophical ideas through the ages are briefly discussed followed by discussion on the Just War Theory. The role of abolitionists per se is not discussed since this work is then traversing St. Augustine’s philosophy and ethical stance apropos the waging of war which exemplifies the justice and peace aspect in restoring order out of chaos. He calls for an ethos of humanness to prevail when conducting war based on the intention to preserve harmonious co-existence between peoples. Augustine argues that waging any war should be avoided where this is possible, however, a just war allows for the acquisition of virtue which then hopefully leads to justice. The morality of waging war is severely compromised once narcissistic vested immoral interests are the primary motivators for belligerence and no genuine peaceful resolution to conflict has been seriously sought as is seemingly the case in the current Gaza war and its prevailing atrocities. Predictably various philosophers have investigated the subject of ‘just war’ and over time have determined the criteria of jus ad bellum (justice toward war), jus in bello (justice in war), and also jus post bellum (justice after war). It is clear that it is imperative to operate off a strong ethical basis when opting for a state of war to exist and to strongly consider preserving the safety and security of non-belligerents at all costs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the occupational status and distribution of free women in the antebellum USA. It considers both their reported and unreported (imputed) occupations, using the 1/100 microdata files from the 1860 Census of Population, the only Census that asked free women's occupations while slavery was legal. After developing and testing the model based on economic and demographic variables used to explain whether a free woman has an occupation, analyses are conducted comparing their occupational distribution to free men, along with analyses among women by marital status, nativity, and the prevalence of slavery. This paper highlights the importance of including unreported family workers in discussions of free female labor market contributions, as their inclusion dramatically shifts the overall female labor force participation rate, as well as their occupational distribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article builds upon African American literary theorist Margo Perkins's conception of political autobiography from her award-winning book Autobiography as Activism: Three Black Women of the Sixties , and the work of critical prison studies scholars Angela Y. Davis and Dylan Rodríguez. It reads Susan Burton's 2017 narrative, Becoming Ms. Burton: From Prison to Recovery to Leading the Fight for Incarcerated Women , as reflecting an untheorized subgenre of African American confinement literature: the post-Black Power neo-abolitionist memoir. In the memoir, Burton alludes to slavery and anti-slavery activism to contextualize historically the post-Black Power-era prison-industrial complex and galvanize opposition to it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article recovers Angela Davis's archived dissertation project, "Towards a Kantian Theory of Force," from 1969, and places it in conversation with her mature work on prison abolition. It begins by documenting how, as a student of Frankfurt School Critical Theory, Davis honed an immanent critique of Kant's problem of freedom as a reflection of the historical contradiction that emerges between the moral claim to universal freedom and the socio-historical determinates that foreclose its material realization. It next reconstructs her dissertation project, showing how Davis teased this same problematic from Kant's little-explored political philosophy to argue persuasively that the liberal constitutional state's justified use of violence is a primary obstacle to the realization of moral freedom. By reading Davis's early critique in the context of contemporaneous Kant scholarship and in view of her subsequent abolitionist work, the article argues that Davis's early work can help to illuminate not just the central antagonism between freedom and state coercion that is the object of abolitionist critique, but the subjective-moral dimension inherent to its political practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the central concerns of abolitionists is not falling into the trap of implementing reforms in the criminal punishment system that maintains hegemonic, oppressive power structures. The challenge is determining which reforms lead toward abolition and which are reformist reforms, entrenching the status quo. This critical, narrative study analyzed a reform in Canada, Section 718.2(e) of the Criminal Code (e.g., Gladue), intended to remediate systemic anti-Indigenous racism at sentencing by requiring judges to consider all alternatives to incarceration when sentencing Indigenous peoples. Yet despite the reform in place, Indigenous incarceration rates continue to rise precipitously in Canada. How is it that the Canadian state, even when claiming "remediation," keeps producing the same—oppressive—result toward Indigenous peoples? Twenty-one semi-structured interviews were conducted with judges from the Ontario Court of Justice (n = 12) and Gladue report writers (n = 9) about the utility of Gladue reports. The findings indicate that Gladue is mostly a reformist reform. The article theorizes that a way out of the reformist reform of Gladue, toward abolition, is through honoring Indigenous self-determination and providing reparations in support of Indigenous-led justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This year-long ethnographic study explores how two ELA preservice teachers of color enacted pedagogies of abolitionist praxis--centering teaching and learning to and through an abolitionist praxis of identifying and dismantling surveillance, criminalization, and punishment--via the areas of curriculum and instruction, relational work, and organizing and activism. When enacting pedagogies of abolitionist praxis, with specific attention to curriculum and instruction, three findings were identified. First, both teachers purposely and strategically designed their curriculum and instruction to explicitly teach an abolitionist praxis, yet they did so via distinct approaches. Next, the teachers rooted their curriculum and instruction in a radical Black, Indigenous, and feminist imaginary to teach about but, more importantly, teach against carceral practices, policies, and ideologies. Last, both teachers facilitated youth-led action research projects that centered present and future world-building actions. This study provides implications for the education and support of preservice teachers and for K-12 teacher practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nicole Nguyen's book, "Terrorism on Trial: Political Violence and Abolitionist Futures," explores how US courts both support and challenge the global war on terror. The book examines how the concept of terrorism pathologizes Muslims as inherently prone to violence while ignoring the underlying causes of violent resistance. Nguyen argues that terrorism trials should be understood within the broader context of legal race-making and highlights the interconnectedness of anti-Black and anti-Indigenous suppression with structural Islamophobia. The book calls for an anti-imperialist and transnational approach to abolitionism and challenges the depoliticized understanding of terrorism. [Extracted from the article]

