In the Twilight of Attica: Toward a Genealogy of Anti-Carceral Thought

In the Summer of 2020, calls to defund and abolish the police rattled the bars of the public sphere. Scholars have since questioned the logic animating those calls — why should the history of police and prisons foreclose the possibility of reform? Why do abolitionists refuse to specify what comes next? This paper argues that the idealism charge mistakes the nature of the intellectual tradition it is evaluating. Rather than asking whether abolitionism is defensible or practical, it proposes to historicize it — tracing the distinctive features of anti-carceral thought as products of the specific historical conditions under which the tradition formed. The paper locates the origins of contemporary abolitionism in the crucible of the 1970s: the systematic foreclosure of Black radical organizational infrastructure and the simultaneous emergence of a self-conscious Black feminist intellectual tradition from the same conditions. Reading abolitionism genealogically reveals the logic of its most contested argumentative features and opens new interpretive horizons for the polarizing demand.

To receive the paper in advance and for further information, please email yiningchang@g.harvard.edu.