Abolition Geography (Hardcover)

Ruth Wilson Gilmore

ISBN 10: 1839761709 / ISBN 13: 9781839761706

Published by Verso Books, London, 2022

About this Item

Hardcover. Race, Space and Abolition brings together Gilmore's essays, articles and interviews from over the past two decades. One of the foremost contemporary theorists and activists in movements for prison abolition and social justice, Gilmore's essays comprise searing analyses of the origins of mass incarceration and racial violence. This collection reveals her to be a major theorist of the state, which she shows has today morphed into an anti-state state organising the abandonment of racialised and exploited populations. Countering these new formations of power, Gilmore presents us with a powerful model for the radical articulation of scholarship and activism, and a novel way of asking ourselves the question: What is to be done? Edited and introduced by Brenna Bhandar and Alberto Toscano. First collection of writings from one of the foremost contemporary critical thinkers on racism, geography and incarceration. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.

Seller Inventory # 9781839761706

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Abolition Geography (Hardcover)
• Publisher: Verso Books, London
• Publication Date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1839761709
• ISBN 13: 9781839761706
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: new

About this title

Synopsis

The first collection of writings from one of the foremost contemporary critical thinkers on racism, geography and incarceration.

Gathering together Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s work from over three decades, Abolition Geography presents her singular contribution to the politics of abolition as theorist, researcher, and organizer, offering scholars and activists ways of seeing and doing to help navigate our turbulent present.

Abolition Geography moves us away from explanations of mass incarceration and racist violence focused on uninterrupted histories of prejudice or the dull compulsion of neoliberal economics. Instead, Gilmore offers a geographical grasp of how contemporary racial capitalism operates through an “anti-state state” that answers crises with the organized abandonment of people and environments deemed surplus to requirement. Gilmore escapes one-dimensional conceptions of what liberation demands, who demands liberation, or what indeed is to be abolished. Drawing on the lessons of grassroots organizing and internationalist imaginaries, Abolition Geography undoes the identification of abolition with mere decarceration, and reminds us that freedom is not a mere principle but a place.

Edited with an introduction by Brenna Bhandar and Alberto Toscano.

About the Author

Ruth Wilson Gilmore is Professor of Earth & Environmental Sciences, and American Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where she is also Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics. She is the author of Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis and Opposition in Globalizing California. Honors include the American Studies Association Angela Y. Davis Award for Public Scholarship (2012); the Association of American Geographers' Harold Rose Award for Anti-Racist Research and Practice (2014); the SUNY-Purchase College Eugene V. Grant Distinguished Scholar Prize for Social and Environmental Justice (2015-16); and the American Studies Association Richard A Yarborough Mentorship Award (2017).