Contemporary international criminal law (ICL) is a well-established field of scholarship and practice that wields significant influence in framing how certain events come to be understood and acted upon. Yet, as the field has increasingly captured the public's attention and imagination, a body of critical scholarship has risen in prominence that seeks to test and challenge ICL's underlying assumptions. In such a climate, this article suggests that ICL not only has moved beyond its inception and consolidation phases, but is beginning to emerge from its critical period towards a 'post-critical' phase where critique is becoming increasingly normalized within the field, with both reformist and structurally oriented reappraisals more readily acknowledged within ICL's imaginary. Situated in this 'post-critical' moment, this article examines the extent to which the vocabulary and institutions of ICL may be productively (re-)engaged in the pursuit of emancipatory ends. After providing an overview of the strands of critique that have become increasingly prominent, we reflect on three avenues for engaging with the field of ICL 'after critique': first, critical engagement , centred on a commitment to revealing and detailing silenced and marginalized experiences and methods within the field itself; second, tactical and strategic engagement , which points to the ways in which actors choose to engage with imperfect legal frameworks for particular struggles; and finally, decolonial and abolitionist (dis-)engagement which takes as its point of departure the rejection of both colonial and carceral logics per se , especially in light of their historical and persisting patterns of patriarchal and racialized domination. Ultimately, in linking ICL with historical and contemporary anti-colonial and anti-carceral struggles, we seek not only to disrupt ICL progress narratives, but also to show how earlier, often-sidelined ways of imagining forms of harm and their repair may provide potentially more productive ways of engaging with ICL 'after critique'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that a reliance on material texts tied to the concept of improvement—such as picturesque engravings, diagrams, and account books—pushed the early abolitionist movement toward a reforming, ameliorationist ethic that disavowed revolutionary action and immediate emancipation. Although the term improvement had broad social applicability by the late eighteenth century, its original connections to land management made it an especially important concept for the abolitionist debate. Integrating book history with studies of enslavement and abolition, I show how abolitionists' use of visual-textual forms such as diagrams and account books created an emphasis on gradual improvement. In response, Black abolitionists both emphasized concepts other than improvement and presented their works in different material forms. Olaudah Equiano and Quobna Ottabah Cugoano adapted the genre of autobiography to demonstrate how their own ostensible improvements did not have the effects anticipated by the logic of white abolitionists, ultimately undercutting the usefulness of improvement as a guiding concept for abolitionism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Psychology is grounded in the ethical principles of beneficence and nonmaleficence, that is, "do no harm." Yet many have argued that psychology as a field is attached to carceral systems and ideologies that uphold the prison industrial complex (PIC), including the field of community psychology (CP). There have been recent calls in other areas of psychology to transform the discipline into an abolitionist social science, but this discourse is nascent in CP. This paper uses the semantic device of "algorithms" (e.g., conventions to guide thinking and decision‐making) to identify the areas of alignment and misalignment between abolition and CP in the service of moving us toward greater alignment. The authors propose that many in CP are already oriented to abolition because of our values and theories of empowerment, promotion, and systems change; our areas of misalignment between abolition and CP hold the potential to evolve. We conclude with proposing implications for the field of CP, including commitments to the belief that (1) the PIC cannot be reformed, and (2) abolition must be aligned with other transnational liberation efforts (e.g., decolonization). Highlights: The prison industrial complex (PIC) is a White supremacist system of violence that needs to be abolished.PIC abolition would replace systems of punishment and control with care and accountability.Community psychology (CP) and abolition are aligned in commitments to social justice and systems change.CP and abolition have misalignments, but they can be shifted.Aligning with abolition will help CP follow the "decolonial turn" for which many are calling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article highlights police brutality in the aftermath of George Floyd's murder, focusing on Smith v. City of Philadelphia. It also discuss into the excessive use of force during protests, particularly in West Philadelphia, and discusses the pursuit of abolitionist remedies through litigation, navigating tensions between immediate harm reduction and transformative change.

