In this expansive companion to Abolition Feminisms Vol. I, contributors confront multiple paradigms of punitivity—the foundational logics of family, borders, heterosexuality, colonial violence, and more—to disengage us from root systems of carcerality. The book transcends various modes and forms: through grassroots praxis, critical research, storytelling, diagrams, poetry, and visual art, these pieces build on the legacies of feminist thinkers who formulated abolitionist critiques of policing, surveillance, and control. The resulting framework provides readers with the resources to cultivate and inhabit a post-carceral world of radical freedom and possibility.

This groundbreaking double-volume engages the theme of abolition feminisms, a political tradition grounded in radical anti-violence organizing, Black feminist and feminist of color rebellion, survivor knowledge production, strategies devised inside and across prison walls, and a full, fierce refusal of race-gender pathology and punitive control. This analysis disrupts the politics of carceral feminism as conversations about the ramifications of the prison-industrial complex continue.

Abolition. Feminism. Now. is a celebration of freedom work, a movement genealogy, a call to action, and a challenge to those who think of abolition and feminism as separate—even incompatible—political projects. In this remarkable collaborative work, leading scholar-activists Angela Y. Davis, Gina Dent, Erica R. Meiners, and Beth E. Richie surface the often unrecognized genealogies of queer, anti-capitalist, internationalist, grassroots, and women-of-color-led feminist movements, struggles, and organizations that have helped to define abolition and feminism in the twenty-first century. This pathbreaking book also features illustrations documenting the work of grassroots organizers embodying abolitionist feminist practice. Amplifying the analysis and the theories of change generated out of vibrant community based organizing, Abolition. Feminism. Now. highlights necessary historical linkages, key internationalist learnings, and everyday practices to imagine a future where we can all thrive.

In this striking study of the pre–Civil War literary imagination, Karen Sánchez-Eppler charts how bodily difference came to be recognized as a central problem for both political and literary expression. Her readings of sentimental anti-slavery fiction, slave narratives, and the lyric poetry of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson demonstrate how these texts participated in producing a new model of personhood—one in which the racially distinct and physically constrained slave body converged alongside the sexually distinct and domestically circumscribed female body. Moving from the public domain of abolitionist politics to the privacy of lyric poetry, Sánchez-Eppler argues that attention to the physical body blurs the boundaries between public and private. Drawing analogies between black and female bodies, feminist-abolitionists use the public sphere of anti-slavery politics to write about sexual desires and anxieties they cannot voice directly. However, Sánchez-Eppler warns against exaggerating the positive links between literature and politics. She finds that the relationships between feminism and abolitionism reveal patterns of exploitation, appropriation, and displacement of the black body that acknowledge the difficulties in embracing “difference” in the nineteenth century as in the twentieth. Her insightful examination of these issues makes a distinctive mark within American literary and cultural studies. This title is part of UC Press’s Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1993.

Abolition Feminisms: Organizing, Survival, and Transformative Practice, offers wide-ranging feminist abolitionist methods for liberation forged in collectivity, radical care, and transformation.

A major collection of essays and speeches from pioneering freedom fighter Angela Y. Davis For over fifty years, Angela Y. Davis has been at the forefront of collective movements for abolition and feminism and the fight against state violence and oppression. Abolition: Politics, Practices, Promises, the first of two important new volumes, brings together an essential collection of Davis’s essays, and speeches over the years, showing how her thinking has sharpened and evolved even as she has remained uncompromising in her commitment to collective liberation. In pieces that address the history of abolitionist practice and thought in the United States and globally, the unique contributions of women to abolitionist struggles, and stories and lessons of organizing inside and beyond the prison walls, Davis is always curious, always incisive, and always learning. Rich and rewarding, Abolition: Politics, Practices, Promises will appeal to fans of Davis, to students and scholars reflecting on her life and work, and to readers new to feminism, abolition, and struggles for liberation.

