Reimagining Abolitionist Democracies

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

This panel is organized around investigations of different abolitionist visions—Black feminist, constitutionalist, pragmatic, and radical republican—that reimagine justice and emancipation from within conditions of carcerality and domination. From the 19th century abolitionist movement and thought to contemporary abolitionist theories and practices, each paper wrestles with the gap between present constraints to democratic equality and social justice and more democratic futures where all members of society can realize their full potentials. Perceiving abolitionist work, in its both practical and conceptual iterations, as ongoing and open-ended, our papers offer problem-spaces to be critically explored rather than settled solutions to be employed. Quinn Lester, thinking against the grain of carceral common sense, as well as its false alternative, “patriarchal abolition,” interrogates the trouble with “community”—whether it is too idealistic and organicist for an abolitionist project, or whether its political meaning can be successfully transformed by Black feminist abolitionists. Anna Terwiel, building on legal scholar Dorothy Roberts’ theorization of “abolitionist constitutionalism,” offers an alternative reading of the 13th amendment—as “a usable past to help move toward a radical future” rather than a re-inscription of slavery into the law—in light of the abolitionist potentials of contemporary prisoners’ rights claims, such as the contested “right to comfort.” Nazlı Konya and Victoria Scott study the Justice Think Tank, a collaborative initiative from Maine that consists of twelve incarcerated scholars, as a case of pragmatic and locally-situated abolitionist praxis, asking how abolitionists can enact decarceral horizons while developing practical steps that aim to build public trust toward those horizons. Finally, Michael Gorup reconceptualizes the 19th century abolitionism as the first movement to take up the unrealized task of republicanism, that is, creating freedom out of conditions of severe domination, with an eye to the disagreements within the movement about how this creation ought to happen. Altogether these papers incite imagination and desire for abolitionist democracy, however much contestation, disagreement, and ambivalence such democracy might entail.

Sub Unit

• Division 2: Foundations of Political Theory

Individual Presentations

• Patriarchal Abolition and the Political Uses of Community - Quinn Lester, Johns Hopkins University

• Abolition Constitutionalism?: The 13th Amendment and Radical Uses of Law - Anna M. Terwiel, Trinity College

• Abolitionist Praxis and Pragmatism: Lessons from Maine - Nazli Konya, Colby College; Victoria Scott

• The Abolitionist Movement and the Politics of Emancipation - Michael Gorup, New College of Florida

Chair

• Deva Woodly Brown University

Discussant

• Adam J. Dahl University of Massachusetts, Amherst