John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress (1678) was enormously popular in the nineteenth-century United States. This article shows that abolitionists appropriated that text, as well as the reputation and biography of its author, as a guide to their own political action. References to Bunyan and The Pilgrim's Progress in abolitionist print culture, including newspapers and book-length responses to The Pilgrim's Progress, reveal that abolitionists saw Bunyan as a virtuous progenitor who helped to legitimate and unify their political movement while representing both political commitment and religious toleration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On 15 May 1851, Frederick Douglass let it be known in the pages of the North Star that he had come to a new interpretation of the US Constitution as an anti-slavery document, indicating his complete break with Garrisonian abolitionists. This essay argues that Douglass's change in understanding the Constitution was propelled not only by specific political and personal events detailed in scholarship but also by his rhetorical engagement with audience. In the years leading up to this announcement, and especially in speeches delivered during his 1845-47 British tour and an 1850-51 lecture series in Rochester, New York, Douglass explored the nature of interpretation through figures of audience, including the oratorical critic, contrasting British and American assemblies, and summoned groups. He offered audiences lessons in transformative anti-slavery and anti-racist reading, presenting himself as one who reads for and with audiences and who reads audiences themselves to break through the interpretive lens of white supremacy. The essay ends with a brief look at the implications of this argument for understanding Douglass's best-known address, "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" (1852). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented in which the author examines what he calls a historical misunderstanding in which the U.S. antislavery press was conflated with the Black press during the 19th century. According to the article, Black editors established an independence from anti-slavery societies and newspapers operated mostly by white Americans during the antebellum period. The article examines the prominence of the Black press, criticism of the anti-slavery press by the Black press, and prominent editors such as Samuel Cornish, William Whipper, and David Ruggles.

Harriet Beecher Stowe, the internationally known U.S. author and abolitionist, whom President Abraham Lincoln famously called 'the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war,' referring to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) and the American Civil War (1861-1865), (2) was also the author of numerous other works, many of them much lesser known today. Stowe's Palmetto Leaves (1873), the subject of this essay, was, for example, a best-selling travel narrative about life in Florida after the American Civil War and is considered to have been an impetus behind the modern tourist industry in Florida. Today, however, Palmetto Leaves has been mostly overlooked or forgotten by scholars. In spite of this oversight, Stowe's text about life in Florida during the post-war period of Reconstruction merits close evaluation because it exposes Stowe's racial, political, and gendered views as they evolved after the Civil War. Because the author and her work were so popular in their day, Palmetto Leaves makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the politics of Northern White women writers and post-Civil War sentiment in the North. As I offer in this essay, Stowe, and her largely White and female readership in the North, increasingly saw the benefits of, and helped enable, a racially hierarchical society during the period of Reconstruction. Thus, in spite of Stowe's 'pioneering' decision to go south in the years after the war ended, my essay complicates our understanding of the proto-feminist author and shows how Stowe ultimately eschews new frontiers in Palmetto Leaves and instead embraces racially regressive views. Keywords: Harriet Beecher Stowe, U.S. Civil War, Florida, U.S. South, Reconstruction, Palmetto Leaves, Racial politics, American women writers, White women, African Americans, 19 (th) -century U.S. literature, Introduction When Harriet Beecher Stowe traveled south in 1866, one year after the U.S. Civil War had ended, she saw the region for what it was--a land decimated by the [...]

This article considers Equiano's turn to performance and spectacle in his Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano in relation to the eighteenth-century stage practice known as 'freedom of the scenes.' Widely regarded as the 'prototype' of all subsequent slave narratives, the Narrative is infused with instances of racial mimicry, including whiteface and blackface, as well as self-fashioning through dress and style--scenes that evince potential for understanding Equiano's more radical abolitionist vision. In foregrounding race and mimicry, Equiano not only takes on the techniques of what was emerging in his lifetime as 'blackface,' but he reverses the dynamic, appropriating 'whiteness' in whiteface acts in order to offer a sustained critique of racial injustice. By strategically positioning himself before audiences through mimicry, fashion and style, Equiano demonstrates how performance cultures help Black Atlantic subjects to constitute themselves as a people. KEYWORDS: Olaudah Equiano, performance, slave narrative, freedom of the scenes, mimicry, fashion, blackface, whiteface, In the opening chapter of his autobiographical Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Equiano describes dances as integral to the communal identity of his native hometown of Essaka. [...]

To the average person, academia has often felt disconnected from everyday life, with academics simply offering an interpretation of the world. Yet, as Karl Marx has suggested, an interpretation of the world is simply not enough - academia must encourage and generate change. Exploring Mariame Kaba's concept of hope as a discipline, hope can provide the foundation necessary for academics to generate positive societal change. Academic activists like Moana Jackson and Angela Davis exemplify this concept and show what is possible when academics use critique to generate positive change that transcends community boundaries. If academics wish to continue this legacy of change, then their academic work must be transformative rather than merely descriptive and to continuously practice hope as a discipline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]