An exploration of how emergent strategies can help us meet this moment, survive what is to come, and shape safer and more just futures. Practicing New Worlds explores how principles of emergence, adaptation, iteration, resilience, transformation, interdependence, decentralization and fractalization can shape organizing toward a world without the violence of surveillance, police, prisons, jails, or cages of any kind, in which we collectively have everything we need to survive and thrive. Drawing on decades of experience as an abolitionist organizer, policy advocate, and litigator in movements for racial, gender, economic, and environmental justice and the principles articulated by adrienne maree brown in Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds, Ritchie invites us to think beyond traditional legislative and policy change to create more possibilities for survival and resistance in the midst of the ongoing catastrophes of racial capitalism—and the cataclysms to come. Rooted in analysis of current abolitionist practices and interviews with on-the-ground organizers resisting state violence, building networks to support people in need of abortion care, and nurturing organizations and convergences that can grow transformative cities and movements, Practicing New Worlds takes readers on a journey of learning, unlearning, experimentation, and imagination to dream the worlds we long for into being.

A vital history of organizing within and beyond the walls of women’s prisons in the 1970s, illuminating a crucial chapter in today’s abolition feminist struggles. This new edition of an award-winning book features a foreword from acclaimed scholar-activist Sarah Haley and an afterword by Thuma. During the 1970s, grassroots women activists in and outside of prisons forged a radical politics against gender violence and incarceration. Scholar-activist Emily L. Thuma traces the making of this anticarceral feminism at the intersections of struggles for racial and economic justice, imprisoned and institutionalized people’s rights, and gender and sexual liberation. All Our Trials chronicles the organizing, ideas, and influence of those who placed criminalized and marginalized women at the heart of their antiviolence mobilizations. This activism confronted a "tough on crime" political agenda and clashed with the mainstream women’s movement’s strategy of resorting to the criminal legal system as a solution to sexual and domestic violence. Drawing on extensive archival research and first-person narratives, Thuma weaves together the stories of mass defense campaigns, prisoner uprisings, coalition organizing, and radical print cultures that cut through prison walls. In the process, All Our Trials reveals a vibrant culture of opposition to interpersonal and state violence that both transforms our understanding of 1970s social movements and illuminates the history of present struggles for transformative justice.

An instant national best seller A persuasive primer on police abolition from two veteran organizers “One of the world’s most prominent advocates, organizers and political educators of the [abolitionist] framework.” —NBCNews.com on Mariame Kaba In this powerful call to action, New York Times bestselling author Mariame Kaba and attorney and organizer Andrea J. Ritchie detail why policing doesn’t stop violence, instead perpetuating widespread harm; outline the many failures of contemporary police reforms; and explore demands to defund police, divest from policing, and invest in community resources to create greater safety through a Black feminist lens. Centering survivors of state, interpersonal, and community-based violence, and highlighting uprisings, campaigns, and community-based projects, No More Police makes a compelling case for a world where the tools required to prevent, interrupt, and transform violence in all its forms are abundant. Part handbook, part road map, No More Police calls on us to turn away from systems that perpetrate violence in the name of ending it toward a world where violence is the exception, and safe, well-resourced and thriving communities are the rule.

What fuels and sustains activism and organizing when it feels like our worlds are collapsing? Let This Radicalize You is a practical and imaginative resource for activists and organizers building power in an era of destabilization and catastrophe. Longtime organizers and movement educators Mariame Kaba and Kelly Hayes examine some of the political lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic, including the convergence of mass protest and mass formations of mutual aid, and consider what this confluence of power can teach us about a future that will require mass acts of care, rescue and defense, in the face of both state violence and environmental disaster. The book is an assemblage of co-authored reflections, interviews and questions that are intended to aid and empower activists and organizers as they attempt to map their own journeys through the work of justice-making. It includes insights from a spectrum of experienced organizers, including Sharon Lungo, Carlos Saavedra, Ejeris Dixon, Barbara Ransby, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore about some of the difficult and joyous lessons they have learned in their work.