First collection of writings from one of the foremost contemporary critical thinkers on racism, geography and incarceration.
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 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).
Scholars like Ruthie Gilmore, filmmakers like Ava Duvernay, and
formerly incarcerated people like Glenn Martin have all done work
to expose the many injustices of the industry of our prison
system.
*Time*
Ruth Gilmore lays bare the diabolical logic of neoliberal
incarceration. She shows us that the prison is a symptom of the
decline of our civilization, how the California Nightmare has
produced its disposable population. Gilmore's depressingly hopeful
analysis is a wake-up call for our somnolence.
*Vijay Prashad, author of Keeping Up with the Dow Joneses: Debt,
Prison, Workfare*
Ruth Gilmore, indefatigable activist-scholar, is one of our most
dangerous and important minds. A radical geographer with roots in
the Black liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s, she pioneered
the study of mass incarceration's catastrophic impacts on
inner-city families and neighborhoods, and together with Angela
Davis has played a catalytic role in the creation of today's
movement for prison abolition. This powerful collection of essays
is an indispensable conceptual armory for that struggle.
*Mike Davis*
Ruthie's clarity and courage is a talisman for these monstrous
times, and a guide out of them.
*Vijay Prashad, director, Tricontinental: Institute for Social
Research.*
Abolition Geography isn't shallow romanticism. It is a rigorous
criticism of capitalist social relations, which foment premature
death and needless suffering of the poor and destroy the planet.
Abolition geography is a human necessity for there to be freedom
and a livable earth. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, one of the foremost
revolutionary thinkers on abolition, draws on real historical
traditions of getting free, showing us what is possible and
necessary.
*Nick Estes, author of Our History is the Future*
This well-crafted assemblage of thirty years worth of Ruthie
Gilmore's countless, brilliant interventions is a tremendous gift
to our movements. While tending to grounded practices and
particularities, Ruthie's meticulous mapping of interconnected
histories offers us prescient analyses across scale, geography, and
time. At a time of incredible uncertainty and global upheaval,
Abolition Geography illuminates a political vocabulary and vision
that reorganizes even conventional left ideologies; a tour de force
and absolute must read for our collective trajectories of freedom
making as world making.
*Harsha Walia, author of Border and Rule and Undoing Border
Imperialism*
The leaderly wisdom of Ruth Wilson Gilmore infuses this hefty
volume, making it an indispensible compendium of practical
abolitionism. In her hands, reducing police powers and dismantling
the prison industrial complex become immediate matters of political
struggle. If you want to come to terms with the movement that
shaped the "American Summer" of 2020, this is the best available
starting point.
*Paul Gilroy, author of The Black Atlantic*
Ruth Wilson Gilmore is one of the most impactful radical thinkers
of our time. This compilation of thirty years' worth of essays,
interviews, and co-written reflections, is evidence of the depth
and breadth of her extraordinary political praxis. Powerful,
provocative, inspiring and inciting, this edited collection offers
a formidable indictment of racial capitalism and the carceral
state, a deep, complex and multi-faceted portrait of abolitionist
work, and a call to action. Readers concerned with freedom-making
and liberation will read this brilliant body of work carefully and
act decisively.
*Barbara Ransby, activist, historian and author of several books,
including Making All Black Lives Matter and Ella Baker
and the Black Freedom Movement.*
Abolition Geography is a collection of three decades of Ruth
Wilson's Gilmore's brilliance in the form of essays and interviews
on the politics of abolition as a theorist, researcher and
organizer. The result is a precious gift that will be read, studied
and cherished for years to come by those of us who believe her when
she says to be green we must be red, and to be red our world
building must be planetary.
*Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, author of Noopiming: The Cure for
White Ladies*
An essential collection of writings from one of the most important
thinkers on abolition, geography and racism of our time.
*Ms.Magazine*
Abolition Geography is the first collection of writing by this
major thinker, activist, and writer in the fields of racism,
geography, and incarceration. The book includes essays, articles,
and interviews from the last two decades, covering topics such as
the origin of mass incarceration and racial violence and the
concept of the 'anti-state state'.
*Autostraddle*
Anyone with an interest in the critical theory of mass
incarceration and social justice can't miss this first-ever
compendium of writing by one of the most brilliant and radical
minds in the field. [An] impactful guidebook for a whole new
generation looking to join the movement.
*The Chicago Review of Books*
For over three decades, Gilmore's work has been crucial to the
study of policing and prison abolition...Her newest anthology,
Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation, includes essays on
policing, capitalism and organizing [that] are more critical than
ever two years after the largest street mobilization in decades.
Expertly assembled by scholars Brenna Bhandar and Alberto Toscano,
the anthology reproduces Gilmore's essays chronologically from 1991
to 2018. The only way to escape the cycles of police violence,
protest and retrenchment will be to collectively build popular,
abolitionist frameworks for relating to each other. Gilmore's work
helps us move toward that goal.
*AJ+*
A geographer by training, Gilmore has a sweeping understanding of
prisons and policing, one that approaches the issue at scale. If
you haven't read her yet, it's a good year to start.
*Teen Vogue*
A scathing exploration of global systems of oppression through a
lens of geography, in which [Gilmore] asserts that freedom and
liberation are a physical, tangible place - they're material
conditions, not platitudes and niceties from ultra-rich
politicians.
*Jezebel*
Introduced by a stimulating essay by Brenna Bhandar and Alberto
Toscano, [Abolition Geography] ranges from theoretical chapters
originally published in academic journals to public speeches and
interviews conducted with other scholars. This anthology format
allows the reader to see how Gilmore introduces, experiments with
and then develops ideas in real time, taking us from the 1992 Los
Angeles riots to the 2021 neo-fascist attack on the US Capitol
building.
*New Frame*
Gilmore is clear as a bell: potent and factual on injustice, filled
with sharp intelligence and even wit, but also somehow continuously
surprising and emotional. With every page, Gilmore forces us to
think of race, class, prisons, and the world in entirely new
ways.
*NPR*
Gilmore's work is enlightening and informative, a must-read for
scholars and activists seeking a complex and interdisciplinary deep
dive to effectively drive systemic change...Anyone committed to
prison reform and social justice has much to learn from Gilmore's
insights about the cognitive work and tactical organizing required
to imagine and build an abolitionist future.
*Seattle Book Review*
Gilmore's prose is descriptive and direct; it describes a society
whose economy has failed too many of its members and whose only
solution is to create a police state.
*Counterpunch*
More than explaining or urging any single scalar change in social
life, the purpose of Abolition Geography is to develop the ability
of its readers to study the transformations of racial capitalism,
figure out what to do about them, and follow through with enough
patience to withstand the enormity of the task and enough urgency
to get it done...Abolition Geography is written to be used.
*Dissent*
As Gilmore always reminds us, theory is a guide for action. This
volume is a call to get on with the practice of getting free
together.
*Smithsonian Magazine, Best Books of 2022*
Notable book, 2022
*Seminary Co-op*
[Abolition Geography] is only the latest generous and supportive
gift from Gilmore to liberation-minded abolitionist movements. This
gift seems to be written as a call, an invitation to act and
do...Abolition Geography contains fire, grit, and hope as well.
*The Avery Review*
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